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Why are American workers becoming harder to find?

• dazaidesu 5y ago
  maybe they should try paying more
  • jomohke 5y ago
    Many, many are. There’s still a notable squeeze, though: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/05/from-the-comments-on-restaurant-labor.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/05/fr...
    • pmoriarty 5y ago
      "We start our back of the house cooks at $17 hour and up. For full time employees we also offer health insurance." That's clearly not enough, especially during a pandemic before there was a vaccine. "For those of you who think you can just pay more and raise prices by a nickel, you are out of touch. As a point of reference, in 2020 the minimum wage increased from $12 hour to $13.50. The increase in costs to my business based on 2019 hours was over $65,000 which is most of my profit. Then covid hit." If the only way some businesses are going to stay afloat is by paying low wages then maybe they shouldn't be in business.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        Although I agree with this, I'd point out that the final line has significant implications for American life in general. The entire restaurant business is fundamentally predicated on paying most of its workers below-living wage rates. If restaurants paid its workers reasonable rates, the cost of eating out would rise (not by the same amount as wages, but a significant proportion thereof). This would have dramatic impact on the frequency and social breadth of dining out. I'm not arguing that this is good or bad, just pointing out that it's about a bit more than just some specific businesses.
        • XorNot 5y ago
          Given the type of food restaurants make (oil and sugar rich - it's why restaurant food "tastes better") this would probably be one of the bigger improvements in middle class health.
          • prawn 5y ago
            Wouldn't the chain restaurants be best positioned to survive a squeeze like this? They have efficiencies of scale with administration, training, marketing, etc. With the mid-range restaurants pushed out (rent up, wages up, etc), more people would head to chain restaurants and eat increasingly poor quality food?
            • deleted 5y ago
              [deleted]
          • babesh 5y ago
            Nope. The cheapest restaurants will still exist but they will charge $10-15 or more. The exceptions will be hot dog stands and McDonalds, with the McDonalds sporting a long line. Regular people will be forced to cook most days of the week. That doesn’t mean that they will cook healthy food though.
            • XorNot 5y ago
              While it's certainly possible to cook unhealthily for yourself, it's a lot harder to do - making huge amounts of butter and sugar work in a food is actually pretty difficult - but more importantly, you have to actually be adding it yourself. Raw ingredients generally don't start out that way.
            • yourapostasy 5y ago
              > Regular people will be forced to cook most days of the week. That doesn’t mean that they will cook healthy food though. When I was a ramen-level college kid literally budgeting at the penny granularity with a back of house job that started out just a dime above minimum wage, the way I got out of that trap was once-a-week cooking, with as many meal components at once-a-month scale my freezer space allowed, even purchasing at retail (though with an eye towards periodic specials). It saved me a ton of time, I ate far healthier than many contemporaries, and I put the time to use in two ways. First, it turns out when cooking at volume, there was a lot of repetitive wait periods I didn't get when cooking one meal at a time. I studied more while cooking at even these modest volumes than I did cooking on-demand. Second, with microwave-zapped meals I skipped all the lines and waiting at the food court/cafeteria options everyone else used; more time studying. I was exhausted running on the low-wage treadmill during the weekdays, so I really appreciated time shifting the meal prep effort away from those weekdays I was so tired from studying and working, to the weekends when I could recover better. Because the meal prep was only the most intense on the one weekend a month I had to prep what I could fit for the next month into the freezer, the other weekends' meal preps were not as intense. The studying paid off in a much better job in less than a year (it was do-or-die for only about 10 months), and it was a ratcheting compounding effect from then onwards. If I didn't have to set aside that time to study, I could have carried on that way for years (though age and how US personal finance and healthcare is structured would have caught up eventually and made that a very punishing choice). I voluntarily chose very repetitive menus because I didn't want to spend the time to figure out more options, and I'm fortunately wired such that I can tolerate that way more than most. After the Internet's Younger Dryas era ended and we got our deluge of content, it became far easier to assemble menus, shopping lists, and prep plans cooking OAW/OAM when I kept meal prepping to save time instead of financially survive. Not glamorous, not "one weird trick", but accessible to anyone even at brutal retail pricing levels on low-wage incomes. Another possible way out for regular people that I have been wondering about ever since is communal cooking. There are people who do this in the meal prep communities, but I'm wondering if more automated online-assisted coordination is possible. It takes organizing and time together, mostly empty freezers and refrigerators, possibly getting some freezer containers, but that and a non-profit filing as a food-related business is all that is necessary to start with a couple neighbors. With that you can go into a restaurant supply store and purchase many raw ingredients for way cheaper than even Costco. Once-a-week and once-a-month weekend cooking between several home kitchens splitting up the work, yields refrigerated and frozen prepared ready, nutritious, wholesome meals. Depending upon what you prepare, you can hit $N USD per meal per person with what you would normally pay 2-5X at a restaurant. The big savings come not from the ingredients though that is welcome, but from time and monetized time. Bring down the per-meal time to even just near the time it takes you to earn sufficient money for the eat out/take out/order in/subscribe alternatives, and it becomes quite attractive for certain personality types. If you hate to cook less than you hate to lose money, then at least it packs all the misery in one compact chunk of time to get it over with as quickly as possible. Get enough people coordinating (about 100 is sufficient), and you can access distributor-scale savings, or go straight to producers for some ingredients. Raw food ingredients in the developed world is ridiculously cheap once you cut out the many transactional layers, and if you're willing to absorb the labor cost/time by turning it into a social activity, then it is a non-trivial cost savings for lower wage income stratas. But it takes sufficient time and willingness to plan ahead and organize. It doesn't need much at first, but the hurdle is real. With an income much higher than median letting me access the bulk quantities at the restaurant supply store and the space and equipment to freeze/store them, I found my time savings still quite significant compared to preparing at retail quantities and times, even though the cost savings as a percentage of income while appreciated were a small fraction of what I would enjoy at a lower income level. This can scale up in complexity as much as the community desires and has the labor/resources for. Gather enough neighbors to go in together on a very plain building that only contains an airtight door, with Lstiburek-type walls using plain Styrofoam insulation, 4 meters thick (even the floor and ceiling), treated with the AeroBarrier system to make extremely airtight, up on concrete piers. Stick a big enough heat pump on it, and you get a walk-in freezer that can serve as large a community as you want that is better than most walk-in offerings on the market (most leak like a sieve by comparison through thinner insulation, modular DIY adding insulation isn't possible, and no one offers such thick insulation), and you can really start to toy with buffering price fluctuations of freezable commodities. I'd love to find out someone has built a site that walks someone from those baby steps of my ramen student days, all the way through to entire neighborhoods doing massive communal meal preps with communal industrial freezers they use for much longer times between meal preps.
