re: Why are so many employers not able to get or keep employees?

It seems that the average age of the workforce has been increasing and more people retiring. People from working families may also be having less kids leaving less domestic born working people available requiring incentives to bring foreigner born people to fill the gaps. I honestly do not see the work ethic to be much different among generations. There are both lazy people and people with good work ethic (old and young) in my experience.

Another dynamic is that things often move towards the complicated, not towards the simple. Some of this seems to be caused by having to "fix" problems that have occurred, perhaps because someone along the way has screwed something up (or maybe because someone new came along and thought a certain way was better). Either way, more administrative controls seem to get put in place all the time (some good, some bad), but often increasing the work load (not decreasing) for fewer people available. Although the original intent may be good, over time, the administrative controls lose their original intent and get (mis)interpreted and sometimes leads to people doing more things to CYA rather than doing what make sense for a certain situation, leaving more and more work to do for an originally simpler task that at one time was also done in a sufficient manner without the same administrative controls.