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Workers and their families are getting sick in droves. I hate how headlines like this loosely frame it as a problem with workers. It's like the "worker shortag

Workers and their families are getting sick in droves. I hate how headlines like this loosely frame it as a problem with workers. It's like the "worker shortage" kind of garbage... we've got plenty of workers in most sectors, but there's a shortage of companies willing to pay what they're asking. Why is it never a "wage shortage"?

jimbob45 5y ago
Even worse, the article's source appears to be six individuals affiliated with six different companies representing 0.0001% of the US workforce. None of their claims are verified or even investigated for accuracy. Not to say that people aren't getting sick or that they aren't calling out but it's clear that the author has no authoritative basis to make any claim on the subject.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Which leads you to wonder why the article was published at all.
- boringg 5y ago
  Not going to say they are the authoritative source or that their data point is sufficient enough. I would say that ever person I have talked to who runs a business or is a worker at a business has many people who are sick currently. I think the author probably used this example to paint a broader picture that resonates with probably most people who are connected to society at this point. The reason they used "worker" is because its the largest class of individuals and it IS having real supply chain issues. It ISN'T because people aren't getting paid enough but because people are sick and shouldn't work so as not to infect other people.
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    Isn't that the main credibility problem facing journalism today though? It's these publications asking for credibility because "just look around, bro" or "look at these six examples, it's everywhere". You can't establish a pattern based off of emotions and expect to be respected as a serious news agency. You could argue that it's the reason that FOX News lost so much respect around ~2010 from FOX and Friends. It's the BLM activists asking you to "look at the racism happening everywhere" and the election truthers telling you that "you just know fraud is happening - nobody I know voted for Biden". I can't draw conclusions based on your feelings, no matter how strong they are. It's telling that 13/52 and 13/90 have stuck around so well because those are real, factual numbers. Perhaps they're entirely misleading but, at the very least, newsreaders appear to be far more interested in those real numbers than "feelings-based" articles like the one above. Part of the magic of FiveThirtyEight early on was their deep commitment to showing the statistical analysis behind every single article. You didn't have to just trust their reporters because they had the MiniTab or MATLab printout on every article that you could read for yourself. They fully describe their methodology behind their pollster ratings and election forecasts, even if you don't agree with them. 538 has since gotten away from their statistical analyses a bit and their viewership and credibility has suffered accordingly.
    - nradov 5y ago
      Modern journalism consists of looking at today's trending topics on Twitter, then finding a few related anecdotes about it to turn into a "news" story that pushes the publication's preferred narrative. Those articles aren't false per se, but they do nothing to help readers understand what's really happening.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    Given that the cdc reported 1.4 million cases in a day last week, and that only includes people who got tested, it's probably more like 3 million. That's 1% of the population getting infected per day. So yeah this checks out.
- gruez 5y ago
  > Even worse, the article's source appears to be six individuals affiliated with six different companies representing 0.0001% of the US workforce. None of their claims are verified or even investigated for accuracy. They're not the BLS. If you're expecting that level of coverage then there's virtually no news stories aside from whatever government stats came out that day.
- dahart 5y ago
  > six different companies representing 0.0001% of the US workforce. Just to check the accuracy, how did you arrive at this number? AFAICT, United Airlines has 93k employees, so alone represents approximately 0.028% of the US workforce, roughly 300x your guess, right?
