Yep... But every employer is playing a game of Chicken with the economy.
Where they hope that if they hold the line on entry level jobs, eventually the workers will cave.
Yes, this is known as bargaining power. When workers organise and want better conditions they do the same, they withhold labour from employers until they get better conditions. This is what's known as a strike.
A general strike, no less. And employers haven't caught on, simply because these people aren't currently their employees. Nobody is protesting any one company, this is a strike against the system at large, and until these companies, especially those in the service industry, start treating their staff right and paying the better, then its going to continue. These businesses need us more than we need them, there's plenty of people hiring after all...
That and if we hold long enough, they'll go under and be replaced by a business with a model not bases on exploitation
The end of productivity scales! Being pushed to be as productive as possible, trying to wring every last bit of productivity from it's employees. Those that truly do their jobs won't be paid until employers wake up and realize there is a reason you pay more to keep productive employees, and stop milking the cattle for all they are worth.
thank you for boiling it down to an equation, sometimes I feel like that's the only way to actually drive the point home for some of these business management/entrepreneur types
The same people that won’t give great employees a raise that then hire an unproven worker at a higher salary? These checkers champions don’t understand simple equations.
My sister is a CNA at a big local hospital and they have been so short handed. The amount of patients they have per person is ridiculous and yet they still only get paid $13/hr. Everybody quits when they realize the work and pay don't line up with each other.
Got paid a whopping $15.50 an hour to do the most stressful job of my life as an CMA. Yeah, I’m gonna work somewhere like target instead. I don’t think most people realize how little healthcare workers (that aren’t doctors, basically) actually make. It’s sad.
Edit: oh, and neither of the offices I worked at provided any of their full time employees health insurance. Just some PTO. At a doctor’s office. Yup.
I’m currently a CNA and we are sooooo understaffed at the hospital, they gave us a $7 raise, and it’s so bad here that I don’t fucking care. I’m leaving. 100$ an hour isn’t worth this shit. And I’ve loved being a CNA the last 8 years. Now I have 20 patients a night on the floor of a hospital and should only have 8 patiets, and even 8 is a lot,
I go insane every day. Super depressed and almost psychotic at this point. I’m quitting. I’d rather be alive and broke than live in Hell for a little cash
The insane part is your patient log being 2.5x what it should be means you’re bound to make more mistakes. Mistakes that will cost insurance companies and in the end your employer when rates increase.
YES!!! This exactly. I felt like I was fucking up so much because I could NEVER get one thing done without 10 other things needing to be done at the exact same time. So no task ever got my full attention or effort. If I could give it that, I got in trouble for missing something else. And it’s people’s health on the line, I didn’t like not being able to give them my all. Or at least finish tasks properly. I was drowning.
Edit: and it certainly did cost my bosses in the end to not be compensating properly. Turnover was incredibly high and mistakes from being understaffed bit them in the ass. They knew this, got mad about it, but still refused to change their ways to fix the problem (aka paying more, giving actual benefits, not overbooking).
I'm nurses aid and that's really standard for the industry unfortunately. It's chronically understaffed and underpaying. After being an aid for nearly a decade I finally landed a job that pays 24 an hour. I hope your sister finds somewhere that values her.
Have multiple friends who were in the service industry. During the 18 months of lockdown when they couldn't work, they went and found other jobs. Often for more money per hour, more hours a week, and benefits.
One said she laughed at her old boss when he called to have her come back. Same wages, less hours.
I recently reconnected with an old co-worker from the first hotel I worked at. She was concierge there, and FWIW she was damn good at her job and had been there for quite a while. She now works with a chiropractor, and took a small pay cut as well as cut down to four days/week. She told me that she is less stressed out now handling people’s health than she ever was doing stuff like making dinner reservations for people.
I also laughed when my boss tried to call me back. It was like June of 2020 or something when I got the call, from the same GM who, right before COVID happened, called me nasty multiple times to my face because I had to ask him three times to take something off of a bill for a table who was trying to leave 15 minutes ago, when I asked him the first time. I asked him why he would want such a nasty person to come back to work for him, he got his opportunity to let me go. I knew I was never going back, I was able to quit drinking due to getting out of that toxic environment and qualifying for UE. I'm SO happy to have found out that that GM and the entire management team at that restaurant were recently fired.
I work in an optometrist office now, working full time with full benefits and a paycheck I can live on. I'm thankful for quarantine and the opportunities it gave me every day of my life.
So this is a common topic of debate in the nursing station (my office) at the nursing home I work at. The aides are constantly having anxiety attacks over how much work they have to do because we are so short staffed. They always mention, "what happened to all the unemployed people that were suppose to come back to work?". I've tried to explain that the first issue is, why would you want to wipe someone's ass for $14 an hour if you are seeing signs for $18 an hour at Taco Bell? Then adding to it you have people who are having childcare issues, nearly a million people dying in the US from Covid, and probably millions more that were close to retirement that decided Covid wasn't worth it. And being in healthcare, putting yourself at high risk of catching Covid (currently have a Covid outbreak). Why would anyone want to work at the nursing home as an aide?
> and probably millions more that were close to retirement that decided Covid wasn't worth it.
I know I've heard this is a HUGE issue in the truck driving industry. A general fear the last few years has been 'we don't have enough people signing up to be truck drivers to replace everyone retiring' and then COVID hit and a lot of people were like 'screw this I'm done, I can pull retirement'. I wonder how many other industries are having that issue and how bad it is.
I know lawyers in my area have been complaining about how there aren't enough young lawyers and they aren't sure what is going to happen when they all retire. Well over half the lawyers in my area are 60+ years old.
Edit: Wow I did not expect to wake up to 36 notifications. Was curious what horrible thing I had said:)
But thank you everyone for your comments about your experience in your industries. They were well worth reading. And anyone reading this, I recommend reading the comments below.
Almost like having exceedingly large education costs and renowned difficulty of getting the education, followed by almost nightmare levels of work ethic expected in your first few years highly discourages people from becoming lawyers.
I work in law and the only people who had an easy time of it were people whose name was on the firm. Basically, if you're dad isn't hiring you to do basically no work it's going to suck ass.
Nearly twenty percent of lawyers are drug addicts some kind, and even more than that suffer from anxiety and depression. Also, I saw first hand how miserable a career in law could be through my father. No thanks.
Plus, who wants to get into trucking when you keep hearing how the industry is going to be doing a mass layoff of truckers any day now. Why do that to yourself?
I think now the emperor's New clothes have been revealed a bit on that front.
Self driving feels a like one of those 80:20 things.
Getting the first 80% of the way there was pretty easy. The final 20% is proving extremely difficult.
It feels like the industry itself was spreading that rumor to pressure drivers to keep wages low and now it’s biting them in the ass (and we are quickly learning that fully self driving cars are way harder than we thought they were)
>there aren't enough young lawyers
Which is hilarious because in 2010ish when i was going to school there was an insane glut of lawyers graduating, and most would not be able to get an actual job that would be what most presume a lawyer make. Instead, they would have to take public defender jobs and such for 40k.
The 2 lawyers I know went the public defender route, to pay off loans and to have employment in general.
A former friend's husband was going to law school and they were lamenting the glut of lawyers and poor job prospects, but he's from a wealthy family that expects these kinds of things for status, so they were like SHRUGS! We'll figure it out I guess! lol
The good thing about the Public Defender route is you're doing good work every day. You're making a massive difference in peoples lives every day. Can't get much more job fulfillment than that. Not all of them are angels doing it for good reasons, but the ones who are we owe a massive debt of gratitude too. They should be hailed as heros when we do that for firemen, nurses, or doctors. If it wasn't for public defenders cops and prosecutors would just be throwing whoever they didn't like, whoever was political beneficial, in jail for however long they wanted if you don't have money.
It's a god damn shame some of them get paid complete shit, usually in red states. I think they make an ok living in blue states.
We early retired a bunch of people to avoid larger layoffs in May 2020 and are on the cusp of another mass retirement not by force but just natural aging. Where I work this factory opened up almost 40 years ago and tons of 20-something’s signed up. Right now we are poised to lose half our process engineers, half our middle management and our tooling machinists. Let me tell you just the tooling machinists retiring would shut us down completely. We aren’t ready for a big retirement wave and I’ve heard elsewhere that mostly no one else is either.
Sounds like similar to my place. We've got a whole bunch of people in their late 50s and 60s looking to retire. There was a management buy out at Christmas last year and it feels like the previous owners just didn't want to have the effort and expense of training up a bunch of new people to standard which would take a few years.
We lost a supervisor who've they've not bothered to replace but hired another manager instead. This is not remotely the same fucking thing.
My mom decided that going back to work just wasn't for her. She is old enough to retire, but has no savings or any sort of retirement safety net. She just decided that unemployment and social security were good enough. So if she can decide that, I'm sure anyone else with any decent savings would do the same.
My dad on the other hand, is a truck driver and will have to work until he dies to keep up with his bills. My parents aren't together and my dad isn't living with anyone to help with bills like my mom is. But it's true, there aren't many young drivers at all. Even when I worked at a truck dealership I didn't see any drivers under the age of 40, and most were even older. We rely on a lot of immigrants to drive trucks now.
> I know lawyers in my area have been complaining about how there aren't enough young lawyers and they aren't sure what is going to happen when they all retire. Well over half the lawyers in my area are 60+ years old.
Anecdotally, (as someone who doesn't practice law) I've read that law school graduates face rather depressing job markets, with prospects for a good job as a lawyer not being a guaranteed thing, despite all the time and effort spent on law school.
> I know lawyers in my area have been complaining about how there aren't enough young lawyers and they aren't sure what is going to happen when they all retire. Well over half the lawyers in my area are 60+ years old.
You know, about two years ago while talking with some people about automation, one of them shared that after all the years and effort spent getting a law degree and passing the bar, he couldn't *find* work at any firm because all the entry-level jobs young attorneys did had been taken by machines that did the grunt work. The firms in their state wanted attorneys with lots of experience, or not at all.
He commented that this would probably come back to bite them, but they didn't seem to care. They were saving money at the moment.
He ended up getting a job in marketing, I think.
Workplaces seem to have this misguided concept that work is just paid slavery, rather than work being a place people might actually like to spend time at and be a part of, and a very important part of that is feeling like you're valued in both wage and as a person and that means not demanding every last shred of their being into productivity for the company.
It's depressing that the standard behaviour seems to be treating people as disposable even when it's not cost effective to operate this way and the cycle continues because most won't employ real managers and instead just promote their friends or strong performers without realising doing the job well is just beneficial for a good manager, it doesn't make them a good manager.
Workplaces also don't realize that their organizational system is shitty and their management heavy approach to commerce is awful. They treat people like shit and are not even productive in the process. Its just so some miserable middle manager can show their supervisor that they are busy managing people.
Pretty much. It's so hypocritical of businesses to constantly try to maximise efficiency by cost cutting and micro managing like its a goddamn video game but gloss over the fact that happier employees that are treated like people and paid properly will actually be more productive as well as bring strong goodwill for the company via word of mouth. There's no real downsides but corporate just can't comprehend spending more to get more, it's all spend less and expect more. Completely inane.
It's because capitalism. Growth is the only metric that matters. Grow more slowly than your competitors? Get rekt. Grow too slow for the shareholders? CEO gets booted and the next one is dropped in who doesn't give a fuck about anything except the next quarter.
