Local — A group of men has reportedly announced what they describe as a bold and final solution to the persistent labor shortages affecting multiple industries, following several hours of discussion about workforce participation, demographic trends, and population growth that researchers say then took an unexpected turn.
The proposal, unveiled at a hastily arranged press conference held in what attendees described as “a garage with chairs in it,” has been characterized by its authors as “the one thing nobody in Washington has the courage to say.”
It was, by every account, said with tremendous courage.
The Proposal
According to multiple people present, the conversation began as a sober examination of the structural causes of America’s labor shortage. Members reportedly cited declining birth rates, an aging population, and the difficulty of filling open positions across hospitality, manufacturing, logistics, and skilled trades.
Then one member, identified by colleagues only as “the visionary,” reportedly leaned forward and delivered the remark that would reorganize the meeting.
“What most people are missing,” he said, “is you need to get pregnant to go into labor.”
The room, according to one witness, went still in the manner of a room that has just heard something it cannot immediately classify as either genius or a 911 call.
He then continued.
“My boys and I believe we are up to the task to tackle the labor shortage.”
The statement was met with immediate applause from fellow group members, several of whom reportedly stood. One man is said to have wiped away a tear. Another asked whether the plan had a logo yet. It did not, but a logo was commissioned before the meeting adjourned.
The Economic Framework
The organization argues that mainstream policy discourse has become fixated on a narrow and, in their view, exhausted set of solutions. According to a one-page document distributed at the event — printed, members noted, “front and back, to save trees” — most labor-market conversations focus excessively on:
- immigration
- training
- automation
- productivity
while overlooking what the group describes, in bolded capital letters, as THE ORIGINAL LABOR PIPELINE.
“Everybody keeps talking about workers,” one member explained, gesturing broadly at a whiteboard on which the word “WORKERS” had been written and then crossed out.
A pause followed.
“We’re talking about future workers.”
The distinction, members stressed, was the entire point. Where conventional economists attempt to move existing humans into existing jobs, the group proposes to address the shortage at what one member called “the supply origin,” a phrase he repeated several times while pointing at no one in particular.
“You can’t have a worker,” he said, “without first having a person. And you can’t have a person without — ” He stopped here, apparently deciding the audience could complete the thought. The audience could.
The Mechanism, Explained at Length No One Requested
Pressed by a reporter to clarify the operational specifics of the plan, members produced a flowchart. The flowchart contained two boxes. The first box read “GET PREGNANT.” The second box read “LABOR.” An arrow connected them. A third element, hovering near the margin and circled twice, read “???” and was described by its author as “the implementation phase.”
“People think this is complicated,” one member said. “It is the least complicated thing there is. It is, statistically, how every single worker in history got here. Every CEO. Every economist. Every guy who told us this wouldn’t work. All of them — pipeline.”
Asked whether he understood that the word “labor” was being used in two unrelated senses, the member reportedly responded that this was “exactly the kind of thinking that got us into the labor shortage.”
Expert Response
Economists contacted for comment described the proposal as “technically related to labor.”
Pressed for elaboration, several declined, citing a desire to keep their remarks accurate.
“There is a labor shortage,” one economist offered, choosing words with visible care. “And there is, separately, a thing called labor. These men have located the second thing and are presenting it as a solution to the first. I want to be respectful. They are not, strictly speaking, wrong about the existence of either.”
Demographers were more cautious.
“The timeline,” one researcher stated, “is somewhat longer than the group appears to realize.”
Asked to quantify “somewhat longer,” the researcher paused, performed a brief calculation, and said the figure was “approximately two decades, assuming nothing goes wrong, which is not an assumption demography permits.”
The Timeline Problem
The two-decade lag emerged as the principal sticking point in subsequent discussions, though group members reportedly regarded it as a strength.
“People want everything now,” the visionary explained. “That’s the problem with this country. We are taking the long view. We are not trying to fill a position this quarter. We are trying to fill a position in the second quarter of 2046.”
When a reporter noted that the current shortage was, by definition, current, a member responded that the group was “not in the business of short-term thinking.” When the reporter noted that the shortage might be resolved by other means long before 2046, rendering the plan unnecessary, the member responded that this was “a coward’s framing” and that the group would “still have the babies, as a hedge.”
At least one member appeared to register the scale of the delay in real time. According to attendees, he raised his hand midway through the press conference and asked, quietly, whether the children would “need to be fed and stuff the whole time.” He was told they would. He sat back down.