      • gruez 5y ago
        >If the only way some businesses are going to stay afloat is by paying low wages then maybe they shouldn't be in business. I'm sure that letting them stay unemployed and drawing even more government assistance is a net benefit to society.
  • chitowneats 5y ago
    Sure, unless it turns out automation is cheaper. Be careful what you wish for.
    • pessimizer 5y ago
      If automation is cheaper, things should be automated. It's not, though.
      • chitowneats 5y ago
        I agree, they should. Labor market shortages due to short term government incentives are going to lead to long term capital investments that automate manufacturing and service work happening sooner rather than later. That was going to happen in a decade or two regardless. But if there's been one common thread in the insane policies of the last year, it's accelerationism. People will be caught in between without the skills to navigate it.
        • pessimizer 5y ago
          Then government should protect them, instead of preserving jobs that left them working nearly full-time and receiving transfer payments. Transfer payments going to full-time workers are simply subsidies to their employers.
          • chitowneats 5y ago
            For how long? I'm talking about people in their 30's who don't realize that there is never going to be a job for them again in the industry they were working in back in February 2020. Mass UBI is not going to be the utopia people imagine it to be.
            • pessimizer 5y ago
              If we don't need their work because productivity is so high, then forever. If we do need their work, we should funnel them into the training they need to do it.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• wernercd 5y ago
  Because the government is "feeding the bears". When you get hundreds a week to not work, why is it any wonder that people choose not to work? When you start working at a $10/hour job and lose $20/benefits for being poor because you pass a threshold, is it any wonder people can't get off of government "assistance"? When it makes more financial sense to remain single and get benefits than it does to get married and create a stable family, is it any wonder? The American Government is taxing the successful, rewarding the lazy and acts surprised when it has obvious effects... They are feeding the bears and making them dependent on handouts.
  • pirocks 5y ago
    > rewarding the lazy This comes off as unnecessarily moralistic.
    • mnouquet 5y ago
      But not anyhow less true.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • wernercd 5y ago
      I've made a couple other posts in response to how people seem to ignore the forest for the trees. The benefits for not working is a perverse incentive that stops large numbers of people from working - laziness IS the wrong word... but large numbers of people are still trapped in a system that rewards not working. https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/the-welfare-cliff-how-the-benefit-scale-discourages-work https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/the...
  • digsy 5y ago
    $10 an hour isnt a livable wage in the US. Why would you advocate for people to become paupers?
• panny 5y ago
  Where are all those robots that make us need UBI right about now? A burger flipper bot and a fully automated cashier kiosk seems like something that would prevent McDonald's offering $50 interview payments.
  • throwawayboise 5y ago
    My guess: it's so far turned out to be impossible to build a robot that works and tolerates the humidity and grease of a kitchen, and has an hourly amortized cost of ownership less than what it would cost to pay a human.
    • SerLava 5y ago
      And McDonalds would have to pay for the cost of taking care of the robot
    • XorNot 5y ago
      Industrial food production has had this problem nailed at scale though. I'm not even sure the technology isn't there - I think there's just not enough people working in the space to find the right design.
      • willcipriano 5y ago
        You have to sell a lot of $1 hamburgers to recoup the costs on your million dollar hamburger assembly machine.
      • Nasrudith 5y ago
        Industrial robots work repetitive tasks for high efficiency but have high capital costs. Fast food beat out automat style resturants for several reasons but one of them was the versatility of human labor. It seems to be a case of "we know how to do it but not do it cheap enough to be worth it".
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • 5y ago
• pirocks 5y ago
  https://outline.com/A8YKRL https://outline.com/A8YKRL
  • dhairya 5y ago
    thanks for posting the a non-paywall version
• Krisjohn 5y ago
  Crap article. The problem is that the maths doesn't work anymore. Wages have been flat for so long that the slight increase in costs, distributed around a person's life, caused by the pandemic pushes McJobs into "working there makes a loss" territory. Every single employer that crawls out from under their rock and howls some version of "nobody wants to work anymore" is saying "I pay crap wages for my crap job, and expected to do so forever". When the boss and all the customers spend every moment of every day taking a dump on you, they should be grateful when the worst that happens is you stop turning up.