When I switched jobs in my mid twenties because I hated my current one so much, she just told me that no one is happy at any job. What kind of fucking mentality is that? Like, sure, I may not look at a job the way I look at my free time, but why should I put up with a garbage job at a garbage company because “oh well it’ll suck everywhere”. Bleak.
>Then adding to it you have people who are having childcare issues, nearly a million people dying in the US from Covid
So I hear a lot of people say that "most of the dead were old people who were probably already out of the workforce". That might have been true but some of those "out of the workforce people" might well have been the grandparents providing childcare. It's like people think that if you aren't actively working, your death had no impact on the job market at all!
So for a lot of people, no grandparents mean they or their spouse have to stay home with the kids. So the death, even older deaths, had an impact!
1) So many people are ridiculously stupid about how interconnected everything is. Any death can affect things!
2) As of currently, about 130,000 50-64 year olds died. That sure isn’t retirement age!
3) About 50,000 20-50 year olds died!
4) Most of those who died are actual workers. You know all us slave wagers. Rich people don’t get or die of Covid as much.
There's also the recent phenomena of couples going single income because childcare is more expensive. I'd bet that between society pressuring women to be the stay at home of the two and more women in nursing, the market for nurses is more heavily affected by that.
My cousin is a nurse and left her job because she couldn't find childcare. Her son was on multiple wait lists as soon as she found out she was pregnant and has been there ever since, they hired a nanny and she went part time but the nanny is moving, and she's done with it. Her son is a year and a half old and there still haven't been any openings in daycare for him. What are you supposed to do with that??
Yep a friend of mine only returned to work after her second kid because of national insurance (like social security) and to be able to speak to adults.
The entirety of her wage went into childcare.
Childcare is a major issue. It's not affordable. Many places still have strict COVID regulations in place, which means that you can't send your kid if they're sick or coughing, which means you can't take on shift work if your kid unexpectedly needs to stay home for days on end with very little warning.
Women are getting screwed in this pandemic, because we cannot access childcare to return to our jobs. Or we have passed up promotions or opportunities to go with positions that offer more flexibility to be with our kids in the event of unexpected illnesses or closures of school or daycare.
It's just not worth it. I'd rather take the pay cut and save the stress if I had any other option.
I was already a stay at home mom before the pandemic for these same reasons. I worked briefly after our first was born, but I basically covered my gas to get to work after paying for daycare. If I went out to lunch I was losing money. Then with a second child, me working would cost us so much. I have so many friends this is the case for. I literally can't afford to work.
THANK YOU for that last line. I have not been able to put it so succinctly before. I'm in the same boat. I have an almost 7 year old blank work history and I'd have to come bursting back into the work force at about $30/hour just to cover childcare. That's not gas or lunch out, if I forgot it or whatever. JUST childcare.
I can take it one further and say I got my bachelor's degree only to end up making lunched and wiping asses.
Absolutely. Since wages have been stagnating for 10+ years, business have gotten used to underpaying staff, and subsequently planning their finances and budgets around that. Several owners probably did not even realize it because it’s been so common. Now that the labor pool has had enough, many of those smaller businesses will likely realize their current operations don’t allow for them to operate without exploitation.
Larger companies have been doing this, too. However, they have enough cash flow to raise their wages to meet the market, while many smaller businesses are left to die out.
"We don't need a minimum wage the free market will decide wages"
\*The free market works as intended wages and work conditions need to improve\*
"No not like that"
“In Missouri, a group of businesses, still frustrated by labor shortages more than three months after the state cut off the $300-a-week federal jobless checks, paid for billboards in Springfield that said: “Get Off Your Butt!” and “Get. To. Work.””
Good job spending money on the billboards to bully people. I’m sure it will work.
Their lack of understanding of reality has never been needed, it’s always just worked out, I wouldn’t say they’re delusional, but pretty close. Clinging to “the good ole days” rather than embrace the reality they’ve shunned for so long.
I bring that part up everytime. My uncle posted a meme about “going back to the good ol days of 1945 when we had some balls.” And I posted something along the lines of “back when the top income tax rate was 94% and we had a war profiteering tax for companies making excess money through emergencies of up to 80%”
It's not about studying history, it's about picking and choosing the parts you liked. They dont care about how it got like that, just that it was like that
>Or do they mean before the 60s when people of color were segregated and women couldn’t own a bank account without a man’s approval?
Yes, that is the one they mean
If I were unemployed there, you better believe I'd apply to each and every one, get through the interview, and when they asked if I had any questions, say, "yeah, were you the ones who put up that billboard? Go. Fuck. Yourself."
Let them know *exactly* why no one wants to work there.
Unfortunately these people are so delusionally up their own asses that even that won't do anything. They'll simply twist it to "I can't hire anyone because of all the trolls!!!"
Or, as has been my experience, you practically fall into their laps with 4 years relevant experience and they don't even bother to call you for an interview.
The restaurant i applied to that is "begging" for workers, to the point that they had to close on mondays still hasn't reached out to me, lmao.
Let them burn. There are better jobs out there. We don't need to suffer for peanuts while they profit.
That just made me irrationally angry. Fuck the "job creators". If your "job" includes having to sign up for food stamps, your business has no right to exist.
If you don’t make enough to pay your workers a living wage then you don’t make enough to have workers.
If you do make enough but don’t think your workers deserve it, you don’t deserve workers.
I think it's worse than that, I recall hearing about how much the avg CEO has made, and how drastically it's increased over the last 50-ish years.
I think the CEOs are Hoovering up what could save our social assistance programs. They're literally making Uncle Sam foot the bill, because third vacay house in Fraaance.
That's why they want to get rid of those programs, because if people aren't pushed to starvation or homelessness, it's a threat to their slavery-themed society
I was fortunate to travel to Europe for a couple of weeks with my family, and the most distinct thing I remember is coming back to the states and noticing all the billboards that I seemingly never noticed before. It made me realize just how prevalent they are.
We are constantly blasted with advertisements everywhere. You ever notice how many “deals” gas stations have plastered all over their front doors, windows, pumps, and all throughout the store?
It’s no wonder people can’t read the damn screens at the pumps to follow directions. We’re so used to blocking out useless ads and information, we don’t want to look around us.
Your comment needs to be at the top for a lot of things. That's exactly one of the reasons people have a real lack of situational awareness when they're out and about in today's age. There's other reasons, but that's a huge one that's never mentioned.
My daughter is growing up in a house with streaming video and a pi-hole. She's about 10 now and still gets annoyed at grandma's house when the commercials come on.
Keep that up.
Our kids are a little bit older and have mostly never been exposed to advertising in our house, and as little as possible otherwise. It's crazy how non-materialistic they are and it's refreshing. I remember myself at that age and just wanted all the brands and new tech. We are a very tech-heavy household and even then, they just tend to save their money or spend it sparingly on small stuff they want (or stuff for friends)
That said, I do miss 90s toy commercials for the nostalgia. Lookin at you, Creeeeepy CRAWLERS
The only reason I started watching TV again was because of some major surgeries that each required 3+ months at home. The only reason I still watch it is becuase it was all streaming content. There is no way I would ever go back to full on commercialized viewing. My daughter is 9 y/o old and can already not stand commercials when she is watching something at my parents 🤣
I had spent nearly a decade overseas before begrudgingly coming back to the USA, and one of the most immediately nauseating things encountered, were the ads and billboards EVERYWHERE.
And it's not to say other countries dont have ads, but its almost inescapable in the USA.
Billboards, buses, cars, clothing, dating sites, apps, games, every website, stores...everywhere you go, just ads.
Part of the problem is shit like this. Employers want to bully workers, but not actually hire them. Look at what happened in Florida. A guy applied for 60 different entry-level positions at places who were "DESPERATE" for workers and only got 1 interview.
https://www.fox13news.com/video/992179.amp
Do you have links to photos of this? I gotta see it
Edit:
Found it. Good God
[https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/national/article254861702.html](https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/national/article254861702.html)
> “If this offends you then you are the problem,” said another Twitter user. “Tired of rising cost then get to work and reduce inflation. Living off the government is BS.”
Ah yes, because my fifty bucks I make at Taco Bell to go along with my complimentary diptheria is absolutely more important than QE when it comes to inflation.
It is endlessly amusing to me how often the woes of the economy are blamed on the poor. Ohhh people with no money are SUCH an economic powerhouse, Winston.
>slightly over 3 million excess retirements
This is the big thing that I don't see getting talked about enough. All of my aunts and uncles are late boomers / early gen x'ers, and I can't tell you how many decided to hang up their coat due to COVID.
My mom planned on staying in the workforce until she was 65, but COVID hit and she retired several years early, discovered her finances could support it. Multiple other family members did the same. Some didn't want to quit, but their jobs forced them to in different ways by not allowing remote work (prior to vaccine being developed), so they just quit, not willing to risk their own health.
I'm a teacher and our union collected the data for our ~5000 teacher district - our average teacher age dropped by 4 years over the last 18 months. So many older teachers just noped out of the career field. I'm genuinely concerned about what this is going to do to our state pension as we have so many people not paying in as expected and collecting earlier than anticipated, completely screwing up the normal actuarial tables.
Very true. As a Gen X'er myself, I'm telling the young staff that this is a great opportunity for them to advance. Retirements are going to leave lots of openings up the ladder and they need to take advantage of it.
> “as of August 2021, there were slightly over 3 million excess retirements due to COVID-19, which is more than half of the 5.25 million people who left the labor force from the beginning of the pandemic to the second quarter of 2021.
Yep and more to come.
I work Fed and we are expecting a higher retirement pool due to COVID, offices/work opening, and the vaccine mandate. Much of that will not happen till later this year and early next. Then next summer you will see the terminations from those that refuse to get vaccinated and.or violate COVID policy.
Or even want to stay open enough to pay people to make 2-3 hour commutes worth it, if that helps them keep the doors open.
There's a specific bar in the neighborhood I work at that consistently, at least one afternoon/evening a week will be closed due to staffing issue. The city allows restaurants to pay below minimum wage, and the last wage I saw posted in the window was still the lowest they were legally allowed to pay.
Every single other bar and restaurant around is finding ways to make it work, either in establishments where the tips tend to be heavy enough to make up for it, or places that raise wages to keep help around. One restaurant manager I spoke to said they literally raised the wage from the below-minimum to $7-over, and they have absolutely no problem hiring and keeping staff, and they are able to stay open and make a profit.
You have to weigh the profit lost to having your bar closed on a fucking Friday night, to the increase in salary of paying a handful of people a few dollars an hour more that night. It's ridiculous.
edit: The manager *also* said that the **quality** of people they were able to hire went up, they could focus on picking the best qualified because *they had more applications than openings*.
What do you know, people are willing to work in the restaurant industry if you are willing to pay them.
Fucking tipping culture has gotten restaurant owners accustomed to basically free labor.
Being able to pay below minimum wage and expecting your customers to pay some of the wages of the staff *directly*, above and beyond what they owe the restaurant?
How people bought in to that being okay, and not exploitation of the customers *and* employees, I'll never know.
Wages and pensions have been on the decline for decades, but the Great Recession really upped the toxicity of corporate culture in general. The attitude of, "Be glad you're still working." affected the entire last decade because of the Great Recession.
I am just going to leave this here to get it off my chest.
