I'm not sure if it isn't regional. At least here the lines at Whole Foods aren't any worse than before and everyone on my street appears to have no trouble getting contractors to come and make an unholy noise during my conference calls. There's still a Subway that can't get staff, but I've heard that guy wants to pay minimum wage.
Except the school bus. They just can't keep drivers, I assume because they can't raise pay quickly and the shitty hours are inherent in the job.
The schoolbus system is a mess here in Durham County, with one big cause being the bus drivers keep getting Covid.
The thing that I see being mocked locally is advertising higher pay than you'll actually pay.
A friend and I were discussing how shitty teaching jobs have become in particular (as in the check-in thread) and his wife in the local school system knows many people who are keeping teacher or teacher's aide jobs (which are particularly underpaid) just for health benefits. Which got me thinking: what if we actually did have universal health care? We'd get rid of another thing propping up the work-shitty-jobs-for-shitty-wages system. We would have to actually pay teachers and bus drivers and treat them well enough to make the jobs appealing.
Despite skepticism from some quarters I think the best explanation for people not taking jobs right now is that the pandemic relief gave them a very small bit of savings and that hasn't run out yet. The "reevaluating their life choices" seems too UMC-centric. It's just the converse of living week to week, paycheck to paycheck. They may only have three paychecks worth of buffer but that's enough to get the system falling apart, especially in areas where day to day economic desperation is highest.
There's vicious-cycle stuff going on, too: people dropping out of the workforce because they can't get child care because other people have quit the childcare jobs (which are, TBF, terrible).
Transportation is going to be part of that, too - locally, bus service is being cut rather than restored to more like pre-COVID levels because there aren't enough drivers; already around a third of scheduled trips on the high-frequency routes are just being skipped (Bus driver pay looks OK until you account for the fact that it's part-time-only for the first several years, mostly due to weirdness around rush hour and split shifts).
There have also been quite a few strikes-- Deere (still ongoing), Kelloggs, carpenters. TV production crews had a strike threatened that was called off on the last day, I think favorably to workers but havent actually read the details.
7
The "reevaluating their life choices" seems too UMC-centric.
I get that it requires a certain amount of leisure to have a midlife crisis, but the pandemic is/was a big shock to a lot of systems. It's one thing to have a shitty job, it's another to literally risk your life for it for no additional compensation besides maybe an "attaboy". A lot of people live life on the edge in one way or another and this could easily push them over. "Over" being "away from a shitty job", which isn't a bad thing in the long run.
Re: the OP, the best-case scenario? Significant increase in union membership. Maybe they'll never get back to the numbers of the 1950s but doubling their current numbers would still have a big effect on workplace cultures and government policies and could last for decades. I'm not saying this is likely, but it's not crazy.
Unions make a big comeback, as more and more workers realize they are the only way to protect themselves from the tyranny of employer vaccine mandates.
I looked at the labor force participation rate and expected to see more gender gap - women differentially choosing full-time parenting given a bad set of choices - but I didn't see that even over the full course of the pandemic.
From September 2019 to September 2021, seasonally adjusted, by age group: 16-24 men -0.4%, women -0.6%; 25-54 men and women both -1.1%; 55+ men -1.6%, women -1.8%.
More of an age effect than a gender effect, it seems to me - the "fuck this, I'm done" effect. But older workers leaving presumably gives more leverage to the younger ones.
Looking just at the past summer when employers have been shrieking, change May vs. September 2021 is: 16-24 men -0.2%, women +0.1%; 25-54 men and women both +0.3%; 55+ men +0.5%, women unchanged.
Back in June I walked the picket line for nurses striking in at St Vincent's Hospital in Worcester, MA. They had been out since March. They are still out.
My conservatives friends are locked into the lazy people at home taking advantage of overly generous unemployment benefits. Of course no data showed any differential between states that ended those benefits early versus those that did not.
7: if we had universal health care I think we'd see a lot more jobs willing to hire people full time. It's the need to provide health care that keeps people at the artificial 37.5 hours threshold.
10: I am preparing my file for promotion now and 2019 Cala apparently loved her work and had energy for teaching and creative work. 2021 Cala is wondering how long it would take to reinvent a career if she quit.
17.1 that's never occurred to me before but absofuckinglutely
16 We have lots of morons stuck on this as well. Unemployment rate here is 2.8% (BLS Aug 2021). Basically, the people who would take the job advertised on every door aren't here. Where are they? Dead? Back to California? Back to Chile? Back to Ireland?
Staying home with kids because there's no childcare is going to account for some of that, I'm sure, but that's not really Burger King, is it?
I can't remember: when the public option was being debated back in 2008, was the idea that the employer would still have to pay into the government instead per employee who took the public option?
What I'm trying to think through is when we dither with universal health care options in the US, do politicians still favor plans still charged employers to cover the costs, in order to not raise taxes? Because it seems like that could still leave a lot of perverse incentives intact, in terms of who counts as a fulltime employee and under what circumstances must an employer pay money to healthcare.
2019 Cala apparently loved her work and had energy for teaching and creative work. 2021 Cala is wondering how long it would take to reinvent a career if she quit.
I've been feeling that a bit.
Here my theory is that there's a lot of college students who have rich parents who require them to work some because they think it's good for them, but because of the pandemic now the parents just give them an allowance rather than putting them at covid risk. But that's college town specific.
I'm not sure. Lots of high school kids could be kept home by parents worried about covid or aggressive customers.