  • tolbish 5y ago
    Is this actually true? I remember my grad level engineering classes in which I was the only American. And these weren't tiny grad classes either, at least 10-20 students. Now I'm starting to think all of this is simply the endgame of our education system.
    • bsder 5y ago
      Actually, I would argue that is simply economic rationality. 1) A PhD is generally an economic disaster. For 6+ years you are making less than minimum wage, and only the most technical fields benefit from it economically. Those 6 years put you almost $250K behind someone earning a decent engineering salary--and the working engineer has a 6 year experience record and corresponding professional network. If you have to spend a couple more years as an underpaid Postdoc, you never catch up economically. 2) A quick Master's generally makes good economic sense in a technical field--get it as cheap and fast as you can. It's generally worth a nice salary bump, and it puts you into a slightly different category when layoffs and stuff come around. (Master's degrees often can be considered for "R&D" positions that a Bachelor's is considered unqualified for even with 20+ years of experience--HR rules are stupid.) 3) Advanced degrees in non-technical fields are a HUGE net negative economically. In addition, a non-trivial amount of foreign grad students are sponsored by their government to be there. Colleges love them because they pay full, non-resident prices in cash.
      • b9a2cab5 5y ago
• bsder 5y ago
  How about: "A ton of these low-end businesses use illegal immigrants to depress wages and Covid shut down that pipeline."
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • astrange 5y ago
    The people complaining about immigrants never check on if their facts are actually correct. “Illegal immigrants from Mexico” haven’t been a thing in years - the US has net emigration to Mexico atm. For restaurants I think a lot of it relies on informal family labor, or 2nd generation cooks who are indeed often Latino. Illegal immigrants could actually be a net positive since they’re additional customers and don’t use the services they pay taxes for.
    • bsder 5y ago
      Agribusinesses certainly rely on illegal labor. Look at what happened in Georgia even before Covid. California is no different. Hospitality is often from the illegal labor pool. Sure, Mariott doesn't pay below minimum wage--they just subcontract such that the subcontractor can't possibly be paying minimum wage. Construction work is also quite often from the illegal labor pool. A raid has shut down every worksite I know who had an unannounced one. Shall I go on? > Illegal immigrants could actually be a net positive since they’re additional customers and don’t use the services they pay taxes for. 1) Illegal labor depresses the wage of those not willing to do the work below minimum wage. 2) Payment to illegal labor is generally cash and dodges taxes. Most do not have bank accounts that they could cash a check at anyway.
      • astrange 5y ago
        Yes, I've noticed people say "taxes" when they mean "income taxes", but it's not possible to dodge property and consumption taxes like that. I suppose cutting down on rent by living 6 to an apartment does evade property tax, but that is called efficiency.
• Exmoor 5y ago
  I can't claim I know the answer, but I know what I wish was the reason. I'd like to hope that millions of workers in low-end service jobs, such as food service and retail, saw that their jobs kept their heads above water but gave them little chance of ever progressing and decided to take the opportunity to move on to jobs with more opportunities to learn and advance into something with better long-term benefits.
  • JackFr 5y ago
    Why weren’t they taking those jobs before? In your scenario, who will work in these low skill jobs?
    • samhain 5y ago
      Maybe this is a hot take, but maybe if a job doesn’t make a living wage, then it’s a job that shouldn’t even be offered? If someone can’t make it on a cashier job then the public shouldn’t be afforded the convenience of having a cashier. Same thing with any other service people provide. Maybe minimum wage destroying jobs (if that even actually happens) would be a good thing.
      • djbebs 5y ago
        How would that improve peoples lives? What effect do you think reducing peoples options will have on their lives?
        • tenacious_tuna 5y ago
          [I am not OP] You seem to be thinking that removing these jobs is removing choice from these peoples' lives, when in reality it's the opposite: Having to take those jobs removes the choice from their lives--because, as OP said, those jobs "kept their heads above water but gave them little chance of ever progressing." Where OP suggests "maybe minimum wage destroying jobs ... would be a good thing," this would require the minimum wage to be high enough where people in those jobs would have the ability to exit them if they so desired--they would have the ability to make choices to do something else. Which returns us to your question: if there exists a number of jobs that people would very happily _leave if they could_, but are unable to (either because they can't accord to take a day off to interview elsewhere, or they don't have a car to widen the range where they can look for other jobs, or because they have to accept the healthcare their current job offers even though the pay is way worse / the job itself horrible), these jobs are in effect exploiting people who are trapped in those positions. Those jobs should not continue to exist simply because they offer some measly payment in exchange for portions of a human lifespan. Our system should instead be structured in such a way where people do not have to be exploited to survive. This means leveling the playing field by offering a living wage, and healthcare as a human right, and related activities. Related quote, by Terry Pratchett[0]: > The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. > Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. > A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. > Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. > But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. > This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness. [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-rich-were-so-rich-vimes-reasoned https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r...
• vxjester 5y ago
  It doesn’t that a rocket scientist to figure out what happened. Those that were working in a restaurant, that got closed because of covid. Either claimed unemployment as long as they could. Or found work elsewhere in another field. For example depending on their education could’ve went into manufacturing. Around my area a lot of factories have decent health care and retirement plans. Plus paid vacations. So it could be tempting to someone with a family.
