41 ms·

> All of this stuff about workers disappearing and people reconsidering their lives is pretty much a sideshow of projected narrative that is detached from what

> All of this stuff about workers disappearing and people reconsidering their lives is pretty much a sideshow of projected narrative that is detached from what is really going on. Well said. We’ve been bombarded with news articles and thought pieces about how COVID has forever changed the workforce, how people are refusing to work jobs they don’t like, how people are quitting en masse because their employers won’t allow remote work, and how companies are abandoning office spaces in favor of full remote for months now. Yet every time I dig for the actual numbers it turns out little has changed on the whole. It’s usually journalists taking isolated stories or small changes in certain statistics and re-casting them as society-wide social movements. Many of these articles are simple clickbait so the reader can think “Duh, pay more!” But it doesn’t make sense that people would choose no job at all over a job that doesn’t pay the wage they want. People are obviously either getting other jobs somewhere, waiting for enhanced unemployment to end, or waiting for other life circumstances to allow them to return to work. And like you said, many of these situations are the result of parents having to leave the workforce to care for children while their schools and daycares were closed down. People without kids may not realize how disruptive that was to families that had planned routines and jobs around kids attending schools and daycares. I suspect we’ll see sharper increases in employment when school is back in session and enhanced unemployment ends this fall. There isn’t some large movement of low-wage people simply refusing to work because without other sources of income. The logic in that narrative just doesn’t make any sense. This problem is temporary while the economy, market, and extended unemployment benefits transition back to normalcy. Journalists are seizing on the narrow window of change to try to insert more dramatic narratives, but those too will fade.