- zuminator 5y ago
  0.0001% of the US workforce is 156 people. United Airlines alone had 3000 out with COVID simultaneously. That's not just some random worker lamenting; it was stated in an official memo by their CEO, linked to in the story.
- gamblor956 5y ago
  "At United Airlines, CEO Scott Kirby said nearly a third of the workforce called out sick on one day alone at Newark Liberty International Airport. At MOM's Organic Market, some of its East Coast stores have had to deal with 15 out of 50 workers out on a single day. And at the community health center Mary's Center in Washington, D.C., half of the COVID-19 Response Team tested positive for the virus over the past few weeks." The article literally starts with the CEO of a public company that employs several tens of thousands of people saying that 1/3 of their workers at one of their busiest facilities called out sick. The MOM's source is...their Chief of HR. The sources for the hospital were its CEO and chief nurse. Whatever ideological point about journalism you thought you were trying to make, you did not make it.
newaccount2021 5y ago
devmunchies 5y ago
> Workers and their families are getting sick in droves. true. we were going to cancel a family birthday last weekend because people had covid but we found out each family currently has it so we kept it. Omicron is spreading like a flame on summer grass.
- brimble 5y ago
  About half of my friend circle has had it in the last two weeks (and no, not because we're passing it to each other). There had been one case of Covid in the whole group the entire rest of the pandemic.
  - nradov 5y ago
    One case that you know of. Unless your entire friend circle has all been getting weekly tests since February 2020 it's likely that some have had asymptomatic infections. The CDC estimated that only about a quarter of infections were officially counted as "cases". https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
    - brimble 5y ago
      Odds of having it pass through a whole household without a trace would be lower, of course, but you are right that some of them/us may have had asymptomatic infections earlier on. About half have had symptomatic infections, all from different sources (not due to us getting together), in the past couple weeks. Everyone in the house, even little kids, are getting sick (fever, at least, every time), in every single case so far (unless, again, some of us have had it pass through and no-one in the house had symptoms). If that 1/4 symptomatic rate holds for omicron (I'm doubting it, but maybe) then something like 3-4% of the country's contracting it per day. Even if not, then it's still somewhere around 1%/day, minimum.
      - webmaven 5y ago
        One thing I haven't seen data on is whether Omicron's milder symptoms also means that a higher percentage of infections are asymptomatic (and undetected).
boringg 5y ago
I think you miss the point of the article - it's to broadcast to the world businesses have significant worker shortages as a function of society is getting sick. Therefore a lot of the things that people would expect are not viable right now (flight cancellations, classes cancelled, hospital staffing issues, delivery issues, etc). Just because it doesn't mention families doesn't mean that there is some strange weird deliberate bias.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Sorry, I maybe muddied the waters by adding families... I meant the phrasing of "calling out sick" rather than "getting sick" – the latter is more accurate and the former has a minor implication that it's the fault of the worker. Getting sick happens to people, calling out sick is something people do. There seems to be an undercurrent of bias that faults workers in a lot of reporting. Maybe it's confirmation bias on my part, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.
  - evilduck 5y ago
    Yeah, "calling out sick" allows for the possibility that people aren't really sick and there might be abuse of sick time happening for other reasons, like coordinated sick-out protests or just individuals being fed up. In this case, the droves of people claiming sick time are most likely genuinely sick.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      What might also be happening is that people are forced to call sick due to being tested positive or a close contact of one, even though they aren't actually feeling sick. We're seeing this here in Spain a lot now. A bit higher up in this thread someone mentioned not cancelling a birthday because all the guests had COVID anyway. But work environments are more strict. I have a feeling this is what they meant by stating it that way, not implying that the workers aren't actually sick. A case of COVID is easily verified anyway.
