If we were extraterrestrials or even just earthly kids, we’d be hard-pressed to understand the many lamentations about understaffing made at all organizational levels. The world’s seven billion inhabitants continually increase despite birth control policies and practices, thus making warm bodies at least readily available.

Italy alone has an official 60 million residents plus almost 10 million unofficial migrants, most of them from North Africa or the Middle East, all needing to work, and willing to do any work, just to survive.

Italy bemoans an unemployment rate higher than 12 percent, and that jumps to more than 40 percent for people under 30 years of age. Should we believe Italian managers who export their companies to Eastern European countries because—they say—they can’t find adequate staffing at home? Italy currently serves as the G8’s “understaffing benchmark,” even as it maintains its top-rate status on the unemployment rosters.

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