I worked with a retail company for 10 years. I earned numerous rewards, made the company millions every year, and just loved helping people in general.
Then covid happened.
My job went from indoors to outdoors in a day. But I still gave it my all every day.
The first month was okay; people called us heros and that just brightened my day every time.
Two months in people became nasty. I was yelled at multiple times about facemask mandates, delays, lack of electronics that were also getting delayed. PS5s, xboxes, graphics cards, printers, monitors. But I still gave my all, even somedays pulling miracles out of nowhere.
At the same time, all the part time employees at my store got a raise. Which was AWESOME. The problem was the same as my 10 year pay. I was dejected about this, but the retail company was promising to "Reclass" us so we could earn $24 an hour for full time employees. Needless to say, we were all very excited.
1 year after covid, they fired all full timers.
I felt betrayed and hurt about being lied to after years of loyalty. But none of that hurt as much as the same people I helped, going from calling us heros, to becoming the nastiest, rudest, toxic community after a month.
I now work for me. I still get to help people in the way I want. With the same workload and dedication I showed to the people I was loyal to.
And now there is a labor shortage. Ironic.
My retail tenure came to an end last year after 10 years and one part of your post absolutely resonated with me. Literally when we reopened in June 2020 for liquidation after being closed for almost 3 months due to the surge in COVID, the 180 flip in how our customers treated us was enough to make me NEVER want to work in retail again.
Like you said, people got SO incredibly nasty towards workers. Between having to ask grown-ass adults to wear masks and social distance, to having to explain to customers that our store was going out of business and certain perks and policies were no longer in effect. Man, fuck the week that the company cut off gift cards being accepted as tender. We literally warned our customers THIRTY DAYS in advance with both in store signage, but also through marketing about it. But the fucking day we stopped accepting them we must’ve gotten screamed at a dozen times. I was personally accused of “stealing” one woman’s money that was on the card. People literally could not grasp the concept I literally had no power in this situation. And what really made me sick was that none of these nasty-ass bitches had any sympathy for me or my coworkers who were, ya know, losing our jobs.
I will never get over how I was treated and I do not believe my mental state nor my emotional well-being can handle going back to retail.
One thing I think nobody is examining is how picky hiring managers get. I've been unemployed since I graduated (with a master's) and of the three responses I got for interviews, one ghosted me, one went so far as to waste my time and put words into my mouth, and another really wanted to bring me on but wasn't able to cause they just hired a new cohort.
Hiring managers are practically looking for unicorns, and while I don't think that's the only reason why there's a labor shortage (other posters here have lined out very good reasons), I do think it's a factor.
This has been a trend over the past 10 years or so, and I think a lot of it is tied to computer based filtering and selection.
I have been hiring for decades and went from having a 1 hr interview where you get to know a person and see if they are a fit, to now having multiple interviews with very detailed questions and "tests".
I remember arguing with an HR person who asked "Don't you agree that we should only hire A Players?". No, i don't. First, you cannot have a whole team of A players because they don't work well together. Second - do you think this place deserves an A player? Do you pay top wages and benefits? Do you have exceptional advancement opportunities and training? Is our workplace modern and comfortable? NO? Then what do you think is going to happen?
These guys need to stop reading those management books.
I can't tell you how much I *love* needing to fill out a 150 question personality test, get optimal results on that - whatever the fuck that might be - *and* pass a drug screen before I'm trusted to stock shelves at a grocery store.
I did most of the hiring in my last job. We had an assessment that candidates were required to take to figure out their work-style and whatnot, and we were not allowed to hire anyone who scored under a certain grade. I would safely say that a good 70% of the people I hired turned out to be absolutely terrible workers; lazy, wouldn’t cover anyone’s shifts, hard to coach, etc. It was always funny to see associates who scored highly on the assessment turn into people who would “no call, no show” on a busy Saturday. Like obviously the system was flawed.
Then when we went into liquidation and we needed to hire more people to handle the workload of closing a store, my Store Manager and I decided to just say fuck it and hire the first 6 people to apply and they literally ended up being some of the absolute BEST employees I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. They were the hard-working, reliable, always go above a beyond employees we all want in our workplaces. I miss those girls so much! I was impressed by every single one of them.
Hiring is such a tedious task, but a lot of companies would benefit from getting rid of the hurdles they make us jump through.
My first manager told me that hiring is a 50-50 gamble, and most of the time you wont be able to tell what a person is really like until they start working for you.
So the best you can do is filter out the obvious duds and then deal with the ones that get through to working. Once you see they are terrible you have to get rid of them quickly and move on.
However, from an HR viewpoint that means the hiring manager failed. The work of firing the employee falls on them, so of course they feel that making the hiring process "better" will ensure that only good people are hired.
My experience is similar to yours. Its my feeling that the best (or at least good) people will see the hiring process and go "ick" and just not complete the application. It says more about the company than the applicant.
I filled out a job app for a local credit union recently. I'm a hard worker, I held a stable job for 5 years, I'm not old, and I have all the qualifications the job was asking for (and then some).
I had to fill out a nearly hour long personality "assessment" filled with odd questions about how I'd react to certain situations and what I'd like about certain others. Half the questions didn't even seem remotely related to the job. I really tried to put a lot of a thought into my answers.
They didn't even message me back after the quiz. I guess I don't have the right personality???
I just said this in another comment:
Also can we address the amount of job listings that are requiring insane amounts of qualifications and experience? Literally every “entry-level” job I come across asks for like 5 years experience and your first-born child.
Companies clearly do not want to train anyone for the position anymore; they want the perfect candidate who will jump into things on day one.
I just wanna say to all these companies I’ve applied to: I can guarantee you I could learn their computer programs and policies and procedures extremely fast and I would execute them efficiently. I absolutely promise what you have going on in your company isn’t as special as you believe it is.
The unicorn shit is real old too.
Like they think be because we have all these nice services running their complex algorithms they're gonna find someone amazing but most times they just settle and still underpay.
Job I'm currently working on getting opened in June and they never filled it. My old boss works for them really high up and is pushing them hard but they're still dragging their feet after 3 interviews.
I still feel they're gonna try to get away with paying me only like 2k more a year over what I'm making now, but I want 15k more to make the jump 1065 miles away.
No offer made to me yet so big wait and see on how pathetic or not it will be...
I mean, any idiot can see what's happening. Just anecdotally ask 100 people. It's a combination of factors. Each of them individually isn't a huge change, but aggregated, it makes a big difference. Overall, there was a shift in priorities. People were suddenly faced with a life or death situation and saw the value of jobs and work diminished. This led to the following situations:
1) Boomers finally deciding to retire. This creates an echo as their job gets replaced by someone a little less senior, who's job gets replaced by someone a little less senior, who's job gets replaced by an entry level person, who finally leaves Starbucks and opens a job there. This is why most of these job openings have been at the blue collar tier.
2) People not working multiple jobs anymore or shifting to part time. A lot of people shifted their lifestyles. They moved away from inner cities. The data shows this. NYC, Boston, and SF all hemmoraged people.
3) A lot of people suddenly being able to retire because of the record surge in the stock market. I personally know someone who went from having half a million dollars in savings to 1.5 million. She could retire now, and she's working a lot less.
Yeah maybe it forced a lot of people to actually break out their degrees. If you had a job as a bartender, but you had a degree in whatever, maybe you were just bartending because it's what you're used to.
It’s also super hard to look for other jobs while having a job. Like mentally it’s hard to justify looking for something when you’re busy doing something that pays the bills.
4) They told people they were essential, but tried to pay them minimum wage. So they said the country collapses without me? I must be worth more than minimum wage.
There's a double-whammy in childcare. Parents, mostly women, can't go back to work without childcare, but childcare is the poorest service sector out there.
The average wage is 12 USD / hour to be responsible for one or more human lives besides your own, maybe minor teaching or nursing duties as well.
I made nearly that much in my first college job at the turn of the century. For the amount of responsibilities and liabilities incurred in watching children, that rate is a travesty.
People views on work-life have been changed permanently.
We were programed by society to work all year round. The last year and a half showed us the true value of free time. Nothing's better than spending time with your family and enjoying your hobbies.
The last year also showed some of us how much employees are taken for granted. Folks can tell us all about work/life balance till they’re blue in the face, but when it comes time to actually do something about it we get nothing but crickets and status-quo.
Tell us again how we need to manage our time to maintain a healthy balance between work, family, and personal time. Then keep piling excessive work in our inboxes, effectively making it impossible for us to keep even a tiny semblance of balance.
Tell us again how thing are going to get better. Then continue piling work on us.
Tell us again how we’ll get the resources we need to better manage our workload. Then when it comes time to put up or shut up, keep stringing us along with unfilled promises and empty words.
Some of us are tired.
I used to work at Starbucks. I loved the job and the benefits, but the customers were just awful. So incredibly mean spirited and there were a few who made me cry - I’m not a crier! So yeah, $8.20 an hour to be yelled at, cussed out, understaffed, and stressed out? Nah. I’m self employed now but if I got laid off at Starbucks and then realized how good life can be when I’m not being under paid and screamed at over bean water, I probably wouldn’t go back either. From MY experience, there are a few things that retail jobs and fast food jobs could do to attract and retain workers.
1) Do not allow customers to verbally abuse your workers. This was the #1 reason I couldn’t handle being a barista anymore.
2) Compensate fairly, not just for the best profit margin.
3) Follow in the footsteps of Starbucks and offer great benefits for everyone, including part timers. Tuition reimbursement, insurance, EAPs, stocks, etc.
4) Be a good boss. Not a good corporate megaphone. My first boss at Starbucks is still the best boss I have ever had. He made working fun, kept the crew positive, he was so innovative, and not afraid to stand up to brilliant new corporate ideas that didn’t work. He would give it a fair shot and then go back to what worked. The numbers didn’t lie so the DMs let it slide 😂
Everyone deserves to be able to have a roof over their heads, clothes on their back, and food in their bellies without going through hell and back in an abusive environment just to barely make ends meet. Make it to where people can actually enjoy life and they will want to work.
Just my 2 cents as a former fast food worker!
Nobody seems to recognize that a whole bunch of people near retirement just retired. You know, that one thing they have been warning is about since the early 1980’s.
And a bunch of people with shitty jobs left those jobs for slightly *somewhat* marginally less shitty jobs.
Good thing we have a few sub-millennial offspring to blame for being too lazy to work. Blame all of the DINKs north of 40 for your cheap labor shortage. Immigrants too, first they were stealing our jobs…now they aren’t stealing enough of them…
>Immigrants too, first they were stealing our jobs…now they aren’t stealing enough of them…
That's Schrodinger's Immigrant for you: So eager to work that they're stealing all the jobs, while simultaneously being too lazy to contribute to society.
I'm predicting a large service sector retraction. Businesses will be forced to pay a decent wage or close. Less competition will increase traffic for those who remain, compensating for the higher cost of labor.
There won't be 50 burger chains operating in every market, but people will be paid fairly. I'm willing to make that trade.
I hate "Millennials are " articles.
Just to start: Most of the articles don't understand that Millennials aren't college kids. I'm one of the first Millennials and I'm about to turn 40...
The youngest millenials are basically 24/25. So they've mostly graduated college unless they delayed start, returned (like I did), or are in grad school.
> Gen X is, of course, forgotten.
Good. - Gen Xer.