      - 5y ago
gruez 5y ago
[deleted]
- brimble 5y ago
  > "workers are getting sick" doesn't imply any sort of blame. Indeed. Instead the headline is "workers are calling out sick in droves". [EDIT] gruez noted below that the original post was based on an error, please don't punish their Internet points too much.
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    It implies that companies are being denied their rightful labor
- shkkmo 5y ago
  The framing of "calling out sick" instead of "getting sick" is what sort of implies some blame for workers. It isn't a super strong connotation, but it does exist.
  - gruez 5y ago
    my bad, I didn't realize that "getting sick" wasn't the original wording.
  - Kessler83 5y ago
    "in droves" isn't exactly a neutral expression, either. Says something about how they see workers.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    To me it implies that they're actually calling out. Prior to 'rona it was normal to get sick and still go to work in many industries.
amelius 5y ago
> Why is it never a "wage shortage"? Because salaries are not transparent.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  They are sufficiently transparent to claim a "wage shortage", what number do you want that you can't get from bls.gov?
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  At the scale "worker shortage" is declared, average salary data is also available.
ChrisLomont 5y ago
>Why is it never a "wage shortage" Wages don't occur in a vacuum. If people want more pay than can be made back by selling the products, then there is no job and no product. How about instead on focusing on ensuring there are multiple companies competing for workers of every skill level (which there are), in which case the wages are likely close to what can be paid.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  When companies are cheaping out on labor and competing with other companies doing the same it is artificially lowering prices at the expense of the workers. If they all had to pay them more then prices would at worst go up around the board. Therefore any price that people are unwilling to pay will not be because the competition offers a lower price, but because they are unwilling to purchase the product at all at that price. If that happens and it causes some businesses to be unviable because no one will pay the price required, then maybe we don't need those businesses.
  - adwn 5y ago
    > When companies are cheaping out on labor and competing with other companies doing the same it is artificially lowering prices at the expense of the workers. If companies can't afford higher wages because it would make their products so expensive that they couldn't find enough customers for them, then you can hardly call that "artificial".
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      Oh, you mean that thing I addressed in the very next paragraph? I'm saying I don't think we've reached that point yet. In other words, I think prices are often as low as they are not because people won't pay more, but because companies have exploited the labor market to lower prices creating a race to the bottom.
      - ChrisLomont 5y ago
parkingrift 5y ago
I think you’re reading too much into the headline. In order for workers to call out sick they must be sick. I don’t perceive any negative connotations to the phrase “calling out sick.” The article is about employee shortages due to sick workers. I don’t think the title is misrepresenting that.
- QuercusMax 5y ago
  You've never heard of somebody calling out sick when they aren't actually sick? The connotation of the headline is absolutely that workers are faking sick, even if the content of the article doesn't say that.
  - decafninja 5y ago
    Aren't there usually a limited number of sick days? My previous jobs have all given me a grand total of 2 sick days plus 2 personal days. Anything beyond that would have cut into vacation days.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    Just the opposite. "Workers are getting sick in droves" would be analysis, and not appropriate. And if you read the article, the article wraps up with information that counters your claim that NPR is pushing an agenda about workers. I think people are so accustomed to clickbait-y headlines, they see an agenda in the headlines of an organization that actually practices strong journalistic standards and plays it "safe" with its headlines, saying less than more.