  • edmundsauto 5y ago
    One key factor that is crucial to understanding the current systems: over a number of decades, the American worker's general experience and compensation has been ratcheted down, one bit at a time. Each year brought less pay (adjusted for economic growth), less autonomy. More efficiencies, more consultants. While pay stagnated. Quarantine has given people a chance to decide if that's what they want to do, at the previous wages.
    • DougN7 5y ago
      But don’t they have to eat and pay rent? I keep wondering where all these people that have decided previous jobs aren’t for them are getting by.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • thatfrenchguy 5y ago
        When you loose your job, that tends to give you a jolt that forces you to change your life. When the government gives you money at the same time, you go improve your situation in a way you couldn't before because you didn't have a spare $100.
        • DougN7 5y ago
          I’m not sure I follow? Can you give an example? Do you means people are learning skills and moving up? That doesn’t seem like it could account for all the help wanted signs I see all over.
• neonate 5y ago
  https://archive.is/1Uiak https://archive.is/1Uiak
• version_five 5y ago
  I'm curious (and quite possibly way off base) - how much of the current trends on corporate culture have trickled down to low skill jobs? What I mean is, when I worked at a grocery store 20 years ago, we came and did our work, effectively labor work, and that was it. Do such jobs now involve constant meetings and trainings about whatever hot topic HR is working on, and reading and having to agree to forms, etc? If nothing else, covid must have definitely introduced all sorts of new rituals and instructions that are not related to the job. From personal experience, the hardest part of an office job is putting up with all the conformity and bureaucracy and politics. For a lot of people in lower skill jobs, they may just not be interested in that stuff (also a reason people didn't go to more education). And so if front line service jobs are getting dominated by all the corporate stuff we have to put up with, I can imagine that pushing more people out of the system. Even things as trivial as having to email or fill out a job application online probably exclude many people. Not to mention having to be monitored by an app, etc. Anyway, just a theory, I'm really just curious to know if this could be a factor based on what people's experience is in these kind of jobs.
  • gumby 5y ago
    > Do such jobs now involve constant meetings and trainings about whatever hot topic HR is working on... If you have a manual labor job, the opportunity to be paid to sit down while someone yammers on about something or other and maybe shows a movie is quite welcome.
    • monoideism 5y ago
      Eh, I think that depends on whether that manual job is self employed or working for someone else.
    • randomdata 5y ago
      If there is no work to do, I'd rather go home and watch a movie of my choosing, or anything else I feel like doing. Idle time at work is excruciating.
      • 5y ago
• rgbrenner 5y ago
  This is America.. where employers (small and large like Walmart) schedule workers for part time just so they don't have to provide health insurance. Where low wage workers live paycheck to paycheck, get no time off, and if they get sick they would still be expected to show up for work. Economists cant seem wrap their head around the idea that being a front line worker being exposed directly to sick people during a pandemic seems to be worth more money than when there wasn't a pandemic. Incredible. It's like people--including low wage people--understand there's a pandemic going on. I wonder when economists will catch on.
  • anitil 5y ago
    I have a question about the Walmart thing - is healthcare not pro-rated according to how much you work? Or is this casual work where you get a higher hourly loading to compensate? I'm trying to translate it into the Australian work context, but we don't tie healthcare to employment so I'm a bit confused.
    • Baeocystin 5y ago
      It's an all-or-nothing cutoff wall, so that if an employer schedules someone for 29 hours/week instead of 30, (for example) they don't have to provide anything. And so of course 90%+ of the companies that can short on this, do. It's as awful as you think.
    • pix64 5y ago
      If you're working at Walmart, you don't get healthcare. Not through your employer anyways.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • ianmcgowan 5y ago
        If you're full time you do, which is why Walmart and other big non-union companies strive as much as possible to have a part-time workforce. If you're part of corporate, or management, you're full time.. https://careers.walmart.com/us/jobs/WD597130-senior-software-engineer-full-stack https://careers.walmart.com/us/jobs/WD597130-senior-software... "Beyond competitive pay, you can receive incentive awards for your performance. Other great perks include 401(k) match, stock purchase plan, paid maternity and parental leave, PTO, multiple health plans, and much more."
• h2odragon 5y ago
  Many hourly jobs love to schedule people at seemingly random times, so they'll never know from one week to the next what times they'll have free and can't make commitments outside of work. Very few employers seem interested in hiring "part time" workers with higher priority commitments that may interfere with their desired schedule. This extends to "can't work on $holy_days" and things that have legal backing; hourly employees aren't likely to pursue the theoretical means of redress they have for those incidents. Then add the other layers of suck jobs have now. Instead of being an expert in "what plumbing stuff our store has and where"; a clerk is now expected to meet credit card signup metrics, first, foremost, and only. A retired plumber who wanted to work at the home improvement store has what incentive to put up with this? Serving the community is great but those people have been eliminated as too old and crunchy and too hard for HR to deal with.
  • johnrgrace 5y ago
    Jobs are about more than a wage rate. To have unstable hours that you can't plan for makes some employers look terrible.
    • nerdponx 5y ago
      Those employers don't care. I suspect it's deliberate. If you can't plan your life, you are a slave to work.
