As Wolf359 said, a number of states have ended or chosen not to pay people on unemployment the extra $300 per week the feds added. If you aren't going to get that extra money, then that can't be the reason you aren't working, right?
Here's something else no one has mentioned yet: most states had waived the requirement of looking for work to get unemployment last year when everything was locked down. After all, if you want everyone to stay at home, requiring them to go out and look for work makes no sense. Lockdowns are broadly over now. And now in most states those waivers are gone. Virginia started requiring people on unemployment to look for work in early June.
So the claim some idiot business executives are still making that "overly generous unemployment benefits" are keeping them from finding workers doesn't hold water. Instead, let's ask some questions of these execs:
Do you still have idiotic degree or certification requirements for working for you that have nothing to do with the job? Why do you want a warehouse worker or repair person to have a bachelor's degree? Is it to avoid hiring certain classes of people?
Are you still expecting employees to work for peanuts? What kind of worker do you expect to get for $10–$12/hour?
Do you bother to offer benefits such as paid leave, medical insurance, and a 401(k) with match? Or do those interfere with your yacht payments?
When it comes to the shortages, I stand by my assertion that most or all are staged. I agree with the OP that we shouldn't be seeing most of them over a year later. Clearly it's about raising prices to some new level where they'll stick. The producers aren't necessarily the ones doing this. Look at middlemen as a cause for shortages and higher prices.
Notice this: now that lumber prices have gone through the roof, suddenly plenty of lumber seems to be available—at the higher prices, which don't seem to be in a hurry to come down. Big players can manipulate markets. Look up the term "rent seekers" sometime.
All of the above play a role with what we see.
Now a side observation: many businesses have obviously used the pandemic as a flimsy excuse to cut service. My employer stopped using a national truck line because it used COVID, even a few months ago, as the excuse for not delivering per contract. We had been using its costly expedited delivery service, again per contract, to get heavy items delivered across the US.
Suddenly it was taking as long as a normal truck line to deliver—but we were still paying the big bucks for the service we weren't getting. Not any more. Clearly this kind of thing doesn't help the overall picture.
About trucking, by the way, last year some big companies forced carriers, including owner-operators, to accept big cuts in payment. Allegedly Walmart was one. The cuts were as much as a third of past payment rates. This might be a reason for the problems with finding drivers...