    - 8note 5y ago
      Calling out sick implies using voice and not text to message their sickness, which is also analysis. "Workers are using sick days, and businesses do not have enough workers not on sick days" is a plain jane version
  - parkingrift 5y ago
    Sure I have but neither the headline nor the article imply any such thing. I do not infer any such negative connotation from the title. Is there another term for calling out sick that you believe doesn’t have such a connotation?
atlantas 5y ago
missedthecue 5y ago
To me that's like saying there's not a housing shortage, just a shortage of people willing to pay what home sellers are asking. Right now, the US population is higher than it's ever been, but there are several million fewer workers than in 2019. That's the definition of a shortage.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  Where do you think they went to? They're still there, they just don't want to do crappy jobs for low pay. If you increase pay all of a sudden that 'shortage' seems to dry up. If I want a 2 dollar cheeseburger and all I can find are 4 dollar cheeseburgers is there a cheeseburger shortage?
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Many retired, and are unlikely to come back for any kind of raise. Others have had children. And pay has risen steadily. It doesn't seem very obvious to me why you think people were happy to work for $15/hr in 2019 but would rather earn nothing than $18/hr today. Wage examples taken from local small business hiring signs around my city.
anthony_romeo 5y ago
As a statistical aside with respect to worker shortages and unemployment in the U.S., here's some BLS data: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm For reference, unemployment rates in the US are recorded by six increasingly-broad measures (from U-1 to U-6). U-3 is the internationally-defined "official" unemployment representing 'everyone actively working, or actively looking for work'. U-6, the broadest measure, includes U-3 as well as "all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force" [basically, unemployed people who stopped looking for work (but theoretically want to work), as well as the underemployed]. U-3 alone does not provide a full picture of unemployment. Sometimes U-3 can go down, but U-4, U-5, or U-6 increase because workers are leaving the labor force entirely. Based on the BLS data, unemployment has been trending down by all measures. This suggests to me that the continued decreases in the unemployment are real and not misleading. Other tables also indicate that U-3 has decreased among all industries and age ranges: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm My armchair suspicion is that, though the "worker shortage" was a very real issue in 2021, the problem [at least nationally] has broadly leveled-out, and that discussions on a national "worker shortages" continue to emerge from a type of, say, 'conversational inertia' when discussing localized labor shortages (e.g. problems with industry X in state/county Y) or acute shocks to supply (e.g. large numbers of people getting sick at the same time). Localized shortages or acute shocks are also meaningful and need to be resolved as they come up, but they may be only tangentially-related to a national worker shortage. I'd love to hear more thoughts on this if others want to chime-in. I didn't do any sort of rigorous analysis on this. There could also be still substantial multi-state/regional shortages hidden among the numbers. I didn't really delve into "reality" or how the data may not actually reflect "real life" or other labor-related issues (e.g. income) -- I just like looking at these stats every now and then.
- svnpenn 5y ago
  You managed to type all that and still avoid addressing the comment you replied to, bravo. The original comment position is that any current shortage is in large part due to rampant low wages across multiple sectors. Did you have an actual refutation of that, or did you just want to distract with tangential information?
dfxm12 5y ago
Why is it never a "wage shortage"? Because big media outlets tend to side with big business over labor, despite cries about "the liberal media".
spaceisballer 5y ago
Definitely sick in droves. I have three people I work with that are all out sick today with COVID. We all work remote but their families they live with are all sick. Omnicron is spreading like wildfire.