      • gruez 5y ago
        > Those employers don't care. I think parent's point is that employees care. Employers probably don't care that they're paying employees minimum wage, but if other places pay higher than that the the employees (who do care) would switch to the other jobs. >I suspect it's deliberate. If you can't plan your life, you are a slave to work. Are you suggesting they're deliberately doing this so "you are a slave to work"? How does the employer benefit from this?
        • grecy 5y ago
• paulpauper 5y ago
  The labor force participation rate will keep falling as America transitions to a post-scarcity economy. This means an increasingly large % of Americans will be able to have their needs met without working, whether it is govt. programs, remitances, inheritances, cohabitation, living with friends or relatives,etc. On Reddit, a lot of young people living with parents longer instead of moving out. Also, assets are appreciating so fast, such as stocks and and real estate, that wealth is able to trickle down making work unecessary for people who know someone who has money. I know people who don't work because their parents have a lot of money and stand to inherit it, ad infinitum. 20% annual returns for the S&P 500 means a lot of people will be able to earn $ doing nothing and that $ will spread out to family and friends. As private sector wealth keeps compounding and exponentiating at a rate that exceeds pop. growth, the probability approaches unity that someone will know someone who has a lot of money and thus does not need to work.
  • rebelos 5y ago
    These are also precisely the kinds of things observed just before either (1) a market correction or (2) substantial inflation. This is not tenable.
    • GPerson 5y ago
      This sounds like a personal hunch. Is there actually an observable pattern here? Can you give a source for this claim?
      • swiley 5y ago
        Everything is more expensive? Labor Housing Gas Food Freaking computer components are more expensive! Those have always gone down.
      • atwebb 5y ago
        As a direct response to the original post, it mentions 20% returns and doesn't seem to treat that as an outlier. That would indicate some serious inflation somewhere.
      • 5y ago
• hooande 5y ago
  I've been thinking about this for a long time. I don't think it's because wages are low or working conditions are bad. Both of those things are about the same as they were in 2019, before the pandemic. If a job at McDonalds was good enough then, why isn't it good enough now? I think it's because people stopped spending as much discretionary money as they did before. People couldn't go out or travel because everything was closed. "Dinner and a movie" turned into "Netflix and a pizza", which is allowed people to save money for a year. Some people are spending that saved money on real estate or crypto. Others, I believe, are giving up part time work that they used to do for extra income. A spouse can afford to quit their part time job and stay home to take care of children. Someone can get by on a stipend that wouldn't have been enough when people were spending more money. If this is true, we should see a rapid return to low wage jobs as the country starts to re-open in the coming months. The federal unemployment increase runs out in September (I believe). If people don't start going work after that then this could be a larger societal shift.
  • danaris 5y ago
    > Both of those things are about the same as they were in 2019, before the pandemic. If a job at McDonalds was good enough then, why isn't it good enough now? Because people have had enough. We saw the way companies treated employees during the pandemic—that is to say, like firewood that they could burn for profit, replacing them as they went through them—and many people are no longer interested in allowing themselves to be exploited for a pittance. It's not a terribly uncommon phenomenon for people to be in a bad situation that seems, or has been treated as, normal for a long time, but when the situation changes temporarily, find that this sort of opens their eyes to how bad it had been all along.
  • imgabe 5y ago
    This is an interesting idea that I haven't seen before. I wonder how many of these jobs that are going unfilled were second or third jobs before. I don't know if there's any way to measure that, but it makes sense. People didn't give up working altogether, they can just get by with one job now because they spend less.
  • Octoth0rpe 5y ago
• sparrc 5y ago
  I've definitely seen a pattern among the companies and businesses complaining about this. They treat their employees terribly. I haven't heard any of these complaints from two of America's largest retailers that are known for providing full-time work with relatively good Healthcare and time off benefits (amazon and costco).
  • Nasrudith 5y ago
    You don't really hear complaints from them because they are actually doing things and even if it was effective it would still waste too much time. You know the old saying about business models, "winners innovate, losers litigate"? Replace innovate with "adapt to supply and demand in all areas" and litigate with "write whinging articles not realizing they are admitting to the world that they suck at their job".
• austincheney 5y ago
  I suspect this differs by geography. Texas never really completely shut down for the pandemic. People where I live remain eager to work. The lower paid service jobs are mostly staffed by young people but people remain eager to work. My wife was just driving through Kentucky and West Virginia to visit some relatives. She is seeing a radically different world there. Job postings and labor shortages are everywhere and most of the people she is visiting are unemployed and don’t do anything.
  • freddie_mercury 5y ago
    According to the BLS current population survey (CPS), the unemployment rate for Texas fell 0.2 percentage points in April 2021 to 6.7%. The state unemployment rate was 0.6 percentage points higher than the national rate for the month. According to the BLS current population survey (CPS), the unemployment rate for Kentucky fell 0.3 percentage points in April 2021 to 4.7%. The state unemployment rate was 1.4 percentage points lower than the national rate for the month. So much for your anecdote. Unemployment in Texas is way higher than in Kentucky.
    • brandmeyer 5y ago
      The workforce participation rate is far lower for KY (56.6%) than TX (62.2%), though.