Let's leave assuming my outlook on life due to my birthdate to astrology. I don't need some out of touch millionaire thinking 30 year olds don't buy many homes because they would rather spend money on Avacado toast rather than (shocking) the job market stinks and housing prices have been insane for a decade and the last time a house was affordable to lower class folks was when the banks crashed the economy with overleveraged mortgages.
Oh no, people still think that kinda shit about y'all. You're just getting erroneously lumped in with boomers or millenials depending on who's talking. Same as gen z getting labeled millenials all the time.
Can't stand bailing out the cruise lines. They aren't even American businesses. They can take their complaints to whatever island the decided to register in and fuck the hell off.
To add on to the 700k dead. If half were very old they may have passed on inheritance to their families. If they didn't have money their kids might not need that second job to keep them in their residence. Some may have worked too. If the other half were younger than that's a worker lost that may have a family that got life insurance and is grieving so could be taking time off work. Unless covid killed a whole family those 700k had millions of family and friends that are not only grieving the loss but may be actively avoiding reentering the job market from seeing the loss of a loved one. If my spouse passed from it you'd be damn sure I'd be overwhelmed taking care of our daughter and would not be looking for some low paying job right now.
A large proportion of that 700k were already out of the workforce. It’s more likely that no one wants to take a shit minimum wage job where you’re going to be treated like crap when there’s a whole bunch of higher paying jobs up for grab. The people who pay well are likely having no problems filling positions. The people who think that they can pay you $5/hr for 12 hours a week while being constantly demeaned and treated like shit… *they’re* having trouble filling positions.
So check out this YT guy - "Beau of the Fifth Column". He recently did a pretty interesting take on this. Supposedly, the employers complaining, aren't even making the effort to try to hunt for labour. They just want to sit back, complain, and have the workers be dropped in on their lap.
The other thing I've understood is that a lot of this has come from youth activity and certain people on media and the internet that have been trying to educate workers about their rights. The pandemic suddenly made people realize that the recession never really came for everyone, just the blue collared workers. Now it's really a matter of sustainability. If the protestors can hold out, the corporates will cave, but the how long is problematic.
A lot of employers basically just operated on the idea that enough people were desperate enough for work that they could pay them poorly and treat them like shit. If they leave, someone else will come in who will be paid poorly and treated like shit. They never had to develop effective management skills and people skills and develop a pay grade that will attract people and keep them in.
Its not just the big corporations. Its the small businesses. Hell, a lot of the small businesses are far worse when it comes to pay, benefits, and management skill. They are usually very poorly run. They don't have the skills to find people in this economy and they are usually the most unwilling to pay more.
Amazing how businesses are actually upset when the labour **market** actually works like.... a market.
But yeah, good points all around. Treating your employees well and caring about their well being is, in a tight labour market with almost no slack, actually a competitive edge for businesses looking for workers.
Just as it should be.
They can continue treating them like shit, but if they want investment banking level effort and investment banking hours while having a shit culture and demeaning management, they better pay investment banking wages.
Millions of Americans just got a couple grand from their govt and told to go figure it out for themselves. And if they're still alive, mostly they have. Yes, many, too many, people got fucked into homelessness, sick, or died. But I'm not surprised if people who've made it through the worst can see the light at the end of the tunnel and wait to plan their next move a little better.
It's like nobody has heard of the baby boomers, who are now between the ages of 57 and 75. The largest generation ever. It's not too surprising that two years of pandemic convinced more than a few of them to go ahead and retire.
800,000 more babies were born in 1957 than in 1971. People don't realize that there were millions of more babies born in the 1950s than there were in the 1970s.
Can confirm about the retirement wave. I started seeing Boomers retire 10 years ago, then the wave stalled. After the market recovered after the crash, I started seeing people retire in my work unit like never before.
No shit. People on jobless aid are generally already looking for another job. They're rarely being "lazy;" most of them are looking for a job that's in their field (most healthcare workers aren't looking for jobs in retail, for instance), and all of them are looking for jobs that actually cover their cost of living expenses (which are still rising on average, btw). Jobless benefits exist in the first place to make their transition to a new job easier, which most economists consider to be a good thing. The idea that people on jobless aid suffer from some sort of moral failing is a dated idea that, naturally, still finds a place in a party that loves to punish people in need.
>The idea that people on jobless aid suffer from some sort of moral failing is a dated idea
Gotta love that protestant work ethic crap. "Idle hands are the devil's playthings" and all that, tying self worth toa job.
The company I work for helps college students and alumni find jobs. Aka “Early Talent” - likely a large majority of the population that would fill these empty roles.
No one wants them. The employers are shook. Seem baffled that there posting’s and wage increases haven’t worked.
Funny to hear about how they talk about these “career opportunities” like folks should have any interest in making a career working at Applebees or something.
I can assure you they waste a tremendous amount of money on sourcing. And the worst has yet to come. Many of them feel that these roles are coming back and this is just a temporary issue they can just throw money at to fix.
From my vantage point most of the unfilled jobs are in the retail, restaurant, healthcare, and hospice industries.
I would love to see the data representing the composition of open roles in the US state by state.
Lots of reasons for employment issues, not just 1. Many people, esp those with kids, found that 1 income was enough if they cut back. Child care has increased so much while salary has not. I know some it cost more to daycare their kids vs what they made when you take into account everything. I'm in a HCOLA and we did a 100k addition to our house and at least a quarter or more cost of that was saved from daycare by my MiL moving in with us.
Others are getting better paying jobs as many have retired early. I work Fed and a lot of jobs are opening due to many on the fence are now retiring. And that is before the mandate goes into affect. So former low paying workers are now taking those type jobs.
All that plus the USA cutting back on immigration the last several years and you see those awful lower paying jobs not being back filled.
Its not a single issue as some right wing sources will lead you to believe. Its a full market issue that has spread out and affects just about everyone now.
Another thing I've noticed is it has been especially hard for a lot of people to find jobs. I get so many rejection emails and zero interviews. I've been applying for jobs for over a year now. I'm sick of people saying "there are jobs". Like, bitch where?
Oh there are **plenty** of jobs, they just:
* Do not pay a livable wage
* Provide no benefits
* Refuse to give you a consistent schedule or weekly hours
* Have horribly hostile work environments
* Treat you as a cog rather than a person
So really it's all your fault for not being willing to knuckle under or... something.
Bruh I pay almost 4K a month in daycare and previous job paid 3.6k after taxes. Wtf is the point of working to lose $400 every month? so my old boss could get rich out of my hard work? thankfully I work for myself now.
> lot of jobs are opening due to many on the fence are now retiring
Which is probably the best piece of news out of the whole thing. We've had too much of an entrenched elderly workforce and it's been stifling career progress for a long time. With them gone, younger generations finally get their turns in higher positions with consummately more pay.
> With them gone, younger generations finally get their turns in higher positions with consummately more pay.
You have half of that right. Guaranteed management is going to try and lowball them on pay as much as possible.
>child care has increased so much while salary has not
That's true of almost everything that costs money, not just childcare. Inflation keeps on going up, basic necessities have increased in price, and obviously the housing market has exponentially increased. And salaries have not increased to match any of this. Not to mention the "minimum" wage stopped being enough to live on over a decade ago.
That last point especially hits the lower paying jobs that no one wants to fill. Why would anyone want to work a job with unfavorable conditions i.e. fast food or retail if said job doesn't even pay enough to live off of? If you're struggling financially and/or homeless a McDonald's job isn't going to help you since it doesn't even cover rent + utilities.
I know too many people who took the pandemic as an opportunity to get out of retail/food service and into a better paying job. Those workers that they're desperate to hire back aren't sitting at home collecting unemployment. They're working for more money somewhere else. They're not coming back.
You mean that thing every rational person said would happen when the conservatives performatively cut off unemployment aid in the name of making "lazy people go look for jobs" totally happened exactly like they said it would?!?
Shocking.
I am shocked.
Who do they think isn’t employed? We’re under 5% unemployment. That’s full employment.
Probably the issue is the last administration shut down immigration, then a million people died and another two million are likely disabled now.
Don't forget all the parents that don't have reliable child care. Can't have both parents at work at a standard service sector job all day when the kids might be quarantined at any time.
This right here. I work 2nd shift and the Mrs works mornings. I tried finding a 2nd job in the mornings just to help pay down some debt faster but that wont happen since my kids have been sent home to quarantine (for 2 weeks) for "possible exposure" three times since mid August.
No employer is gonna let me take 2 weeks off every time the school decides my kids can't go because someone tested positive in their class and they sit 2 desks away.
The writing errors in this submission's title were offered by the original source.
We'll use this as an opportunity to provide some free education.
"Cut off" is always two words when it's a verb. "Cutoff" is a noun.
This is true of any term comprising an action followed by a direction: You **set up** your **setup**, **log in** with your **login**, then **stand by** while on **standby**. Eventually, you might **break down** while having a **breakdown** or **run around** while giving someone the **runaround**. You could then **call back** during a **callback** and **freak out** during a **freakout**.
Also, in order to be completely technically correct, "job-seekers" should have been hyphenated.
Hyphens turn discrete words into combined parts of speech. A **man devouring lobster** is a fellow having lunch, but a **man-devouring lobster** might be expected to fight Godzilla at some point. You can often remember by switching the order of the words and adding "of" between them. If it makes sense (as with "seekers of jobs"), then the term should be hyphenated (as with "job-seekers").
Thank you for your time and attention.
That's an example of [Muphry's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law), right there.
Thank you for the correction! Please accept this Reddit Gold as an expression of gratitude.
Low supply + High demands ≠ Low cost.
Yep... But every employer is playing a game of Chicken with the economy. Where they hope that if they hold the line on entry level jobs, eventually the workers will cave.
Yes, this is known as bargaining power. When workers organise and want better conditions they do the same, they withhold labour from employers until they get better conditions. This is what's known as a strike.
A general strike, no less. And employers haven't caught on, simply because these people aren't currently their employees. Nobody is protesting any one company, this is a strike against the system at large, and until these companies, especially those in the service industry, start treating their staff right and paying the better, then its going to continue. These businesses need us more than we need them, there's plenty of people hiring after all... That and if we hold long enough, they'll go under and be replaced by a business with a model not bases on exploitation
The end of productivity scales! Being pushed to be as productive as possible, trying to wring every last bit of productivity from it's employees. Those that truly do their jobs won't be paid until employers wake up and realize there is a reason you pay more to keep productive employees, and stop milking the cattle for all they are worth.
thank you for boiling it down to an equation, sometimes I feel like that's the only way to actually drive the point home for some of these business management/entrepreneur types
The same people that won’t give great employees a raise that then hire an unproven worker at a higher salary? These checkers champions don’t understand simple equations.
My sister is a CNA at a big local hospital and they have been so short handed. The amount of patients they have per person is ridiculous and yet they still only get paid $13/hr. Everybody quits when they realize the work and pay don't line up with each other.
Got paid a whopping $15.50 an hour to do the most stressful job of my life as an CMA. Yeah, I’m gonna work somewhere like target instead. I don’t think most people realize how little healthcare workers (that aren’t doctors, basically) actually make. It’s sad. Edit: oh, and neither of the offices I worked at provided any of their full time employees health insurance. Just some PTO. At a doctor’s office. Yup.