19: Employment-population ratio is still below January 2020, which is what they are complaining about. Though if you look at the chart, it looks like it is recovering rapidly: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/employment-population-ratio.htm
I'm going to cynically guess that the whole thing is made up by the media. The COVID shock was really big, and it's just not possible to recover any faster than we are.
Is the supply chain disruption being exaggerated, too? Because I'm really annoyed by grandparents and aunts and uncles (on one side) who need to know what kids want for Christmas now.
(I'm generally cranky about how the gift-giving process evolved to be so much work for Jammies and me. Do kids have to hand pick out every gift? Is it that big a deal if they get something they don't want, and they have to smile politely and re-gift it? Also I'm cranky about how my in-laws are really into the who mountain-sized-stack of presents in general. Also I SUPER don't care whether or not the gifts are all wrapped under the tree by the 25th. Isn't it kind of nice if gifts trickle in during January?)
25:. Aha! Now that Trump is gone, are we bringing back the War Against Christmas? Count me in!
25.last: you and me both. Cassandane has almost finished her Christmas shopping for the year, with two exceptions, but I think even "almost" is crazy and my family is too polite to say so but I think they'd agree.
As for whether supply chain disruptions are for real (or rather, are meaningful), I wouldn't be surprised either way. On the one hand, covid really is/was a huge mess. On the other hand, the Chamber of Commerce would love to have people panic buying Christmas presents and the media is often credulous about stuff like this.
20: a you can make them pay some proportionate cost. Like, part-timers can get health insurance where I work, but they pay a lot more for it. Employer penalty could be reduced for part-timers.
I'm wondering how immigration -- or lack thereof -- plays into the shortage for restaurant jobs, etc. Haven't seen much on this.
There's just so many weird factors. E.g., locally, it's pretty common for the ski resort to host a summer concert/food series, and they had to cancel most of it because they can't find workers. But they can't find workers in part because a decent chunk of their worker pool is seasonal -- people who are here for the summer leading adventure tours who pick up bartending or other work. Those people aren't here in part because rents have gone through the roof, and the economy is strong enough that there just isn't much of a labor pool locally. Lots of moms have dropped out of the workforce because of childcare/online school. Utah canceled its unemployment benefit early and it didn't have a noticeable effect. College enrollments are down because the economy is strong and everyone's worried we'll close again suddenly.
29.1: I have had the same thought. Don't know what the magnitude of the drop in immigration is.
And I am wondering that even if there had been no pandemic if the employment/population ratio was going to drop due to the demographic bubble reaching retirement age (although maybe it would have come a few years later). Or is the number somehow working age adjusted?
I think it's just covid. To make up some plausible numbers: A couple hundred thousand people in the workforce died, hundreds of thousands are out any given day because they are sick or supposed to isolate, hundreds of thousands of people retire early, about the same can't go to work because the kids are at home, and about twenty million people decide they have a duty to save America by being shitty to people paid to take their order. Most of those things correlate at least a little, so you've got people who were happy to work before becoming miserable dealing with assholes and doing work they used to share with people who quit. All of them with any choice in the matter, basically anyone with another income in the household or substantial savings, says 'fuck it'. This leaves the remaining workers with even less help but not less work, so it ratchets up again with more people staying home or looking for jobs where they don't have to face a customer.
if the employment/population ratio was going to drop due to the demographic bubble reaching retirement age (although maybe it would have come a few years later).
Apparently this is the case in Canuckistan: the labour shortage predates Covid, but was greatly exacerbated by the pandemic. And immigration (or lack thereof, with lockdowns and travel restrictions) is a part of it: Canada relies heavily on immigrants for economic and demographic growth.
Re: universal health care: Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to make much difference when it comes to wages/benefits in the service/hospitality sector. When it comes to retail and restaurants, Canada has the same crappy, low-paying, precarious, part-time jobs that are all too common in the US. Of course it matters, and does make a difference in people's lives, that at least Canada's exploited service workers do have health care (and if their employers had their way, these workers would not...). But it doesn't seem to provide any real leverage to low-paid service sector employees: the jobs are minimum-wage, with no benefits, and with abusive working conditions.
But I suspect universal health care does make a difference at the level of "good"/formerly "good" jobs (by "good," I mean: full-time, with benefits, and with decent pay). When your health care is already covered, and is covered independently of your employer and regardless of your employment status, you don't have to stick around for the health insurance benefits.
Well, that's depressing about the bad jobs in Canada still being bad that way. The need to pay for bed and board kept people at it even before health insurance was thought of, of course...
I daydream occasionally about benefits in the US switching to a per-hour payment by the employer, with 40 hours in a week adding up to a full benefit package but an employee can get that from several employers. Maybe there should be some hassle per employee so employers have a small motive to just hire the one person fulltime already yet.
That's mostly because it's a hedge I can imagine the US being driven to before actual public healthcare for all.
Whatever you think of it, though, I recently managed to demand and get a whole lot more money, so get out there and demand the cash before you let the side down. The Unfogged tradition of learned helplessness is a liar.
All we ask is that you live blog the conversation where you ask.
I don't know if I mentioned this at the time, but I had two interviews when I was last looking for work. The one not in the private sector went well and then they asked how much I wanted. I picked 85% of what I was told to ask for in the private sector and they ghosted me. You could hear that they were going to ghost me in the "thank you."
Anyway, I realized that we had not a single, properly functioning PC in the house that wasn't employer-provided, so I ordered one on Sunday and it's here now. Things are not that short. Edge is truly much easier to download another browser with than Explorer ever was.
37: People will anthropomorphize anything.
I should download Chrome, but I'm so used to Firefox.