      • cmendel 5y ago
        That's because of the history of coal mining/factory jobs in KY. When The coal jobs dried up and the factories closed a fair portion of the people who were previously employed dropped out of the labor force and never went back. The other piece is this: Population of Texas in 2020: 29,360,759 Population of Kentucky in 2020: 4,477,251
  • a3n 5y ago
    Anecdata: Driving through Florence SC a couple weeks ago, a McDonalds was advertising $500 hiring bonus. A few days later in either Arkansas or Missouri I was inside a McDonalds offering $200 signing bonus, $100 after 30 days, $100 after another 30 days. Yesterday I was at the Walmart distribution center in Houston (I'm a truck driver) and they had a banner stretched across a street-visible building for starting warehouse wages of $17.50/hour. No idea whether any of those jobs get you more than 29 hours/week. Help wanted signs are everywhere. Metal working. "Labor." Truck stop cashiers. There are signs as well as audio in the truck stops, and they brag about "flexible scheduling." Maybe that means you can schedule around school, or maybe that means "it's slow today, go home." The big three truck stop chains (TA/Petro, Pilot/FlyingJ, Loves/Speedco) used to always be clean and serviced. Recently that's become spotty, all over the country.
• sabalaba 5y ago
  Because you’re not paying them enough? Supply and demand.
  • rayuela 5y ago
    Get outta here with your logic!
• dalbasal 5y ago
  Since labour shortages are economy-wide, not just at the lower end... I think it's almost certainly macro related. In any case, this is a good thing. When unemployment rates are high, the least employable people tend to be unemployed. When unemployment is low, the least attractive jobs are unfilled.
• mr_toad 5y ago
  US unemployment isn’t particularly high though. It’s higher than 2019, but 2019 is literally a low bar in terms of unemployment. Even after the pandemic, which isn’t completely over, the unemployment rate is much lower than it was in 2009.
  • bradleyjg 5y ago
    U5+ is at Jan 2015 levels and U6++ at June 2015 levels. The 25-54 employment rate is where it was in Dec 2014. I agree that the current situation doesn’t need much explanation. Things are not exactly where they were pre-covid but the employment situation seems pretty darn healthy considering the year we just had. + Total Unemployed, Plus Discouraged Workers, Plus All Other Persons Marginally Attached to the Labor Force, as a Percent of the Civilian Labor Force Plus All Persons Marginally Attached to the Labor Force ++ U5 plus Total Employed Part Time for Economic Reasons (i.e. involuntary part time)
• julienb_sea 5y ago
  It is very clear that people are collecting unemployment until it runs out. Sure, this implies an unstable situation and a job will eventually need to be found, but what could possibly be the rush? Summer is here, its beautiful out, if you're making full paycheck on unemployment then WHY would you possibly want to jump into a low end job? Wages will temporarily increase, but once things return to normal and we no longer subsidize unemployment as we presently are, I would assume the glut of job supply will go down. This will likely spur further investment in automation or other ways to reduce business reliance on labor, especially at very large scale.
• bdcravens 5y ago
  In Texas, there's been a lot of gnashing of teeth about the low labor supply, as a talking point against the unemployment bonus (which the state is opting out of). It seems to ones the most effected are places likes restaurants, who often pay the $2.15+tips rate. Then I noticed today that HEB (grocery chain often rated as one of the best in the country) was hiring warehouse workers at $17.50/hour. I suspect they have no issues finding workers.
  • jackson1442 5y ago
    I can attest. I have two friends who were hired on the spot at places that were desperate for workers. One makes $8/hr, the other makes like $10/hr. No breaks, no benefits, no scheduling regularity. The company I work at has no trouble finding employees, but I have a well-paying swe position.
• novok 5y ago
  I think you'll find a good correlation between a lack of child care / in person school and a difficulty in finding people wanting to come to work, which is something I didn't find in a quick search in the article.
• uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 5y ago
  This is propaganda to make jobbed people feel special
• cletus 5y ago
  Fun fact: we have surnames largely as a result of another pandemic, the Black Death in the 14th century. The Black Death killed an estimated 1/3 to 1/2 of the population of Europe at the time (really!) and created a huge labour shortage. Peasants were largely serfs and tied to the lands of their lords. Surnames were an indicator of profession. As a result of the labour shortage, wages went up and workers became more mobile, which created the need for surnames that weren't strictly profession-related. The King even passed a law to try and limit wages with mixed results. This pandemic may well end up being a huge boon for real wages. As many have noted: there is no labour shortage. There's simply an unwillingness to pay what the market demands. Additionally, the last 12-15 months have taught many people that commuting into an office is completely unnecessary and is essentially wage theft since you aren't paid for those 1-2 hours of commuting time. A fallacy of youth I've found is to fall into the trap that things are only getting worse. A benefit of having some more experience and perspective is the realization that things happen in cycles. We had union movement spring up, which were a huge boon for working conditions and real wages. In many cases the pendulum eventually swung too far in the other direction and unions became a tool for political power and an excuse for inefficiencies that paralyzed industries. And then in the last 50+ years in the US we've had the cult of Ayn Rand acolytes take hold and sell people on the idea that they need to be beholden to employers. It's partly (IMHO) why we've largely seen near zero real wage growth in 40 years. My hope is this is a turning point where we'll start to see it's unacceptable to not provide living wages and not to provide basic human rights like affordable health care. This won't be a quick process but the main purveyors of pro-corporate propaganda, the Republican party, is essentially in its death throes. It is a now a minority that can only govern through voter suppression, disenfranchisement and gerrymandering. Here's something I want any defenders of billionaires to consider: if you give people a living wage, what do you think is going to happen? They're going to spend what they earn. This is the fabric of an economy. After all, who does a trillion-dollar market cap company sell to if only 0.01% of the people on Earth have anything to spend?