jimbob45 5y ago

Even worse, the article's source appears to be six individuals affiliated with six different companies representing 0.0001% of the US workforce. None of their claims are verified or even investigated for accuracy. Not to say that people aren't getting sick or that they aren't calling out but it's clear that the author has no authoritative basis to make any claim on the subject.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
Which leads you to wonder why the article was published at all.
boringg 5y ago
Not going to say they are the authoritative source or that their data point is sufficient enough. I would say that ever person I have talked to who runs a business or is a worker at a business has many people who are sick currently. I think the author probably used this example to paint a broader picture that resonates with probably most people who are connected to society at this point. The reason they used "worker" is because its the largest class of individuals and it IS having real supply chain issues. It ISN'T because people aren't getting paid enough but because people are sick and shouldn't work so as not to infect other people.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Isn't that the main credibility problem facing journalism today though? It's these publications asking for credibility because "just look around, bro" or "look at these six examples, it's everywhere". You can't establish a pattern based off of emotions and expect to be respected as a serious news agency. You could argue that it's the reason that FOX News lost so much respect around ~2010 from FOX and Friends. It's the BLM activists asking you to "look at the racism happening everywhere" and the election truthers telling you that "you just know fraud is happening - nobody I know voted for Biden". I can't draw conclusions based on your feelings, no matter how strong they are. It's telling that 13/52 and 13/90 have stuck around so well because those are real, factual numbers. Perhaps they're entirely misleading but, at the very least, newsreaders appear to be far more interested in those real numbers than "feelings-based" articles like the one above. Part of the magic of FiveThirtyEight early on was their deep commitment to showing the statistical analysis behind every single article. You didn't have to just trust their reporters because they had the MiniTab or MATLab printout on every article that you could read for yourself. They fully describe their methodology behind their pollster ratings and election forecasts, even if you don't agree with them. 538 has since gotten away from their statistical analyses a bit and their viewership and credibility has suffered accordingly.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Modern journalism consists of looking at today's trending topics on Twitter, then finding a few related anecdotes about it to turn into a "news" story that pushes the publication's preferred narrative. Those articles aren't false per se, but they do nothing to help readers understand what's really happening.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  Given that the cdc reported 1.4 million cases in a day last week, and that only includes people who got tested, it's probably more like 3 million. That's 1% of the population getting infected per day. So yeah this checks out.
gruez 5y ago
> Even worse, the article's source appears to be six individuals affiliated with six different companies representing 0.0001% of the US workforce. None of their claims are verified or even investigated for accuracy. They're not the BLS. If you're expecting that level of coverage then there's virtually no news stories aside from whatever government stats came out that day.
dahart 5y ago
> six different companies representing 0.0001% of the US workforce. Just to check the accuracy, how did you arrive at this number? AFAICT, United Airlines has 93k employees, so alone represents approximately 0.028% of the US workforce, roughly 300x your guess, right?
zuminator 5y ago
0.0001% of the US workforce is 156 people. United Airlines alone had 3000 out with COVID simultaneously. That's not just some random worker lamenting; it was stated in an official memo by their CEO, linked to in the story.
gamblor956 5y ago
"At United Airlines, CEO Scott Kirby said nearly a third of the workforce called out sick on one day alone at Newark Liberty International Airport. At MOM's Organic Market, some of its East Coast stores have had to deal with 15 out of 50 workers out on a single day. And at the community health center Mary's Center in Washington, D.C., half of the COVID-19 Response Team tested positive for the virus over the past few weeks." The article literally starts with the CEO of a public company that employs several tens of thousands of people saying that 1/3 of their workers at one of their busiest facilities called out sick. The MOM's source is...their Chief of HR. The sources for the hospital were its CEO and chief nurse. Whatever ideological point about journalism you thought you were trying to make, you did not make it.

newaccount2021 5y ago

devmunchies 5y ago

> Workers and their families are getting sick in droves. true. we were going to cancel a family birthday last weekend because people had covid but we found out each family currently has it so we kept it. Omicron is spreading like a flame on summer grass.

brimble 5y ago
About half of my friend circle has had it in the last two weeks (and no, not because we're passing it to each other). There had been one case of Covid in the whole group the entire rest of the pandemic.
- nradov 5y ago
  One case that you know of. Unless your entire friend circle has all been getting weekly tests since February 2020 it's likely that some have had asymptomatic infections. The CDC estimated that only about a quarter of infections were officially counted as "cases". https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
  - brimble 5y ago
    Odds of having it pass through a whole household without a trace would be lower, of course, but you are right that some of them/us may have had asymptomatic infections earlier on. About half have had symptomatic infections, all from different sources (not due to us getting together), in the past couple weeks. Everyone in the house, even little kids, are getting sick (fever, at least, every time), in every single case so far (unless, again, some of us have had it pass through and no-one in the house had symptoms). If that 1/4 symptomatic rate holds for omicron (I'm doubting it, but maybe) then something like 3-4% of the country's contracting it per day. Even if not, then it's still somewhere around 1%/day, minimum.
    - webmaven 5y ago
      One thing I haven't seen data on is whether Omicron's milder symptoms also means that a higher percentage of infections are asymptomatic (and undetected).