whall6 5y ago
Right. Why would I seek a job if the unemployment benefits pay me nearly as much to do nothing?
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  And the employer perspective: Why would I try to compete with unemployment benefits that are ending in a few months? The situation is temporary and has obviously causal factors that are coming to an end soon (unemployment benefits, school out for summer). Journalists seem to be going out of their way to ignore these and pretend that something else is happening.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    The only shitty thing here is, that many companies will fail and close down in the meantime, meaning less jobs openings for people who just lost unemployment benefits.
    - varjag 5y ago
      If there is still demand for their services, other more successful franchises will step in.
    - alisonkisk 5y ago
      That's the creative destruction of capitalism, eliminating net negative value enterprises.
  - nuker 5y ago
    > with unemployment benefits that are ending in a few months? I don't think so. Zeta variant is coming.
    - eropple 5y ago
      I hadn't heard of this, but the WHO seems to have indicated that this is no longer a variant of interest, let alone a variant of concern.
      - wallacoloo 5y ago
        I believe it was a joke that, as emergency covid policies are extended a couple months as each new variant arises, and since there will be no end of variants for an endemic virus, that means the policies are actually permanent. Or maybe I misunderstood.
        nuker 5y ago
        you got it right
  - 5y ago
- cbozeman 5y ago
  Because you have self-respect and shouldn't be taking handouts if you're capable of working? No one capable of working should be taking unemployment, ever. This is how social safety nets get demonized by politicians, and it works. A factory worker and mother of three who was making car parts from the start of COVID-19 until now and was never laid off and who never had the option of quitting work, fucking hates someone who sits on their ass collecting unemployment playing Xbox games all day. That's the relatively young Hispanic woman who lives down the road from me. I was fortunate; I already work remote so the only thing COVID did for me was restrict my dining choices temporarily here in Texas. The answer to every problem we seem to face in America always ends up being, "Just throw some fucking money at it!" I'm sick of it. Many of our problems couldn't be solved if we had literally quadrillions of dollars of cash. Sometimes - many times - it takes a lot of good old fashioned hard work, in the arenas of careful thinking, and then careful doing. Neither of which it seems either political party is particularly interested.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    I mostly agree with you. However, it may not (always) be that simple. The media here in France reports that some industries, in particular restaurants, are having a hard time finding employees, with not enough people applying and even employees who were there before Covid hit leaving. I don't know how actually true this is, but when they (the media) ask people why they won't go back, the main reason doesn't seem to be a preference for sitting on ass, but rather a realization that given the wages, those jobs were a terrible proposition. They claim instead to be looking at how they can improve their situation, like looking for work in other industries, going back to school, etc. Which I think is a good thing. How many random empty bars does a country really need? Now maybe I'm being too optimistic, but I hope that that's true and that this will at least increase wages for those jobs. But I can't help but think that all this soul-searching is helped by government aid and that, sooner or later, when that runs out, the people will have to get back to those jobs and then, whatever rise there might have been, will be swept away.
    - secondcoming 5y ago
      > The media here in France reports that some industries, in particular restaurants, are having a hard time finding employees It's the same in the UK. Farmers cannot harvest some crops because the cheap EU labour is no longer present and locals won't do it.
- jonathanlb 5y ago
  It might be important to distiguish doing "nothing" from not being on the job market. It's possible to contribute to society by making art, writing, cooking, spending time with family, caring for others, etc. as well as self-actualizing via exercise, reading, meditation, and so on.
  - varjag 5y ago
    Meditation is very much doing nothing.
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      Not at all.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Not sure how self-actualizing is contributing to society.
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      "Self-actualization is the complete realization of one's potential, and the full development of one's abilities and appreciation for life" From most classical philosophers, to Einstein, Maxwell, Darwin and countless other, their work was nothing else than an act of self-actualization. And because this is HN, shall I include Torvalds? The FLOSS movement started from volunteers.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        I appreciate my life. I don't see how that contributes to society.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    self-actualizing doean't pay bills.
- dazc 5y ago
  One of the UK employers currently moaning about a lack of workers had a policy of only employing people for 16 hours a week since this was the optimum hours a person could work whilst still receiving tax credits and housing benefit. Around 10 years ago I was in the labour market willing to do pretty much anything and these kinds of jobs accounted for most of what was available. Since I wasn't 'on benefits' I was at the other end of the equation. What I really wanted was a chance to work my way out of financial trouble - these kind of jobs only offered the opposite of this.
  - gwright 5y ago
    This is a great example of perversive incentives driven by ill-conceived benefit rules.
  - f0xytr0xy 5y ago
    In some states in the USA a lot of service jobs will cap your work at 31 hours, to get around their own corporate policies of giving benefits to anyone who worked 32 hours or more.
    - adaml_623 5y ago
      And any company that has done this might see it coming back and biting them even though they would never admit that they brought it on themselves
