Every day, the wails of business owners and restaurant managers echo out into the streets. A cry of pain and hopelessness compounds into one single complaint: nobody wants to work anymore. Desperately, they plaster their windows with flyers and beg for potential hires. These poor, poor employers litter indeed.com and Glassdoor with job listings to no avail. Is it so outrageous to request that candidates for their entry level jobs have a master’s degree and ten years’ experience? Yes, their jobs may pay twelve dollars an hour, but that’s a marginal detail when you consider the close-knit community their workplaces offer. Minimum wage is perfectly livable if one shares an apartment with ten other people and works two side jobs. Plus, who could resist benefits as enticing as dental insurance and monthly pizza in the breakroom?

Despite the abundance of opportunity these workplaces offer, they remain barren of enthusiastic employees. So who is to blame? The baby boomer generation looks despondently upon their millennial children and condemns them for the state of the economy. They may be correct; after all, headlines about millennials and their uneconomical ways flash across television screens everyday: “Millennials Killed the Movie Theater Industry,” “Millennials Killed the Marriage Industry,” “Millennials Killed the Blackface Industry.” Millennials are clearly greedy, un-American goblins, and it doesn’t seem like Generation Z will be much better. All that teenagers care about these days are Hot Cheetos, pornography, and communism. Young people are chronically lazy, so it may be time to search for solutions to the labor shortage elsewhere.

The first potential source of new workers exists right within our own homes, lazing about in kennels and leaving their excrement in the open for humans to retrieve. I have recently seen YouTube videos of dogs who use buttons to communicate with their owners. If a dog is intelligent enough to tell its owner that it wants to go to the beach, it is intelligent enough to handle call center operations. Rather than buttons that say “walk” or “play” or “hungry,” we should provide dogs with buttons that say, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” and “We’ve been trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty.” We have let these animals leech off human generosity far too long. It is time to put these hounds in three piece suits and show them the workings of a fax machine. It is time to make these canines prove their loyalty.

The second potential source of labor can be found in elementary schools and playgrounds across the nation. Now, I am aware that child labor is a touchy subject. Pediatricians and child psychologists may try to argue that kids aren’t made for work, but I disagree. Through looking at the most popular video games, it becomes evident that children are yearning to return to the workforce. Since the abolition of child labor, we have taken the children out of the coal mines, but they rush home from school to dig for diamonds in Minecraft. We have removed kids from the military, but they spend their afternoons playing Call of Duty on sticky Xbox controllers. We have stolen children away from drug operations and gangs, but they waste hours on Grand Theft Auto and listen to trap music constantly. They are wasting time on these simulated forms of labor. Their enthusiasm for video games should almost certainly transfer to the real-life jobs these video games represent. Children should be placed back in the workforce immediately.

The final source of new workers resides in retirement communities and assisted living facilities. I expect that the elderly will be more enthusiastic to rejoin the workforce than all of the cohorts previously mentioned. After all, baby boomers have been the loudest voice in calling out the laziness of the younger generations. Surely, they must have been preparing to fill that gap in the workforce this whole time! They’re undoubtedly all ready to shamble on over to the employment centers on their canes and walkers, their wrinkled faces beaming with delight as they hand in their resumes. I know some might not be thrilled at the prospect of ending their retirement. However, I trust that they will understand the urgency of this labor crisis and be willing to sacrifice those final years of rest. Some may worry that the elderly are a feeble population whose health would be compromised by intensive work. This, however, has a simple solution. Each large workplace will be equipped with a vehicle and driver with the sole purpose of transporting bodies directly to the crematorium. This way, grandpa and grandma can be quickly disposed of without disturbing workplace productivity if they happen to croak at their desk.

Young adults may refuse to work, but this does not mean the end for America. Let the millennials sip their iced lattes and eat their avocado toast; we don’t need them anymore. If we do a little dog training, reinstate child labor, and recruit the elderly, our workforce numbers will increase greatly.  Laziness is an epidemic that can be cured with a little creativity and a few human rights violations.