  • JackFr 5y ago
    If the wage level demanded is higher than the output produced by the worker, the job simply goes away and output is reduced.
• fy20 5y ago
  I've only visited the US twice, so most of what I know about the US low-wage labour market is from here or the media. From my understanding, it's a toxic place for employees and I'd never want to work in it: * No job security - if your boss decides they want to fire you, you are SOL figuring out how to pay this month's rent * No healthcare * No paid time off - not that the standard 2 weeks for higher wage earners is much better * Having to deal with abuse from management and customers with no recourse * Scheduling hours so you effectively have no free time outside work * The legal minimum wage, being expected to be propped up by tips, so you can actually survive * The only incentive to work better is from the fear that what you do have could be taken away at any moment When I was younger I worked a grocery store and it had none of these issues. There were full time employees there who were pretty happy (the wage was low, but you could live a meager life without struggling). Is it really a suprise that it's hard to find employees if you treat then like they are worthless?
• davesque 5y ago
  Easy: because people know they're getting a bad deal.
• solveit 5y ago
  Unpaywalled link: https://outline.com/A8YKRL https://outline.com/A8YKRL
• dnndev 5y ago
  Unemployment benefits right now are paying more than your average unskilled job. You may not want to hear it but many people are using this provision knowing there are jobs out there for when it comes to an end, so guess what they collect unemployment. Once it goes back to pre-pandemic then the issues are still pay sucks, job sucks, no retirement options, no to little healthcare etc... The one thing we have been seeing and will only get worse is the skill gap. Many skills you cannot learn overnight and many people are assuming 'other' jobs will be there for them. Short term govt. checks. Short/Long term skill gap.
• dustractor 5y ago
  Its all these jobs that want you to already own a car when you apply so they don't have to pay you enough to a) live somewhere b) eat food c) keep your phone on d) keep your lights on e) keep your internet connection f) much less g) buy a car
• kennethh 5y ago
  There is never lack of workers, it is only question of pay and benefits. This is not something new, there is a story about how Henry Ford increased the pay of the workers, the 5$ work day so that they could afford to buy their own model T, but the story does not tell that the main reason was that trouble of keeping workers. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-story-of-henry-fords-5-a-day-wages-its-not-what-you-think/?sh=449a1f8d766d https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-stor... At the time, workers could count on about $2.25 per day, for which they worked nine-hour shifts. It was pretty good money in those days, but the toll was too much for many to bear. Ford's turnover rate was very high. In 1913, Ford hired more than 52,000 men to keep a workforce of only 14,000. New workers required a costly break-in period, making matters worse for the company. Also, some men simply walked away from the line to quit and look for a job elsewhere. Then the line stopped and production of cars halted. The increased cost and delayed production kept Ford from selling his cars at the low price he wanted. Drastic measures were necessary if he was to keep up this production.
  • test6554 5y ago
    Yes wages should go up, but the driver of this increase is temporary (global pandemic and fear of it). But once you raise wages, you're kind of stuck there. I think if we can get through this year without going crazy with wage increases we can keep inflation at bay and COVID will go away. So what they're saying is that benefits need to get less and less generous as fear of covid gets lower and lower. The former should follow the latter until those terrible jobs don't looks so bad to some people. And that means some people will land at the bottom rung of the economic ladder and obviously not be happy about it.
    • rapsey 5y ago
      > I think if we can get through this year without going crazy with wage increases we can keep inflation at bay and COVID will go away When cost of everything is going up, you can't keep inflation at bay.
    • imtringued 5y ago
      When you have moderate inflation the economic system rewards ingenuity, productivity and efficiency. People at the bottom rung of the economic ladder will obviously be happy about it because that is all they have. The rich have money and capital that can paper over those three things.
• qiqing 5y ago
  Excerpt from the article: Jobs in health care, recreation and hospitality report the highest level of job openings, relative to employment. Many of these involve plenty of person-to-person contact, making their workers especially vulnerable to infection (a study from California earlier this year found that cooks were most at risk from dying of covid-19). By contrast, in industries where maintaining social distancing or being outside is often easier, labour shortages are less of an issue. The number of job openings per employee in the construction industry is lower today than it was before the pandemic.
  • TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    Those are also the industries that unceremoniously dumped a large portion of their workers a year ago. Many of those workers undoubtedly moved to other industries and now that they have gone to the trouble of switching, they aren't going to switch back without getting a much sweeter deal.
• projectileboy 5y ago
  We have a shortage of workers, just like we have a shortage of people who want to get beaten with sticks, or a shortage of $5 kilos of gold. When large corporations are sitting on enormous piles of cash that they refuse to translate into wages or benefits, the audacity of talking about “worker shortages” is mind boggling.
  • claaams 5y ago
    It's always the lower class' fault. Because the wealthy own the media and write the narrative. Blame their lack of virtue or work ethic while being dishonest and greedy.
• chewz 5y ago
  Libreralism’s creed is that free market will balance itself through price discovery. Except for labour. Just increase wages a lot and there will be no shortage of labour. And if employees cannot afford higher cost of labour they could just drop out of the market.
• rober7 5y ago
  in every country workers are hard to find lately ...
