We all know about the increasingly severe truck driver shortage.

But a crisis of almost equal proportions is starting to be felt on manufacturing shop floors and  indistribution centers.

Just recently, Carolyn Lee, executive director for the Manufacturing Institute at the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), wrote that the current shortage of US manufacturing workers "is a full-blown workforce crisis."

She added that right now, manufacturers in the United States have nearly 500,000 open positions.

Good luck filling them.

With the very strong US economy, we have an inversion of sorts. As shown below in a graphic from the Wall Street Journal, in a real oddity, the number of available jobs now exceeds the number of unemployed workers.

Such a gap never occurred before March of this year in the records going back to 2000, but a gap has occurred in every month through the August report - and is growing.

It's a labor seller's market - and almost every company is feeling the pinch.

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