Operational Challenges
Early implementation obstacles reportedly include:
- finding willing participants
- raising children
- waiting approximately two decades
The group classified these concerns as “long-term strategic considerations” and declined to assign them owners, deadlines, or any further thought.
The first item — finding willing participants — was acknowledged by members to be “a known dependency.” Internal estimates of the number of willing participants currently secured by the group range, according to two sources, from “zero” to “we’re in talks.” One member clarified that “in talks” referred to a conversation he intended to have with someone he had met once.
The second item — raising children — produced what one attendee described as “the only genuinely heated debate of the evening,” after a member proposed that the children, once born, could begin contributing to the labor force “pretty early, honestly,” at which point a different member reminded him of the existence of child labor laws, a body of regulation the group had not, until that moment, factored into its model.
“So we can’t even use them right away,” the first member said, deflated.
“Not legally,” the second confirmed.
The matter was tabled.
The Boys
Considerable attention has centered on the group’s repeated references to “my boys,” a phrase deployed throughout the press conference with the confidence of a man invoking a standing army.
Reporters were unable to establish the precise size, composition, or commitment level of “the boys.” Estimates provided by members themselves varied between “a solid core group” and “whoever shows up.” When asked to introduce the boys, the visionary gestured toward three men near the snack table, two of whom appeared to be unaware they had been volunteered.
One of the boys, reached afterward, said he had come “for the wings” and had understood the meeting to be about fantasy football. Informed of his role in resolving the national labor shortage, he expressed cautious openness, adding that he would “need to talk to his girlfriend,” who he believed would have “thoughts.”
She did.
A Question of Demand
Pressed on whether the jobs that prompted the initiative would still exist in twenty years — given ongoing automation, the very trend the group had earlier dismissed — members appeared briefly unsettled.
“The robots,” one member said slowly, “might take the jobs before our guys are old enough to work them.”
A silence followed, longer than the previous silences.
“So we’d be raising twenty years of future workers,” another said, “for jobs that won’t be there.”
The visionary, recovering, reframed this as an opportunity. “Then our guys can build the robots,” he said. The room, relieved, applauded again. No one raised the point that this would require training — one of the four solutions the group had opened the evening by rejecting.
The Funding Pitch
Buoyed by the response, the group announced it would seek funding to scale the initiative, characterizing it to potential investors as “a twenty-year, fully human, fully organic talent pipeline with no upfront automation costs.”
A pitch deck, reviewed by this publication, projected returns beginning in fiscal year 2046 and described the venture’s primary asset class as “people we don’t have yet.” The total addressable market was listed as “everyone, eventually.” The competitive moat was described as “biological.”
Under the heading “Risks,” the deck listed a single bullet point: “same as always.”
One venture capitalist who reviewed the materials reportedly declined to invest but admitted the unit economics were “the only honest part,” given that the cost of producing a human and the time required to produce a human were, he conceded, “famously not things you can disrupt.”
Closing Statement
The organization remains optimistic. Its final policy paper, distributed as members filed out toward the parking lot, reportedly concludes:
“Some people create jobs. Some people fill jobs. We’re focusing on creating future applicants.”
At press time, the labor shortage remained unresolved.
The birth-rate discussion, however, was reportedly very active.
The Bottom Line
A group of men identified a real shortage of workers, correctly observed that every worker is preceded by a person and every person by a pregnancy, and concluded that the bottleneck could be cleared at the source. The plan is, in the narrowest possible sense, not wrong: it is, in fact, how labor supply has always worked. It simply takes twenty years, requires participants who have not agreed to participate, presumes jobs that automation may have eliminated by then, and resolves a problem defined by its urgency with a solution defined by its delay. The shortage remains. The pipeline, the group insists, is full of promise — and, for now, nothing else.
¹ The two senses of the word “labor” — economic activity performed for pay, and the physiological process of childbirth — share an etymological root in the Latin labor, meaning toil or hardship. The group is, technically, the first body in recorded policy history to treat this coincidence as actionable.
² No willing participants had been confirmed as of press time. The phrase “in talks” was used eleven times across the press conference and is not believed, in any instance, to have referred to a completed conversation.
³ This publication contacted the girlfriend referenced in the section titled “The Boys.” She asked that her position be recorded in full. It was: “Absolutely not.”