      - f0xytr0xy 5y ago
        Probably not. USA is a capitalist-first, worker-5th nation.
        f0xytr0xy 5y ago
        Capitalists are so fragile and insecure.
heurisko 5y ago
One of the stories I often hear, is that people have decided to move house to the countryside, as they are now able to work remotely. I don't know how true this is: are these people not concerned if their employer decides to reopen offices and require employees to work in the office again when the pandemic inevitably ends?
- nicoburns 5y ago
  I imagine a lit of these people have gotten permission and made arrangements with their employers in advance.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    That being said, this is not necessarily easy even for large employers, because until now there wasn't a need to clarify if workers were subject to the income, payroll etc. taxes and employee protection, health insurance contracts of their working or resident state. It is totally possible to be a large Fortune 500 company in the US and not be set up to do paperwork in, I don't know, Alaska or Wyoming or Idaho.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      I guess that's an issue if you move states. I'm in the UK, and I know someone who moved 8 hours away to a different part of the UK. Would never have even been considered pre-covid, but the evidence that they could work productively from home was there: they'd been doing it for a year already! They're a manager too, so regular collaboration is a given. It's just all online now.
      - bobthepanda 5y ago
        Keep in mind that 11 US states by themselves are larger than the entirety of the UK; Oregon, for example. I don't know if tax is assessed differently for say Scottish rather than English residents, and 32 US states are larger than England. This is going to be an issue if you move anywhere within a country with a federal system of government. For EU residents I imagine this also gets tricky for people who decide to WFH from other countries.
Closi 5y ago
Also, when I hear about people struggling to recruit, it’s often minimum wage jobs on awful conditions. People don’t want to work for absolute minimum wage on a temporary contract picking fruit? Colour me surprised!
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  IDK about everywhere but I'm not seeing anyone still paying minimum wage. McDonalds is paying $12.50/hr for day, $15/hr for night work. That's $30k/year FTE for a job that you can learn in a week and that requires zero prior experience or education. And they are still begging.
  - mjevans 5y ago
    Bad bosses, unstable schedules / hours, not a career. Probably doesn't have "benefits", which everyone should have for a level playing field (so medicare for all, get value for our taxes). Also, have you seen inflation lately?
  - scolby33 5y ago
    Just this week in Pittsburgh, I saw an official corporate poster up in a McDonald's advertising a "competitive starting wage" with an 8.5″x11″ sheet taped to it reading "STARTING RATE UP TO 10$/HR." I doubt they'll have much luck at ≤$10/hour. Sure, it's more than the minimum ($7.25/hour), but the "up to" weasel words don't give me confidence.
    - syshum 5y ago
      "McDonald's" is a bit of a mixed bag, like most of the Fast Food Places. McDonald's owned stores are paying a minimum of $13 with the plan to go to $15 in the next few years, this was announced awhile back The problem is McDonald's Corporate only owns 5% of McDonald's locations, the rest are franchise locations, thus a "McDonald's" crew member at a non-company store is not working for McDonald's but the Franchisee.. This is where you get the lower wages.. This allows McDonald's to get headlines about offering a "$15 min wage" while 95% of wearing an McDonald's uniform do not work for McDonald's thus do not get this wage
UnpossibleJim 5y ago
I can't speak to statistics at large, but anecdotally, my wife was laid off and we needed someone with our son during "home schooling" anyway, so she just continued on to get her degree since many universities have an online option at the moment (which should continue and expand). With the variant, we have this same option next year, though no unemployment and we'll just be a single income while she finishes up her last half year or so. In our case, it wasn't the "refusing to go back to work to make a better life" narrative that's getting pushed; it's more the, she had to stay home with our son while he's in school, but what does she do while he's in school all day? You only have to be sort of involved. You might as well be productive, but you have trouble being productive enough to really work.
morpheos137 5y ago
I wonder how significant the booming stock market is? Maybe people are neglecting to work because their Tesla stock is up some absurd amount over 5 years or whatever. Same for crypto. But when these people start treating such capital gains as disposeable income then it will cause inflation.
WalterBright 5y ago
> companies are abandoning office spaces in favor of full remote for months now On the other hand, traffic during rush hour seems to have returned to as bad as it ever was.
- mjevans 5y ago
  All those new and used cars are now PPE bubbles and added freedom for people that previously took the bus or carpooled. If they make work at the office mandatory now we're going to see even worse than pre-pandemic commutes.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  I think hn has a little bit of forgetful bias that their industry has probably the most amenable situation for remote work.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- RobertKerans 5y ago
  [UK specifically] not seems, it has gone back to normal (as in pre-pandemic).
willyt 5y ago
I walked down through the financial district of London on a Tuesday morning recently and I did not see one single office worker sat at a desk in any office I passed. Just empty buildings with lights on and bored receptionists sat at front desks.
mylons 5y ago
I’m willing to bet a lot of money school is not in session this fall in many parts of the USA.
schwartzworld 5y ago
> doesn’t make sense that people would choose no job at all over a job that doesn’t pay the wage they want. I don't agree. The pandemic is still very much happening and low-paid workers are expected to be on the front lines. If this had all happened when I was working retail, I probably would have made the decision to not go to work and catch covid while making 8/hr.

