"What a shortage really means from their perspective is that they can't find enough workers for the price they want to pay"

Exactly - we are in agreement

We are mostly in agreement. I'm pretty sure we need to sympathize with employers in situations like this, at times, though. It doesn't help anyone to reduce every shortage to a supposed moral fault in the employers lol. At what point do we become sympathetic to them? When their business is crucial to society and can't function without the workers at the given price? Or is it when the market rate for a job is offensive to other kinds of workers at jobs of similar difficulty? I think the societal need is a plausible reason, but it leads to this slippery slope we started off complaining about. It boils down to: who's to say how expensive is too expensive, or that a business should fail because of a politically imposed scarcity of labor?