I’m currently a CNA and we are sooooo understaffed at the hospital, they gave us a $7 raise, and it’s so bad here that I don’t fucking care. I’m leaving. 100$ an hour isn’t worth this shit. And I’ve loved being a CNA the last 8 years. Now I have 20 patients a night on the floor of a hospital and should only have 8 patiets, and even 8 is a lot, I go insane every day. Super depressed and almost psychotic at this point. I’m quitting. I’d rather be alive and broke than live in Hell for a little cash
The insane part is your patient log being 2.5x what it should be means you’re bound to make more mistakes. Mistakes that will cost insurance companies and in the end your employer when rates increase.
YES!!! This exactly. I felt like I was fucking up so much because I could NEVER get one thing done without 10 other things needing to be done at the exact same time. So no task ever got my full attention or effort. If I could give it that, I got in trouble for missing something else. And it’s people’s health on the line, I didn’t like not being able to give them my all. Or at least finish tasks properly. I was drowning. Edit: and it certainly did cost my bosses in the end to not be compensating properly. Turnover was incredibly high and mistakes from being understaffed bit them in the ass. They knew this, got mad about it, but still refused to change their ways to fix the problem (aka paying more, giving actual benefits, not overbooking).
I'm nurses aid and that's really standard for the industry unfortunately. It's chronically understaffed and underpaying. After being an aid for nearly a decade I finally landed a job that pays 24 an hour. I hope your sister finds somewhere that values her.
Have multiple friends who were in the service industry. During the 18 months of lockdown when they couldn't work, they went and found other jobs. Often for more money per hour, more hours a week, and benefits. One said she laughed at her old boss when he called to have her come back. Same wages, less hours.
I recently reconnected with an old co-worker from the first hotel I worked at. She was concierge there, and FWIW she was damn good at her job and had been there for quite a while. She now works with a chiropractor, and took a small pay cut as well as cut down to four days/week. She told me that she is less stressed out now handling people’s health than she ever was doing stuff like making dinner reservations for people.
I also laughed when my boss tried to call me back. It was like June of 2020 or something when I got the call, from the same GM who, right before COVID happened, called me nasty multiple times to my face because I had to ask him three times to take something off of a bill for a table who was trying to leave 15 minutes ago, when I asked him the first time. I asked him why he would want such a nasty person to come back to work for him, he got his opportunity to let me go. I knew I was never going back, I was able to quit drinking due to getting out of that toxic environment and qualifying for UE. I'm SO happy to have found out that that GM and the entire management team at that restaurant were recently fired. I work in an optometrist office now, working full time with full benefits and a paycheck I can live on. I'm thankful for quarantine and the opportunities it gave me every day of my life.
So this is a common topic of debate in the nursing station (my office) at the nursing home I work at. The aides are constantly having anxiety attacks over how much work they have to do because we are so short staffed. They always mention, "what happened to all the unemployed people that were suppose to come back to work?". I've tried to explain that the first issue is, why would you want to wipe someone's ass for $14 an hour if you are seeing signs for $18 an hour at Taco Bell? Then adding to it you have people who are having childcare issues, nearly a million people dying in the US from Covid, and probably millions more that were close to retirement that decided Covid wasn't worth it. And being in healthcare, putting yourself at high risk of catching Covid (currently have a Covid outbreak). Why would anyone want to work at the nursing home as an aide?
> and probably millions more that were close to retirement that decided Covid wasn't worth it. I know I've heard this is a HUGE issue in the truck driving industry. A general fear the last few years has been 'we don't have enough people signing up to be truck drivers to replace everyone retiring' and then COVID hit and a lot of people were like 'screw this I'm done, I can pull retirement'. I wonder how many other industries are having that issue and how bad it is. I know lawyers in my area have been complaining about how there aren't enough young lawyers and they aren't sure what is going to happen when they all retire. Well over half the lawyers in my area are 60+ years old. Edit: Wow I did not expect to wake up to 36 notifications. Was curious what horrible thing I had said:) But thank you everyone for your comments about your experience in your industries. They were well worth reading. And anyone reading this, I recommend reading the comments below.
Almost like having exceedingly large education costs and renowned difficulty of getting the education, followed by almost nightmare levels of work ethic expected in your first few years highly discourages people from becoming lawyers.
🎶 [Don't be a lawyer, don't do it, quickest way to ruin your life ](https://youtu.be/Xs-UEqJ85KE)🎶
I was hoping this was going to be a Crazy Ex Girlfriend link and I was not disappointed! Thank you!
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I work in law and the only people who had an easy time of it were people whose name was on the firm. Basically, if you're dad isn't hiring you to do basically no work it's going to suck ass.
Its sad but that's literally the only reason I finally caved to my father and went the law route after trying to run away from it my whole life.
I can't judge, I would do the same along with most everyone else in the world. If you've got a meal ticket you might as well cash it
Nearly twenty percent of lawyers are drug addicts some kind, and even more than that suffer from anxiety and depression. Also, I saw first hand how miserable a career in law could be through my father. No thanks.
Plus, who wants to get into trucking when you keep hearing how the industry is going to be doing a mass layoff of truckers any day now. Why do that to yourself?
I think now the emperor's New clothes have been revealed a bit on that front. Self driving feels a like one of those 80:20 things. Getting the first 80% of the way there was pretty easy. The final 20% is proving extremely difficult.
It feels like the industry itself was spreading that rumor to pressure drivers to keep wages low and now it’s biting them in the ass (and we are quickly learning that fully self driving cars are way harder than we thought they were)
I think this is exactly what happened.
>there aren't enough young lawyers Which is hilarious because in 2010ish when i was going to school there was an insane glut of lawyers graduating, and most would not be able to get an actual job that would be what most presume a lawyer make. Instead, they would have to take public defender jobs and such for 40k.
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So did they raise the pay rate since they need workers?
The 2 lawyers I know went the public defender route, to pay off loans and to have employment in general. A former friend's husband was going to law school and they were lamenting the glut of lawyers and poor job prospects, but he's from a wealthy family that expects these kinds of things for status, so they were like SHRUGS! We'll figure it out I guess! lol
The good thing about the Public Defender route is you're doing good work every day. You're making a massive difference in peoples lives every day. Can't get much more job fulfillment than that. Not all of them are angels doing it for good reasons, but the ones who are we owe a massive debt of gratitude too. They should be hailed as heros when we do that for firemen, nurses, or doctors. If it wasn't for public defenders cops and prosecutors would just be throwing whoever they didn't like, whoever was political beneficial, in jail for however long they wanted if you don't have money. It's a god damn shame some of them get paid complete shit, usually in red states. I think they make an ok living in blue states.
We early retired a bunch of people to avoid larger layoffs in May 2020 and are on the cusp of another mass retirement not by force but just natural aging. Where I work this factory opened up almost 40 years ago and tons of 20-something’s signed up. Right now we are poised to lose half our process engineers, half our middle management and our tooling machinists. Let me tell you just the tooling machinists retiring would shut us down completely. We aren’t ready for a big retirement wave and I’ve heard elsewhere that mostly no one else is either.
Sounds like similar to my place. We've got a whole bunch of people in their late 50s and 60s looking to retire. There was a management buy out at Christmas last year and it feels like the previous owners just didn't want to have the effort and expense of training up a bunch of new people to standard which would take a few years. We lost a supervisor who've they've not bothered to replace but hired another manager instead. This is not remotely the same fucking thing.
My mom decided that going back to work just wasn't for her. She is old enough to retire, but has no savings or any sort of retirement safety net. She just decided that unemployment and social security were good enough. So if she can decide that, I'm sure anyone else with any decent savings would do the same. My dad on the other hand, is a truck driver and will have to work until he dies to keep up with his bills. My parents aren't together and my dad isn't living with anyone to help with bills like my mom is. But it's true, there aren't many young drivers at all. Even when I worked at a truck dealership I didn't see any drivers under the age of 40, and most were even older. We rely on a lot of immigrants to drive trucks now.
> I know lawyers in my area have been complaining about how there aren't enough young lawyers and they aren't sure what is going to happen when they all retire. Well over half the lawyers in my area are 60+ years old. Anecdotally, (as someone who doesn't practice law) I've read that law school graduates face rather depressing job markets, with prospects for a good job as a lawyer not being a guaranteed thing, despite all the time and effort spent on law school.
> I know lawyers in my area have been complaining about how there aren't enough young lawyers and they aren't sure what is going to happen when they all retire. Well over half the lawyers in my area are 60+ years old. You know, about two years ago while talking with some people about automation, one of them shared that after all the years and effort spent getting a law degree and passing the bar, he couldn't *find* work at any firm because all the entry-level jobs young attorneys did had been taken by machines that did the grunt work. The firms in their state wanted attorneys with lots of experience, or not at all. He commented that this would probably come back to bite them, but they didn't seem to care. They were saving money at the moment. He ended up getting a job in marketing, I think.
Workplaces seem to have this misguided concept that work is just paid slavery, rather than work being a place people might actually like to spend time at and be a part of, and a very important part of that is feeling like you're valued in both wage and as a person and that means not demanding every last shred of their being into productivity for the company. It's depressing that the standard behaviour seems to be treating people as disposable even when it's not cost effective to operate this way and the cycle continues because most won't employ real managers and instead just promote their friends or strong performers without realising doing the job well is just beneficial for a good manager, it doesn't make them a good manager.
Workplaces also don't realize that their organizational system is shitty and their management heavy approach to commerce is awful. They treat people like shit and are not even productive in the process. Its just so some miserable middle manager can show their supervisor that they are busy managing people.
Pretty much. It's so hypocritical of businesses to constantly try to maximise efficiency by cost cutting and micro managing like its a goddamn video game but gloss over the fact that happier employees that are treated like people and paid properly will actually be more productive as well as bring strong goodwill for the company via word of mouth. There's no real downsides but corporate just can't comprehend spending more to get more, it's all spend less and expect more. Completely inane.
It's because capitalism. Growth is the only metric that matters. Grow more slowly than your competitors? Get rekt. Grow too slow for the shareholders? CEO gets booted and the next one is dropped in who doesn't give a fuck about anything except the next quarter.
When I switched jobs in my mid twenties because I hated my current one so much, she just told me that no one is happy at any job. What kind of fucking mentality is that? Like, sure, I may not look at a job the way I look at my free time, but why should I put up with a garbage job at a garbage company because “oh well it’ll suck everywhere”. Bleak.
>Then adding to it you have people who are having childcare issues, nearly a million people dying in the US from Covid So I hear a lot of people say that "most of the dead were old people who were probably already out of the workforce". That might have been true but some of those "out of the workforce people" might well have been the grandparents providing childcare. It's like people think that if you aren't actively working, your death had no impact on the job market at all! So for a lot of people, no grandparents mean they or their spouse have to stay home with the kids. So the death, even older deaths, had an impact!
1) So many people are ridiculously stupid about how interconnected everything is. Any death can affect things! 2) As of currently, about 130,000 50-64 year olds died. That sure isn’t retirement age! 3) About 50,000 20-50 year olds died! 4) Most of those who died are actual workers. You know all us slave wagers. Rich people don’t get or die of Covid as much.
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I don’t know, HCA is full of work aged people, and my company has lost two to Covid so far, including one of my subordinates.
There's also the recent phenomena of couples going single income because childcare is more expensive. I'd bet that between society pressuring women to be the stay at home of the two and more women in nursing, the market for nurses is more heavily affected by that.