whall6 5y ago

Right. Why would I seek a job if the unemployment benefits pay me nearly as much to do nothing?

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
And the employer perspective: Why would I try to compete with unemployment benefits that are ending in a few months? The situation is temporary and has obviously causal factors that are coming to an end soon (unemployment benefits, school out for summer). Journalists seem to be going out of their way to ignore these and pretend that something else is happening.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  The only shitty thing here is, that many companies will fail and close down in the meantime, meaning less jobs openings for people who just lost unemployment benefits.
  - varjag 5y ago
    If there is still demand for their services, other more successful franchises will step in.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    That's the creative destruction of capitalism, eliminating net negative value enterprises.
- nuker 5y ago
  > with unemployment benefits that are ending in a few months? I don't think so. Zeta variant is coming.
  - eropple 5y ago
    I hadn't heard of this, but the WHO seems to have indicated that this is no longer a variant of interest, let alone a variant of concern.
    - wallacoloo 5y ago
      I believe it was a joke that, as emergency covid policies are extended a couple months as each new variant arises, and since there will be no end of variants for an endemic virus, that means the policies are actually permanent. Or maybe I misunderstood.
      - nuker 5y ago
        you got it right
- 5y ago
cbozeman 5y ago
Because you have self-respect and shouldn't be taking handouts if you're capable of working? No one capable of working should be taking unemployment, ever. This is how social safety nets get demonized by politicians, and it works. A factory worker and mother of three who was making car parts from the start of COVID-19 until now and was never laid off and who never had the option of quitting work, fucking hates someone who sits on their ass collecting unemployment playing Xbox games all day. That's the relatively young Hispanic woman who lives down the road from me. I was fortunate; I already work remote so the only thing COVID did for me was restrict my dining choices temporarily here in Texas. The answer to every problem we seem to face in America always ends up being, "Just throw some fucking money at it!" I'm sick of it. Many of our problems couldn't be solved if we had literally quadrillions of dollars of cash. Sometimes - many times - it takes a lot of good old fashioned hard work, in the arenas of careful thinking, and then careful doing. Neither of which it seems either political party is particularly interested.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  I mostly agree with you. However, it may not (always) be that simple. The media here in France reports that some industries, in particular restaurants, are having a hard time finding employees, with not enough people applying and even employees who were there before Covid hit leaving. I don't know how actually true this is, but when they (the media) ask people why they won't go back, the main reason doesn't seem to be a preference for sitting on ass, but rather a realization that given the wages, those jobs were a terrible proposition. They claim instead to be looking at how they can improve their situation, like looking for work in other industries, going back to school, etc. Which I think is a good thing. How many random empty bars does a country really need? Now maybe I'm being too optimistic, but I hope that that's true and that this will at least increase wages for those jobs. But I can't help but think that all this soul-searching is helped by government aid and that, sooner or later, when that runs out, the people will have to get back to those jobs and then, whatever rise there might have been, will be swept away.
  - secondcoming 5y ago
    > The media here in France reports that some industries, in particular restaurants, are having a hard time finding employees It's the same in the UK. Farmers cannot harvest some crops because the cheap EU labour is no longer present and locals won't do it.
jonathanlb 5y ago
It might be important to distiguish doing "nothing" from not being on the job market. It's possible to contribute to society by making art, writing, cooking, spending time with family, caring for others, etc. as well as self-actualizing via exercise, reading, meditation, and so on.
- varjag 5y ago
  Meditation is very much doing nothing.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    Not at all.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Not sure how self-actualizing is contributing to society.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    "Self-actualization is the complete realization of one's potential, and the full development of one's abilities and appreciation for life" From most classical philosophers, to Einstein, Maxwell, Darwin and countless other, their work was nothing else than an act of self-actualization. And because this is HN, shall I include Torvalds? The FLOSS movement started from volunteers.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      I appreciate my life. I don't see how that contributes to society.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  self-actualizing doean't pay bills.
dazc 5y ago
One of the UK employers currently moaning about a lack of workers had a policy of only employing people for 16 hours a week since this was the optimum hours a person could work whilst still receiving tax credits and housing benefit. Around 10 years ago I was in the labour market willing to do pretty much anything and these kinds of jobs accounted for most of what was available. Since I wasn't 'on benefits' I was at the other end of the equation. What I really wanted was a chance to work my way out of financial trouble - these kind of jobs only offered the opposite of this.
- gwright 5y ago
  This is a great example of perversive incentives driven by ill-conceived benefit rules.
- f0xytr0xy 5y ago
  In some states in the USA a lot of service jobs will cap your work at 31 hours, to get around their own corporate policies of giving benefits to anyone who worked 32 hours or more.
  - adaml_623 5y ago
    And any company that has done this might see it coming back and biting them even though they would never admit that they brought it on themselves
    - f0xytr0xy 5y ago
      Probably not. USA is a capitalist-first, worker-5th nation.
      - f0xytr0xy 5y ago
        Capitalists are so fragile and insecure.

heurisko 5y ago

One of the stories I often hear, is that people have decided to move house to the countryside, as they are now able to work remotely. I don't know how true this is: are these people not concerned if their employer decides to reopen offices and require employees to work in the office again when the pandemic inevitably ends?

nicoburns 5y ago
I imagine a lit of these people have gotten permission and made arrangements with their employers in advance.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  That being said, this is not necessarily easy even for large employers, because until now there wasn't a need to clarify if workers were subject to the income, payroll etc. taxes and employee protection, health insurance contracts of their working or resident state. It is totally possible to be a large Fortune 500 company in the US and not be set up to do paperwork in, I don't know, Alaska or Wyoming or Idaho.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    I guess that's an issue if you move states. I'm in the UK, and I know someone who moved 8 hours away to a different part of the UK. Would never have even been considered pre-covid, but the evidence that they could work productively from home was there: they'd been doing it for a year already! They're a manager too, so regular collaboration is a given. It's just all online now.
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      Keep in mind that 11 US states by themselves are larger than the entirety of the UK; Oregon, for example. I don't know if tax is assessed differently for say Scottish rather than English residents, and 32 US states are larger than England. This is going to be an issue if you move anywhere within a country with a federal system of government. For EU residents I imagine this also gets tricky for people who decide to WFH from other countries.