boringg 5y ago

I think you miss the point of the article - it's to broadcast to the world businesses have significant worker shortages as a function of society is getting sick. Therefore a lot of the things that people would expect are not viable right now (flight cancellations, classes cancelled, hospital staffing issues, delivery issues, etc). Just because it doesn't mention families doesn't mean that there is some strange weird deliberate bias.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
Sorry, I maybe muddied the waters by adding families... I meant the phrasing of "calling out sick" rather than "getting sick" – the latter is more accurate and the former has a minor implication that it's the fault of the worker. Getting sick happens to people, calling out sick is something people do. There seems to be an undercurrent of bias that faults workers in a lot of reporting. Maybe it's confirmation bias on my part, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.
- evilduck 5y ago
  Yeah, "calling out sick" allows for the possibility that people aren't really sick and there might be abuse of sick time happening for other reasons, like coordinated sick-out protests or just individuals being fed up. In this case, the droves of people claiming sick time are most likely genuinely sick.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    What might also be happening is that people are forced to call sick due to being tested positive or a close contact of one, even though they aren't actually feeling sick. We're seeing this here in Spain a lot now. A bit higher up in this thread someone mentioned not cancelling a birthday because all the guests had COVID anyway. But work environments are more strict. I have a feeling this is what they meant by stating it that way, not implying that the workers aren't actually sick. A case of COVID is easily verified anyway.
    - 5y ago

gruez 5y ago

[deleted]

brimble 5y ago
> "workers are getting sick" doesn't imply any sort of blame. Indeed. Instead the headline is "workers are calling out sick in droves". [EDIT] gruez noted below that the original post was based on an error, please don't punish their Internet points too much.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  It implies that companies are being denied their rightful labor
shkkmo 5y ago
The framing of "calling out sick" instead of "getting sick" is what sort of implies some blame for workers. It isn't a super strong connotation, but it does exist.
- gruez 5y ago
  my bad, I didn't realize that "getting sick" wasn't the original wording.
- Kessler83 5y ago
  "in droves" isn't exactly a neutral expression, either. Says something about how they see workers.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  To me it implies that they're actually calling out. Prior to 'rona it was normal to get sick and still go to work in many industries.

amelius 5y ago

> Why is it never a "wage shortage"? Because salaries are not transparent.

willcipriano 5y ago
They are sufficiently transparent to claim a "wage shortage", what number do you want that you can't get from bls.gov?
micromacrofoot 5y ago
At the scale "worker shortage" is declared, average salary data is also available.

ChrisLomont 5y ago

>Why is it never a "wage shortage" Wages don't occur in a vacuum. If people want more pay than can be made back by selling the products, then there is no job and no product. How about instead on focusing on ensuring there are multiple companies competing for workers of every skill level (which there are), in which case the wages are likely close to what can be paid.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
When companies are cheaping out on labor and competing with other companies doing the same it is artificially lowering prices at the expense of the workers. If they all had to pay them more then prices would at worst go up around the board. Therefore any price that people are unwilling to pay will not be because the competition offers a lower price, but because they are unwilling to purchase the product at all at that price. If that happens and it causes some businesses to be unviable because no one will pay the price required, then maybe we don't need those businesses.
- adwn 5y ago
  > When companies are cheaping out on labor and competing with other companies doing the same it is artificially lowering prices at the expense of the workers. If companies can't afford higher wages because it would make their products so expensive that they couldn't find enough customers for them, then you can hardly call that "artificial".
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Oh, you mean that thing I addressed in the very next paragraph? I'm saying I don't think we've reached that point yet. In other words, I think prices are often as low as they are not because people won't pay more, but because companies have exploited the labor market to lower prices creating a race to the bottom.
    - ChrisLomont 5y ago

parkingrift 5y ago

I think you’re reading too much into the headline. In order for workers to call out sick they must be sick. I don’t perceive any negative connotations to the phrase “calling out sick.” The article is about employee shortages due to sick workers. I don’t think the title is misrepresenting that.