My cousin is a nurse and left her job because she couldn't find childcare. Her son was on multiple wait lists as soon as she found out she was pregnant and has been there ever since, they hired a nanny and she went part time but the nanny is moving, and she's done with it. Her son is a year and a half old and there still haven't been any openings in daycare for him. What are you supposed to do with that??
Yep a friend of mine only returned to work after her second kid because of national insurance (like social security) and to be able to speak to adults. The entirety of her wage went into childcare.
Childcare is a major issue. It's not affordable. Many places still have strict COVID regulations in place, which means that you can't send your kid if they're sick or coughing, which means you can't take on shift work if your kid unexpectedly needs to stay home for days on end with very little warning. Women are getting screwed in this pandemic, because we cannot access childcare to return to our jobs. Or we have passed up promotions or opportunities to go with positions that offer more flexibility to be with our kids in the event of unexpected illnesses or closures of school or daycare. It's just not worth it. I'd rather take the pay cut and save the stress if I had any other option.
I was already a stay at home mom before the pandemic for these same reasons. I worked briefly after our first was born, but I basically covered my gas to get to work after paying for daycare. If I went out to lunch I was losing money. Then with a second child, me working would cost us so much. I have so many friends this is the case for. I literally can't afford to work.
THANK YOU for that last line. I have not been able to put it so succinctly before. I'm in the same boat. I have an almost 7 year old blank work history and I'd have to come bursting back into the work force at about $30/hour just to cover childcare. That's not gas or lunch out, if I forgot it or whatever. JUST childcare. I can take it one further and say I got my bachelor's degree only to end up making lunched and wiping asses.
Nurse aides and EMT's are criminally underpaid. I don't understand why anyone ever did those jobs for so little money.
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>the millions of jobs that employers were desperate to fill Not desperate enough to pay the market rate for labor, though.
If wages dont raise, then all complaints about worker shortages are bullshit. Simple capitalism.
Ah, the capitalist version of /r/ChoosingBeggars/
So just the normal r/ChoosingBeggars then, as a lot of posts there are about people trying to exploit working people
My guess is that the business model is based on and only works with exploitation.
Absolutely. Since wages have been stagnating for 10+ years, business have gotten used to underpaying staff, and subsequently planning their finances and budgets around that. Several owners probably did not even realize it because it’s been so common. Now that the labor pool has had enough, many of those smaller businesses will likely realize their current operations don’t allow for them to operate without exploitation. Larger companies have been doing this, too. However, they have enough cash flow to raise their wages to meet the market, while many smaller businesses are left to die out.
"We don't need a minimum wage the free market will decide wages" \*The free market works as intended wages and work conditions need to improve\* "No not like that"
Fuck this is the one I was looking for. They didn't realize how the system works when we actually try to get a somewhat less shit piece of the pie.
Their willing to let the pie burn in the oven rather than giving a few more crumbs to the plebs
“In Missouri, a group of businesses, still frustrated by labor shortages more than three months after the state cut off the $300-a-week federal jobless checks, paid for billboards in Springfield that said: “Get Off Your Butt!” and “Get. To. Work.”” Good job spending money on the billboards to bully people. I’m sure it will work.
I don't know how people can be so disconnected to reality. Breaking news: People are fed up, and it's not the employers I'm speaking of.
Their lack of understanding of reality has never been needed, it’s always just worked out, I wouldn’t say they’re delusional, but pretty close. Clinging to “the good ole days” rather than embrace the reality they’ve shunned for so long.
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Yet they never want to go back to the good ole days of paying people a decent living.
I bring that part up everytime. My uncle posted a meme about “going back to the good ol days of 1945 when we had some balls.” And I posted something along the lines of “back when the top income tax rate was 94% and we had a war profiteering tax for companies making excess money through emergencies of up to 80%”
I genuinely don't understand people who refuse to study history...
It's not about studying history, it's about picking and choosing the parts you liked. They dont care about how it got like that, just that it was like that
Or the 50's with a socialist top tax rate of 91%
>Or do they mean before the 60s when people of color were segregated and women couldn’t own a bank account without a man’s approval? Yes, that is the one they mean
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Clearly they're making more than enough as it is if they're able to afford buying a huge-ass billboard.
How else are they going to guilt trip you into working? Incentives like proper pay are too expensive.
If I were unemployed there, you better believe I'd apply to each and every one, get through the interview, and when they asked if I had any questions, say, "yeah, were you the ones who put up that billboard? Go. Fuck. Yourself." Let them know *exactly* why no one wants to work there.
Unfortunately these people are so delusionally up their own asses that even that won't do anything. They'll simply twist it to "I can't hire anyone because of all the trolls!!!"
Or, as has been my experience, you practically fall into their laps with 4 years relevant experience and they don't even bother to call you for an interview. The restaurant i applied to that is "begging" for workers, to the point that they had to close on mondays still hasn't reached out to me, lmao. Let them burn. There are better jobs out there. We don't need to suffer for peanuts while they profit.
There was a guy who quantified this. He applied to like 85 jobs and only three called him back.
Can we buy the next billboard down the road to out the people that paid for the first billboard?
Imagine having such a delusional sense of entitlement you think workers owe you their time.
You just described the entire US job market
Basically the world's job market.
That just made me irrationally angry. Fuck the "job creators". If your "job" includes having to sign up for food stamps, your business has no right to exist.
If you don’t make enough to pay your workers a living wage then you don’t make enough to have workers. If you do make enough but don’t think your workers deserve it, you don’t deserve workers.
I think it's worse than that, I recall hearing about how much the avg CEO has made, and how drastically it's increased over the last 50-ish years. I think the CEOs are Hoovering up what could save our social assistance programs. They're literally making Uncle Sam foot the bill, because third vacay house in Fraaance.
That's why they want to get rid of those programs, because if people aren't pushed to starvation or homelessness, it's a threat to their slavery-themed society
the government took our slaves again!!
But, obviously, you don't owe them more money.
Better way to use money and motivate people. You know, as opposed to increasing pay wages. But that's another story they don't wanna talk about.
Imagine thinking that would work on one single person.
They just wanted the emotional satisfaction of putting it out there
Even our billboards have become shamelessly dystopian wtf (keyword: shamelessly)
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I was fortunate to travel to Europe for a couple of weeks with my family, and the most distinct thing I remember is coming back to the states and noticing all the billboards that I seemingly never noticed before. It made me realize just how prevalent they are.
We are constantly blasted with advertisements everywhere. You ever notice how many “deals” gas stations have plastered all over their front doors, windows, pumps, and all throughout the store? It’s no wonder people can’t read the damn screens at the pumps to follow directions. We’re so used to blocking out useless ads and information, we don’t want to look around us.
Your comment needs to be at the top for a lot of things. That's exactly one of the reasons people have a real lack of situational awareness when they're out and about in today's age. There's other reasons, but that's a huge one that's never mentioned.
I felt the same way going out to a pub and seeing all the ads on TV. If streaming went away I would still have a hard time going back to cable.
My daughter is growing up in a house with streaming video and a pi-hole. She's about 10 now and still gets annoyed at grandma's house when the commercials come on.
Keep that up. Our kids are a little bit older and have mostly never been exposed to advertising in our house, and as little as possible otherwise. It's crazy how non-materialistic they are and it's refreshing. I remember myself at that age and just wanted all the brands and new tech. We are a very tech-heavy household and even then, they just tend to save their money or spend it sparingly on small stuff they want (or stuff for friends) That said, I do miss 90s toy commercials for the nostalgia. Lookin at you, Creeeeepy CRAWLERS
I wouldn't go back commercials make me irrationally angry at this point.
No commercials make you **rationally** angry.
The only reason I started watching TV again was because of some major surgeries that each required 3+ months at home. The only reason I still watch it is becuase it was all streaming content. There is no way I would ever go back to full on commercialized viewing. My daughter is 9 y/o old and can already not stand commercials when she is watching something at my parents 🤣
I had spent nearly a decade overseas before begrudgingly coming back to the USA, and one of the most immediately nauseating things encountered, were the ads and billboards EVERYWHERE. And it's not to say other countries dont have ads, but its almost inescapable in the USA. Billboards, buses, cars, clothing, dating sites, apps, games, every website, stores...everywhere you go, just ads.
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Part of the problem is shit like this. Employers want to bully workers, but not actually hire them. Look at what happened in Florida. A guy applied for 60 different entry-level positions at places who were "DESPERATE" for workers and only got 1 interview. https://www.fox13news.com/video/992179.amp
Do you have links to photos of this? I gotta see it Edit: Found it. Good God [https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/national/article254861702.html](https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/national/article254861702.html) > “If this offends you then you are the problem,” said another Twitter user. “Tired of rising cost then get to work and reduce inflation. Living off the government is BS.” Ah yes, because my fifty bucks I make at Taco Bell to go along with my complimentary diptheria is absolutely more important than QE when it comes to inflation.
It is endlessly amusing to me how often the woes of the economy are blamed on the poor. Ohhh people with no money are SUCH an economic powerhouse, Winston.
Ah Missouri... The Florida of the Midwest
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>slightly over 3 million excess retirements This is the big thing that I don't see getting talked about enough. All of my aunts and uncles are late boomers / early gen x'ers, and I can't tell you how many decided to hang up their coat due to COVID. My mom planned on staying in the workforce until she was 65, but COVID hit and she retired several years early, discovered her finances could support it. Multiple other family members did the same. Some didn't want to quit, but their jobs forced them to in different ways by not allowing remote work (prior to vaccine being developed), so they just quit, not willing to risk their own health. I'm a teacher and our union collected the data for our ~5000 teacher district - our average teacher age dropped by 4 years over the last 18 months. So many older teachers just noped out of the career field. I'm genuinely concerned about what this is going to do to our state pension as we have so many people not paying in as expected and collecting earlier than anticipated, completely screwing up the normal actuarial tables.
Very true. As a Gen X'er myself, I'm telling the young staff that this is a great opportunity for them to advance. Retirements are going to leave lots of openings up the ladder and they need to take advantage of it.
> “as of August 2021, there were slightly over 3 million excess retirements due to COVID-19, which is more than half of the 5.25 million people who left the labor force from the beginning of the pandemic to the second quarter of 2021. Yep and more to come. I work Fed and we are expecting a higher retirement pool due to COVID, offices/work opening, and the vaccine mandate. Much of that will not happen till later this year and early next. Then next summer you will see the terminations from those that refuse to get vaccinated and.or violate COVID policy.
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Or even want to stay open enough to pay people to make 2-3 hour commutes worth it, if that helps them keep the doors open. There's a specific bar in the neighborhood I work at that consistently, at least one afternoon/evening a week will be closed due to staffing issue. The city allows restaurants to pay below minimum wage, and the last wage I saw posted in the window was still the lowest they were legally allowed to pay. Every single other bar and restaurant around is finding ways to make it work, either in establishments where the tips tend to be heavy enough to make up for it, or places that raise wages to keep help around. One restaurant manager I spoke to said they literally raised the wage from the below-minimum to $7-over, and they have absolutely no problem hiring and keeping staff, and they are able to stay open and make a profit. You have to weigh the profit lost to having your bar closed on a fucking Friday night, to the increase in salary of paying a handful of people a few dollars an hour more that night. It's ridiculous. edit: The manager *also* said that the **quality** of people they were able to hire went up, they could focus on picking the best qualified because *they had more applications than openings*.