Closi 5y ago

Also, when I hear about people struggling to recruit, it’s often minimum wage jobs on awful conditions. People don’t want to work for absolute minimum wage on a temporary contract picking fruit? Colour me surprised!

throwawayboise 5y ago
IDK about everywhere but I'm not seeing anyone still paying minimum wage. McDonalds is paying $12.50/hr for day, $15/hr for night work. That's $30k/year FTE for a job that you can learn in a week and that requires zero prior experience or education. And they are still begging.
- mjevans 5y ago
  Bad bosses, unstable schedules / hours, not a career. Probably doesn't have "benefits", which everyone should have for a level playing field (so medicare for all, get value for our taxes). Also, have you seen inflation lately?
- scolby33 5y ago
  Just this week in Pittsburgh, I saw an official corporate poster up in a McDonald's advertising a "competitive starting wage" with an 8.5″x11″ sheet taped to it reading "STARTING RATE UP TO 10$/HR." I doubt they'll have much luck at ≤$10/hour. Sure, it's more than the minimum ($7.25/hour), but the "up to" weasel words don't give me confidence.
  - syshum 5y ago
    "McDonald's" is a bit of a mixed bag, like most of the Fast Food Places. McDonald's owned stores are paying a minimum of $13 with the plan to go to $15 in the next few years, this was announced awhile back The problem is McDonald's Corporate only owns 5% of McDonald's locations, the rest are franchise locations, thus a "McDonald's" crew member at a non-company store is not working for McDonald's but the Franchisee.. This is where you get the lower wages.. This allows McDonald's to get headlines about offering a "$15 min wage" while 95% of wearing an McDonald's uniform do not work for McDonald's thus do not get this wage

UnpossibleJim 5y ago

I can't speak to statistics at large, but anecdotally, my wife was laid off and we needed someone with our son during "home schooling" anyway, so she just continued on to get her degree since many universities have an online option at the moment (which should continue and expand). With the variant, we have this same option next year, though no unemployment and we'll just be a single income while she finishes up her last half year or so. In our case, it wasn't the "refusing to go back to work to make a better life" narrative that's getting pushed; it's more the, she had to stay home with our son while he's in school, but what does she do while he's in school all day? You only have to be sort of involved. You might as well be productive, but you have trouble being productive enough to really work.

morpheos137 5y ago

I wonder how significant the booming stock market is? Maybe people are neglecting to work because their Tesla stock is up some absurd amount over 5 years or whatever. Same for crypto. But when these people start treating such capital gains as disposeable income then it will cause inflation.

WalterBright 5y ago

> companies are abandoning office spaces in favor of full remote for months now On the other hand, traffic during rush hour seems to have returned to as bad as it ever was.

mjevans 5y ago
All those new and used cars are now PPE bubbles and added freedom for people that previously took the bus or carpooled. If they make work at the office mandatory now we're going to see even worse than pre-pandemic commutes.
dv_dt 5y ago
I think hn has a little bit of forgetful bias that their industry has probably the most amenable situation for remote work.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
RobertKerans 5y ago
[UK specifically] not seems, it has gone back to normal (as in pre-pandemic).

willyt 5y ago

I walked down through the financial district of London on a Tuesday morning recently and I did not see one single office worker sat at a desk in any office I passed. Just empty buildings with lights on and bored receptionists sat at front desks.

mylons 5y ago

I’m willing to bet a lot of money school is not in session this fall in many parts of the USA.

schwartzworld 5y ago

> doesn’t make sense that people would choose no job at all over a job that doesn’t pay the wage they want. I don't agree. The pandemic is still very much happening and low-paid workers are expected to be on the front lines. If this had all happened when I was working retail, I probably would have made the decision to not go to work and catch covid while making 8/hr.