Headlines are full of dire warnings about labor shortages. “Where is the labor?” asks USA Today. Employers are “begging” for workers, the Washington Post reports. Labor shortages could “jeopardize essential services” and undermine Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan. By some accounts, “worker shortages could cancel Christmas.”

Yet, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor, the labor crunch is “an opportunity, not a crisis.” “Imagine,” Autor writes in a recent New York Times op-ed, “that the U.S. had a market mechanism that spurred employers to voluntarily pay higher wages, offer better benefits and use workers more productively. Actually, that mechanism exists — it’s called a labor shortage.” And, in fact, a number of reports suggest that at least some US employers are doing just that: increasing wages or offering job perks such as college tuition and referral bonuses — the latter of which are likely preferable to employers, as they are more easily rescinded once the labor market slackens.

But reports also reveal another, more sinister response to the current labor shortage. Instead of improving job quality, some employers are hiring structurally vulnerable workers such as incarcerated and formerly incarcerated workers, or immigrant and foreign “guest workers” who cannot (or are significantly less able to) insist on higher wages and better benefits. So much for the automatic market mechanism that supposedly forces employers to improve jobs when workers are in short supply.