"Essential workers" were "on the front line" and then were fired. Restaurant workers switched to take out/delivery becoming essential workers on the front line

"Essential workers" were "on the front line" and then were fired. Restaurant workers switched to take out/delivery becoming essential workers on the front line, and then many of them got fired. They feel betrayed, good luck getting them to come back. Long covid has also probably taken a lot of them out of the game (current estimates in the USA are 1.5 million if I remember correctly.) So the worker shortage is probably permanent, for all types of jobs, until a decade or so passes and the population creates more workers. No amount of inducement is going to make workers who can't function come back to work. Workers who now don't have to risk their lives for their front line jobs which they felt locked into because who else was hiring at the time now feel free to move to something better, different, but at least less risky than what they had before. The pandemic is not over either, four new variants on the way. So getting out of a job that could turn really risky at any time only seems to make sense. At the very least they probably feel the need to be compensated for the risk.