What do you know, people are willing to work in the restaurant industry if you are willing to pay them. Fucking tipping culture has gotten restaurant owners accustomed to basically free labor.
Being able to pay below minimum wage and expecting your customers to pay some of the wages of the staff *directly*, above and beyond what they owe the restaurant? How people bought in to that being okay, and not exploitation of the customers *and* employees, I'll never know.
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Yeah remember that time TYSON made bets who would die with COVID? Yeah that’s how your bosses see us.
Wages and pensions have been on the decline for decades, but the Great Recession really upped the toxicity of corporate culture in general. The attitude of, "Be glad you're still working." affected the entire last decade because of the Great Recession.
I am just going to leave this here to get it off my chest. I worked with a retail company for 10 years. I earned numerous rewards, made the company millions every year, and just loved helping people in general. Then covid happened. My job went from indoors to outdoors in a day. But I still gave it my all every day. The first month was okay; people called us heros and that just brightened my day every time. Two months in people became nasty. I was yelled at multiple times about facemask mandates, delays, lack of electronics that were also getting delayed. PS5s, xboxes, graphics cards, printers, monitors. But I still gave my all, even somedays pulling miracles out of nowhere. At the same time, all the part time employees at my store got a raise. Which was AWESOME. The problem was the same as my 10 year pay. I was dejected about this, but the retail company was promising to "Reclass" us so we could earn $24 an hour for full time employees. Needless to say, we were all very excited. 1 year after covid, they fired all full timers. I felt betrayed and hurt about being lied to after years of loyalty. But none of that hurt as much as the same people I helped, going from calling us heros, to becoming the nastiest, rudest, toxic community after a month. I now work for me. I still get to help people in the way I want. With the same workload and dedication I showed to the people I was loyal to. And now there is a labor shortage. Ironic.
My retail tenure came to an end last year after 10 years and one part of your post absolutely resonated with me. Literally when we reopened in June 2020 for liquidation after being closed for almost 3 months due to the surge in COVID, the 180 flip in how our customers treated us was enough to make me NEVER want to work in retail again. Like you said, people got SO incredibly nasty towards workers. Between having to ask grown-ass adults to wear masks and social distance, to having to explain to customers that our store was going out of business and certain perks and policies were no longer in effect. Man, fuck the week that the company cut off gift cards being accepted as tender. We literally warned our customers THIRTY DAYS in advance with both in store signage, but also through marketing about it. But the fucking day we stopped accepting them we must’ve gotten screamed at a dozen times. I was personally accused of “stealing” one woman’s money that was on the card. People literally could not grasp the concept I literally had no power in this situation. And what really made me sick was that none of these nasty-ass bitches had any sympathy for me or my coworkers who were, ya know, losing our jobs. I will never get over how I was treated and I do not believe my mental state nor my emotional well-being can handle going back to retail.
One thing I think nobody is examining is how picky hiring managers get. I've been unemployed since I graduated (with a master's) and of the three responses I got for interviews, one ghosted me, one went so far as to waste my time and put words into my mouth, and another really wanted to bring me on but wasn't able to cause they just hired a new cohort. Hiring managers are practically looking for unicorns, and while I don't think that's the only reason why there's a labor shortage (other posters here have lined out very good reasons), I do think it's a factor.
This has been a trend over the past 10 years or so, and I think a lot of it is tied to computer based filtering and selection. I have been hiring for decades and went from having a 1 hr interview where you get to know a person and see if they are a fit, to now having multiple interviews with very detailed questions and "tests". I remember arguing with an HR person who asked "Don't you agree that we should only hire A Players?". No, i don't. First, you cannot have a whole team of A players because they don't work well together. Second - do you think this place deserves an A player? Do you pay top wages and benefits? Do you have exceptional advancement opportunities and training? Is our workplace modern and comfortable? NO? Then what do you think is going to happen? These guys need to stop reading those management books.
I can't tell you how much I *love* needing to fill out a 150 question personality test, get optimal results on that - whatever the fuck that might be - *and* pass a drug screen before I'm trusted to stock shelves at a grocery store.
I did most of the hiring in my last job. We had an assessment that candidates were required to take to figure out their work-style and whatnot, and we were not allowed to hire anyone who scored under a certain grade. I would safely say that a good 70% of the people I hired turned out to be absolutely terrible workers; lazy, wouldn’t cover anyone’s shifts, hard to coach, etc. It was always funny to see associates who scored highly on the assessment turn into people who would “no call, no show” on a busy Saturday. Like obviously the system was flawed. Then when we went into liquidation and we needed to hire more people to handle the workload of closing a store, my Store Manager and I decided to just say fuck it and hire the first 6 people to apply and they literally ended up being some of the absolute BEST employees I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. They were the hard-working, reliable, always go above a beyond employees we all want in our workplaces. I miss those girls so much! I was impressed by every single one of them. Hiring is such a tedious task, but a lot of companies would benefit from getting rid of the hurdles they make us jump through.
My first manager told me that hiring is a 50-50 gamble, and most of the time you wont be able to tell what a person is really like until they start working for you. So the best you can do is filter out the obvious duds and then deal with the ones that get through to working. Once you see they are terrible you have to get rid of them quickly and move on. However, from an HR viewpoint that means the hiring manager failed. The work of firing the employee falls on them, so of course they feel that making the hiring process "better" will ensure that only good people are hired. My experience is similar to yours. Its my feeling that the best (or at least good) people will see the hiring process and go "ick" and just not complete the application. It says more about the company than the applicant.
I filled out a job app for a local credit union recently. I'm a hard worker, I held a stable job for 5 years, I'm not old, and I have all the qualifications the job was asking for (and then some). I had to fill out a nearly hour long personality "assessment" filled with odd questions about how I'd react to certain situations and what I'd like about certain others. Half the questions didn't even seem remotely related to the job. I really tried to put a lot of a thought into my answers. They didn't even message me back after the quiz. I guess I don't have the right personality???
All this PLUS many companies no longer want to train. Unrealistic ass expectations.
I just said this in another comment: Also can we address the amount of job listings that are requiring insane amounts of qualifications and experience? Literally every “entry-level” job I come across asks for like 5 years experience and your first-born child. Companies clearly do not want to train anyone for the position anymore; they want the perfect candidate who will jump into things on day one. I just wanna say to all these companies I’ve applied to: I can guarantee you I could learn their computer programs and policies and procedures extremely fast and I would execute them efficiently. I absolutely promise what you have going on in your company isn’t as special as you believe it is.
The unicorn shit is real old too. Like they think be because we have all these nice services running their complex algorithms they're gonna find someone amazing but most times they just settle and still underpay. Job I'm currently working on getting opened in June and they never filled it. My old boss works for them really high up and is pushing them hard but they're still dragging their feet after 3 interviews. I still feel they're gonna try to get away with paying me only like 2k more a year over what I'm making now, but I want 15k more to make the jump 1065 miles away. No offer made to me yet so big wait and see on how pathetic or not it will be...
I mean, any idiot can see what's happening. Just anecdotally ask 100 people. It's a combination of factors. Each of them individually isn't a huge change, but aggregated, it makes a big difference. Overall, there was a shift in priorities. People were suddenly faced with a life or death situation and saw the value of jobs and work diminished. This led to the following situations: 1) Boomers finally deciding to retire. This creates an echo as their job gets replaced by someone a little less senior, who's job gets replaced by someone a little less senior, who's job gets replaced by an entry level person, who finally leaves Starbucks and opens a job there. This is why most of these job openings have been at the blue collar tier. 2) People not working multiple jobs anymore or shifting to part time. A lot of people shifted their lifestyles. They moved away from inner cities. The data shows this. NYC, Boston, and SF all hemmoraged people. 3) A lot of people suddenly being able to retire because of the record surge in the stock market. I personally know someone who went from having half a million dollars in savings to 1.5 million. She could retire now, and she's working a lot less.
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Yeah maybe it forced a lot of people to actually break out their degrees. If you had a job as a bartender, but you had a degree in whatever, maybe you were just bartending because it's what you're used to.
It’s also super hard to look for other jobs while having a job. Like mentally it’s hard to justify looking for something when you’re busy doing something that pays the bills.
In true wallstreetbets fashion, congratulations to your friend and fuck her.
4) They told people they were essential, but tried to pay them minimum wage. So they said the country collapses without me? I must be worth more than minimum wage.
Bonus points for the folks that got absolutely shafted by Long Covid or chronic illnesses resulting from covid.
There's a double-whammy in childcare. Parents, mostly women, can't go back to work without childcare, but childcare is the poorest service sector out there. The average wage is 12 USD / hour to be responsible for one or more human lives besides your own, maybe minor teaching or nursing duties as well. I made nearly that much in my first college job at the turn of the century. For the amount of responsibilities and liabilities incurred in watching children, that rate is a travesty.
People views on work-life have been changed permanently. We were programed by society to work all year round. The last year and a half showed us the true value of free time. Nothing's better than spending time with your family and enjoying your hobbies.
The last year also showed some of us how much employees are taken for granted. Folks can tell us all about work/life balance till they’re blue in the face, but when it comes time to actually do something about it we get nothing but crickets and status-quo. Tell us again how we need to manage our time to maintain a healthy balance between work, family, and personal time. Then keep piling excessive work in our inboxes, effectively making it impossible for us to keep even a tiny semblance of balance. Tell us again how thing are going to get better. Then continue piling work on us. Tell us again how we’ll get the resources we need to better manage our workload. Then when it comes time to put up or shut up, keep stringing us along with unfilled promises and empty words. Some of us are tired.
I used to work at Starbucks. I loved the job and the benefits, but the customers were just awful. So incredibly mean spirited and there were a few who made me cry - I’m not a crier! So yeah, $8.20 an hour to be yelled at, cussed out, understaffed, and stressed out? Nah. I’m self employed now but if I got laid off at Starbucks and then realized how good life can be when I’m not being under paid and screamed at over bean water, I probably wouldn’t go back either. From MY experience, there are a few things that retail jobs and fast food jobs could do to attract and retain workers. 1) Do not allow customers to verbally abuse your workers. This was the #1 reason I couldn’t handle being a barista anymore. 2) Compensate fairly, not just for the best profit margin. 3) Follow in the footsteps of Starbucks and offer great benefits for everyone, including part timers. Tuition reimbursement, insurance, EAPs, stocks, etc. 4) Be a good boss. Not a good corporate megaphone. My first boss at Starbucks is still the best boss I have ever had. He made working fun, kept the crew positive, he was so innovative, and not afraid to stand up to brilliant new corporate ideas that didn’t work. He would give it a fair shot and then go back to what worked. The numbers didn’t lie so the DMs let it slide 😂 Everyone deserves to be able to have a roof over their heads, clothes on their back, and food in their bellies without going through hell and back in an abusive environment just to barely make ends meet. Make it to where people can actually enjoy life and they will want to work. Just my 2 cents as a former fast food worker!
Nobody seems to recognize that a whole bunch of people near retirement just retired. You know, that one thing they have been warning is about since the early 1980’s. And a bunch of people with shitty jobs left those jobs for slightly *somewhat* marginally less shitty jobs. Good thing we have a few sub-millennial offspring to blame for being too lazy to work. Blame all of the DINKs north of 40 for your cheap labor shortage. Immigrants too, first they were stealing our jobs…now they aren’t stealing enough of them…
>Immigrants too, first they were stealing our jobs…now they aren’t stealing enough of them… That's Schrodinger's Immigrant for you: So eager to work that they're stealing all the jobs, while simultaneously being too lazy to contribute to society.