• anitil 5y ago
  In an Australian (really, Sydney) context, I'm seeing a trend that employers are really struggling to fill senior technical roles, but are unwilling to raise pay. It's very strange.
• ncmncm 5y ago
  They must be on those Chinese fishing trawlers that disappear on the way into in Argentine territorial waters.
• coldtea 5y ago
  Two major reasons I can think of: (1) Lack of workers with the required skills (a matter of making such education accessible, possibly at-work, and prioritizing that sector) (2) Pay below what's livable / better options (a matter of increasing pay and making sure certain employees can't just hire illegal immigrants which they pay less by taking advantage of their illegal status and lower expectations)
• Little_John 5y ago
  Simple. It's abuse.
• Little_John 5y ago
  Simple. It's abuse. Food and shelter are hard to get. What would you want to get a shiny car. You sophists. .
• Tempest1981 5y ago
  Since half the kids were doing Zoom-school at home thru May, probably a lot of parents needed to be home to "parent" them. Also, hard to find a job where you can leave at 2 or 3pm to pick up those kids from school. And after-school care isn't cheap ($20-40/day). Tough if your making $10-15/hr.
• nautilus12 5y ago
  Does there need to be anymore proof that UBI doesn't work?
• iso1631 5y ago
  Supply and demand. Companies need to offer more money, perhaps they could cut back on skinny lattes and avacado toast?
• buggythebug 5y ago
  Small Business owner here in the service industry. Why am I on hacker news? I have a lot of friends who work in tech. I don't have time to put my thoughts into organized paragraphs but let me just make some bullet points of random thoughts: 1)Lots of workers in this industry suck as people: You pay them well, you treat them well, and they still back talk you and not follow the rules. Is it their upbringing, failed education system, drugs? Not sure - but this is the end result 2)Stop talking about this problem as if every company is the size of Amazon. Most small businesses in my industry make less than 1 million in sales. 3)People in this industry ARE milking unemployment. I asked the owners of nearby liquor and convenience stores: they cannot keep alcohol and lottery tickets in stock! 4)Especially in smaller towns: anyone with their head on their shoulder is got out of dodge. Before people were born, grew up, lived, worked, and died in their town. More and more so they leave now.
• papito 5y ago
  If you can’t pay a living wage to your employees, you are either a bad business owner or simply don’t have a viable business. You can’t clamor for the ruthless efficiency of Capitalism and then complain that you are its victim.
• thrower123 5y ago
  We've had a perverse incentive in place for fifteen months that encourages people not to work on the bottom end of the scale. Piled on top of all the other perverse incentives that discourage marginal workers from earning extra, unless it is significantly extra.
• unnouinceput 5y ago
  Why? Because the classic "show me the money" still applies.
• Fricken 5y ago
  Many young adults moved back in with their parents during the pandemic. They are far away from the shit jobs they used to have. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-live-with-their-parents-for-the-first-time-since-the-great-depression/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...
• hnbad 5y ago
  The "we'll pay you for an interview" stunt was a great marketing gimmick but it actually acted as an intentional trap: if you turned up for the interview and declined the job, they'd report that you turned down the job offer which may cause you to lose unemployment benefits. In practice it acted as a signing bonus with free publicity, not the "no strings attached interview bonus". You might say this is obvious because TINSTAAFL (or "paid interview" rather than "free lunch") but the target demographic is less likely to be aware of contractual nuances like this.
• afpx 5y ago
  If you've ever tried to get a low-paying job in the US these days, it's very difficult. Many first have to take several tests first to prove they're a "good" Human.
  • foxpurple 5y ago
    My bf applied for at least 100 minimum wage casual jobs a few years ago and didn’t get anything. Now a few years later and 1.5 years of a software development degree finished, he applied for 2 programming jobs and got one. Sure the second part could be luck but the first part has become a statistic. These low wage jobs are absolutely flooded with applicants.
• theknocker 5y ago
  Cool article I can’t read because the economist thinks the year is still 2007 and it’s still special enough to make me jump through hoops to read it’s hallowed words, I mean CNN tier propaganda.
• r00t4ccess 5y ago
  Paywall free version https://financialfreedomandeducation.com/why-are-american-workers-becoming-harder-to-find/ https://financialfreedomandeducation.com/why-are-american-wo...
• audit 5y ago
  I think the answer is simple. Below a certain point in the salary curve -- merit-respecting folks -- are not willing to put up with bullshit managers, bullshit working conditions, bullshit co-workers. Because their health, and lowering stress level -- become higher priority and value, than the money they are making. I would expect this effect being even more pronounced when social safety nets improve. - - - Here is more details of what is happening: If the playing field is not fair, and if judiciary system is tilted -- then there is no capitalism, it is Oligarchy. Oligarchy is not about 'providing value to consumer at lowest possible prices' or 'treating workforce the best' and it is not about 'fairness and merit-based rewards'. Instead, in Oligarchy you can expect 'perception driven' economy. Where well-paid workers, at any level, earn more for perception that they create, compared to the work they do. So in current system in US, being Oligrarchy -- you can expect the loudest mouths, the most obnactios, the most manipulative, the best backstubbers -- get paid more. If the salary is high enough, and social safety nets are working enough -- people choose not to deal to deal with the above evil. If the salary is low, at a certain point in the curve of salaries, -- then people want to avoid the stress, and the health impact dealing with the above described 'assholes'. This is why low wage workers with the citizenship/greencard are harder to find.