QuercusMax 5y ago
You've never heard of somebody calling out sick when they aren't actually sick? The connotation of the headline is absolutely that workers are faking sick, even if the content of the article doesn't say that.
- decafninja 5y ago
  Aren't there usually a limited number of sick days? My previous jobs have all given me a grand total of 2 sick days plus 2 personal days. Anything beyond that would have cut into vacation days.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  Just the opposite. "Workers are getting sick in droves" would be analysis, and not appropriate. And if you read the article, the article wraps up with information that counters your claim that NPR is pushing an agenda about workers. I think people are so accustomed to clickbait-y headlines, they see an agenda in the headlines of an organization that actually practices strong journalistic standards and plays it "safe" with its headlines, saying less than more.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Calling out sick implies using voice and not text to message their sickness, which is also analysis. "Workers are using sick days, and businesses do not have enough workers not on sick days" is a plain jane version
- parkingrift 5y ago
  Sure I have but neither the headline nor the article imply any such thing. I do not infer any such negative connotation from the title. Is there another term for calling out sick that you believe doesn’t have such a connotation?

atlantas 5y ago

missedthecue 5y ago

To me that's like saying there's not a housing shortage, just a shortage of people willing to pay what home sellers are asking. Right now, the US population is higher than it's ever been, but there are several million fewer workers than in 2019. That's the definition of a shortage.

idiotsecant 5y ago
Where do you think they went to? They're still there, they just don't want to do crappy jobs for low pay. If you increase pay all of a sudden that 'shortage' seems to dry up. If I want a 2 dollar cheeseburger and all I can find are 4 dollar cheeseburgers is there a cheeseburger shortage?
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Many retired, and are unlikely to come back for any kind of raise. Others have had children. And pay has risen steadily. It doesn't seem very obvious to me why you think people were happy to work for $15/hr in 2019 but would rather earn nothing than $18/hr today. Wage examples taken from local small business hiring signs around my city.

anthony_romeo 5y ago

As a statistical aside with respect to worker shortages and unemployment in the U.S., here's some BLS data: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm For reference, unemployment rates in the US are recorded by six increasingly-broad measures (from U-1 to U-6). U-3 is the internationally-defined "official" unemployment representing 'everyone actively working, or actively looking for work'. U-6, the broadest measure, includes U-3 as well as "all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force" [basically, unemployed people who stopped looking for work (but theoretically want to work), as well as the underemployed]. U-3 alone does not provide a full picture of unemployment. Sometimes U-3 can go down, but U-4, U-5, or U-6 increase because workers are leaving the labor force entirely. Based on the BLS data, unemployment has been trending down by all measures. This suggests to me that the continued decreases in the unemployment are real and not misleading. Other tables also indicate that U-3 has decreased among all industries and age ranges: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm My armchair suspicion is that, though the "worker shortage" was a very real issue in 2021, the problem [at least nationally] has broadly leveled-out, and that discussions on a national "worker shortages" continue to emerge from a type of, say, 'conversational inertia' when discussing localized labor shortages (e.g. problems with industry X in state/county Y) or acute shocks to supply (e.g. large numbers of people getting sick at the same time). Localized shortages or acute shocks are also meaningful and need to be resolved as they come up, but they may be only tangentially-related to a national worker shortage. I'd love to hear more thoughts on this if others want to chime-in. I didn't do any sort of rigorous analysis on this. There could also be still substantial multi-state/regional shortages hidden among the numbers. I didn't really delve into "reality" or how the data may not actually reflect "real life" or other labor-related issues (e.g. income) -- I just like looking at these stats every now and then.

svnpenn 5y ago
You managed to type all that and still avoid addressing the comment you replied to, bravo. The original comment position is that any current shortage is in large part due to rampant low wages across multiple sectors. Did you have an actual refutation of that, or did you just want to distract with tangential information?

dfxm12 5y ago

Why is it never a "wage shortage"? Because big media outlets tend to side with big business over labor, despite cries about "the liberal media".

spaceisballer 5y ago

Definitely sick in droves. I have three people I work with that are all out sick today with COVID. We all work remote but their families they live with are all sick. Omnicron is spreading like wildfire.