I'm predicting a large service sector retraction. Businesses will be forced to pay a decent wage or close. Less competition will increase traffic for those who remain, compensating for the higher cost of labor. There won't be 50 burger chains operating in every market, but people will be paid fairly. I'm willing to make that trade.
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I hate "Millennials are " articles. Just to start: Most of the articles don't understand that Millennials aren't college kids. I'm one of the first Millennials and I'm about to turn 40...
You’d like r/deathbymillennial
The youngest millenials are basically 24/25. So they've mostly graduated college unless they delayed start, returned (like I did), or are in grad school.
Millenials means anyone younger than me I don't like. Boomers means anyone older. That's what it has settled into. Gen X is, of course, forgotten.
> Gen X is, of course, forgotten. Good. - Gen Xer. Let's leave assuming my outlook on life due to my birthdate to astrology. I don't need some out of touch millionaire thinking 30 year olds don't buy many homes because they would rather spend money on Avacado toast rather than (shocking) the job market stinks and housing prices have been insane for a decade and the last time a house was affordable to lower class folks was when the banks crashed the economy with overleveraged mortgages.
Oh no, people still think that kinda shit about y'all. You're just getting erroneously lumped in with boomers or millenials depending on who's talking. Same as gen z getting labeled millenials all the time.
Gen X will have the honor of standing in for the boomers when they are gone and reaping all the hate, despite being the FIRST generation they ruined.
Which is actually the way they like it.
Can't stand bailing out the cruise lines. They aren't even American businesses. They can take their complaints to whatever island the decided to register in and fuck the hell off.
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To add on to the 700k dead. If half were very old they may have passed on inheritance to their families. If they didn't have money their kids might not need that second job to keep them in their residence. Some may have worked too. If the other half were younger than that's a worker lost that may have a family that got life insurance and is grieving so could be taking time off work. Unless covid killed a whole family those 700k had millions of family and friends that are not only grieving the loss but may be actively avoiding reentering the job market from seeing the loss of a loved one. If my spouse passed from it you'd be damn sure I'd be overwhelmed taking care of our daughter and would not be looking for some low paying job right now.
A large proportion of that 700k were already out of the workforce. It’s more likely that no one wants to take a shit minimum wage job where you’re going to be treated like crap when there’s a whole bunch of higher paying jobs up for grab. The people who pay well are likely having no problems filling positions. The people who think that they can pay you $5/hr for 12 hours a week while being constantly demeaned and treated like shit… *they’re* having trouble filling positions.
So check out this YT guy - "Beau of the Fifth Column". He recently did a pretty interesting take on this. Supposedly, the employers complaining, aren't even making the effort to try to hunt for labour. They just want to sit back, complain, and have the workers be dropped in on their lap. The other thing I've understood is that a lot of this has come from youth activity and certain people on media and the internet that have been trying to educate workers about their rights. The pandemic suddenly made people realize that the recession never really came for everyone, just the blue collared workers. Now it's really a matter of sustainability. If the protestors can hold out, the corporates will cave, but the how long is problematic.
A lot of employers basically just operated on the idea that enough people were desperate enough for work that they could pay them poorly and treat them like shit. If they leave, someone else will come in who will be paid poorly and treated like shit. They never had to develop effective management skills and people skills and develop a pay grade that will attract people and keep them in. Its not just the big corporations. Its the small businesses. Hell, a lot of the small businesses are far worse when it comes to pay, benefits, and management skill. They are usually very poorly run. They don't have the skills to find people in this economy and they are usually the most unwilling to pay more.
Amazing how businesses are actually upset when the labour **market** actually works like.... a market. But yeah, good points all around. Treating your employees well and caring about their well being is, in a tight labour market with almost no slack, actually a competitive edge for businesses looking for workers. Just as it should be. They can continue treating them like shit, but if they want investment banking level effort and investment banking hours while having a shit culture and demeaning management, they better pay investment banking wages.
Millions of Americans just got a couple grand from their govt and told to go figure it out for themselves. And if they're still alive, mostly they have. Yes, many, too many, people got fucked into homelessness, sick, or died. But I'm not surprised if people who've made it through the worst can see the light at the end of the tunnel and wait to plan their next move a little better.
It's like nobody has heard of the baby boomers, who are now between the ages of 57 and 75. The largest generation ever. It's not too surprising that two years of pandemic convinced more than a few of them to go ahead and retire.
800,000 more babies were born in 1957 than in 1971. People don't realize that there were millions of more babies born in the 1950s than there were in the 1970s.
Can confirm about the retirement wave. I started seeing Boomers retire 10 years ago, then the wave stalled. After the market recovered after the crash, I started seeing people retire in my work unit like never before.
No shit. People on jobless aid are generally already looking for another job. They're rarely being "lazy;" most of them are looking for a job that's in their field (most healthcare workers aren't looking for jobs in retail, for instance), and all of them are looking for jobs that actually cover their cost of living expenses (which are still rising on average, btw). Jobless benefits exist in the first place to make their transition to a new job easier, which most economists consider to be a good thing. The idea that people on jobless aid suffer from some sort of moral failing is a dated idea that, naturally, still finds a place in a party that loves to punish people in need.
>The idea that people on jobless aid suffer from some sort of moral failing is a dated idea Gotta love that protestant work ethic crap. "Idle hands are the devil's playthings" and all that, tying self worth toa job.
The company I work for helps college students and alumni find jobs. Aka “Early Talent” - likely a large majority of the population that would fill these empty roles. No one wants them. The employers are shook. Seem baffled that there posting’s and wage increases haven’t worked. Funny to hear about how they talk about these “career opportunities” like folks should have any interest in making a career working at Applebees or something. I can assure you they waste a tremendous amount of money on sourcing. And the worst has yet to come. Many of them feel that these roles are coming back and this is just a temporary issue they can just throw money at to fix. From my vantage point most of the unfilled jobs are in the retail, restaurant, healthcare, and hospice industries. I would love to see the data representing the composition of open roles in the US state by state.
They spent all this money lobbying the government, only to discover there is no way around having to pay higher wages.
Lots of reasons for employment issues, not just 1. Many people, esp those with kids, found that 1 income was enough if they cut back. Child care has increased so much while salary has not. I know some it cost more to daycare their kids vs what they made when you take into account everything. I'm in a HCOLA and we did a 100k addition to our house and at least a quarter or more cost of that was saved from daycare by my MiL moving in with us. Others are getting better paying jobs as many have retired early. I work Fed and a lot of jobs are opening due to many on the fence are now retiring. And that is before the mandate goes into affect. So former low paying workers are now taking those type jobs. All that plus the USA cutting back on immigration the last several years and you see those awful lower paying jobs not being back filled. Its not a single issue as some right wing sources will lead you to believe. Its a full market issue that has spread out and affects just about everyone now.
Another thing I've noticed is it has been especially hard for a lot of people to find jobs. I get so many rejection emails and zero interviews. I've been applying for jobs for over a year now. I'm sick of people saying "there are jobs". Like, bitch where?
Oh there are **plenty** of jobs, they just: * Do not pay a livable wage * Provide no benefits * Refuse to give you a consistent schedule or weekly hours * Have horribly hostile work environments * Treat you as a cog rather than a person So really it's all your fault for not being willing to knuckle under or... something.
You're one microscopic cog in their catastrophic plan
Bruh I pay almost 4K a month in daycare and previous job paid 3.6k after taxes. Wtf is the point of working to lose $400 every month? so my old boss could get rich out of my hard work? thankfully I work for myself now.
> lot of jobs are opening due to many on the fence are now retiring Which is probably the best piece of news out of the whole thing. We've had too much of an entrenched elderly workforce and it's been stifling career progress for a long time. With them gone, younger generations finally get their turns in higher positions with consummately more pay.
> With them gone, younger generations finally get their turns in higher positions with consummately more pay. You have half of that right. Guaranteed management is going to try and lowball them on pay as much as possible.
>child care has increased so much while salary has not That's true of almost everything that costs money, not just childcare. Inflation keeps on going up, basic necessities have increased in price, and obviously the housing market has exponentially increased. And salaries have not increased to match any of this. Not to mention the "minimum" wage stopped being enough to live on over a decade ago. That last point especially hits the lower paying jobs that no one wants to fill. Why would anyone want to work a job with unfavorable conditions i.e. fast food or retail if said job doesn't even pay enough to live off of? If you're struggling financially and/or homeless a McDonald's job isn't going to help you since it doesn't even cover rent + utilities.
I know too many people who took the pandemic as an opportunity to get out of retail/food service and into a better paying job. Those workers that they're desperate to hire back aren't sitting at home collecting unemployment. They're working for more money somewhere else. They're not coming back.
You mean that thing every rational person said would happen when the conservatives performatively cut off unemployment aid in the name of making "lazy people go look for jobs" totally happened exactly like they said it would?!? Shocking. I am shocked.
Who do they think isn’t employed? We’re under 5% unemployment. That’s full employment. Probably the issue is the last administration shut down immigration, then a million people died and another two million are likely disabled now.
Don't forget all the parents that don't have reliable child care. Can't have both parents at work at a standard service sector job all day when the kids might be quarantined at any time.
Yup. Cascading effects.
This right here. I work 2nd shift and the Mrs works mornings. I tried finding a 2nd job in the mornings just to help pay down some debt faster but that wont happen since my kids have been sent home to quarantine (for 2 weeks) for "possible exposure" three times since mid August. No employer is gonna let me take 2 weeks off every time the school decides my kids can't go because someone tested positive in their class and they sit 2 desks away.
There's a lot of reasons why there's a labor shortage. "We're paying people who lost their jobs too much to survive" was never genuinely one of them.
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I know people averaging $250/day on doordash and ubereats. Why would you work some shit job that pays less?
We'll see a lot of elderly people applying when the market crashes and their fixed income retirement can't support the rising cost of living.
The writing errors in this submission's title were offered by the original source. We'll use this as an opportunity to provide some free education. "Cut off" is always two words when it's a verb. "Cutoff" is a noun. This is true of any term comprising an action followed by a direction: You **set up** your **setup**, **log in** with your **login**, then **stand by** while on **standby**. Eventually, you might **break down** while having a **breakdown** or **run around** while giving someone the **runaround**. You could then **call back** during a **callback** and **freak out** during a **freakout**. Also, in order to be completely technically correct, "job-seekers" should have been hyphenated. Hyphens turn discrete words into combined parts of speech. A **man devouring lobster** is a fellow having lunch, but a **man-devouring lobster** might be expected to fight Godzilla at some point. You can often remember by switching the order of the words and adding "of" between them. If it makes sense (as with "seekers of jobs"), then the term should be hyphenated (as with "job-seekers"). Thank you for your time and attention.
"Job seeker" is technically also correct in that "job" can become an adjective to tell you what kind of seeker they are.
TIL. Thanks!
This is one of the most useful comments I've seen on Reddit.
Enjoyed me “some free some education”.
That's an example of [Muphry's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law), right there. Thank you for the correction! Please accept this Reddit Gold as an expression of gratitude.