I’m not seeing it where I’m at, at least not in terms of service outages or inability to do things. Where I might see it is in businesses realizing they can do without as many people and/or without the service levels they provided pre-pandemic, but that’s not the same thing as a labor shortage.
Also, I’d have thought that now, a couple years after the major pandemic-related issues, we’d have enough young people coming available for work that most shortages would be relieved by now. Is that the case? Are COVID-related shortages still a thing? Is it more the fact that when the economy’s doing well, unemployment tends to be very low? I’m curious what you think!
I think it is very common in healthcare, showing up in places like long waits in emergency rooms, long delays to get an appointment with a doctor, inadequate staffing in nursing homes.
That’s part of it; unemployment in the US has been under 4% for a couple of years, which is a low number.
COVID led a large number of people to choose to leave the work force (i.e., “early retirement”); many, but not all, have since returned to the labor force.
As @PastTense notes, healthcare, among other industries, suffered a great deal of burnout during COVID, leading people to leave the field, and creating continued staffing issues.
There are still labor shortages, but I don’t know to what extent they can still be called “covid-related”. And companies have been taking measures to mitigate it for years, now (things like self check-outs in grocery stores).
My grocery stores have shorter hours, and a lower level of service. Many restaurants have cut back hours or the complexity of the menu. There are signs advertising “we need workers and the starting pay is $xx” all over the place.
On the other hand, the Tech industry has laid of a lot of workers. So did my employer. So there’s still a shortage of unskilled or slightly skilled labor, but I don’t see any shortage of skilled labor. Except in healthcare, where there are still shortages due to covid-burn-out and some long-simmering issues with how medical employers pay medical staff.
Can those of you who have tried to hire people for home improvement projects comment on this? Is this true or are there high prices and long delays before they can do your project?
There have always been high prices and long delays, in my experience. I haven’t had any more trouble hiring plumbers, electricians, or house painters than in the past.
(I just finished a big home improvement project last year.)
Yeah, we had parts of our house renovated in about 2015 or so, and it wasn’t any less bad back then- those guys are always hard to schedule and get to commit when we’ve needed them.
I think it’s a general lack of tradespeople more than anything COVID related. Everyone wants their kid to go to college, but nobody wants their kid to learn how to lay bricks or be a plumber or flooring installer. Which is crazy; the last time we had major plumbing work done, I was chatting with the crew leader, and he was telling me about all his hunting/fishing adventures- he had a deer lease, a boat, etc. along with a bunch of guns and fishing gear that he was excited to tell me about. He was not hurting for money, that’s for sure. He had all new Milwaukee M18 cordless tools, and pretty much nothing was beat up or dilapidated. But people will push their kids to college when they’re not academically inclined for it, rather than suggesting that they go to trade school and apprenticeship in something like plumbing or electrician-ing, and that means that we’ve got a sort of glut of people with some college, or maybe a bachelor’s degree from a third-rate school who are overqualified for most entry level positions. This has bad effects in two more ways- it devalues college degrees, and it hurts the high school grads who would otherwise be perfectly qualified for a lot of these positions. And like I pointed out above, it lessens the pool of trained tradespeople, causing these issues.
In my industry, advertising, we’ve seen a massive blood-letting over the past two years or so, as agencies answer to their holding companies’ demands for better margins by cutting staff. I have a huge number of industry friends who are now freelancers, not by choice.
This. It’s a lazy way for managers to justify not having enough workers. The low-wage part of the public now demands more pay, the managers won’t pony up, the job goes unfulfilled, and the excuse is “COVID did it”.
It’s been six months since I’ve last been there, but the last time I was at the Krispy Kreme on Bowles Avenue in suburban St. Louis, the drive through was open but the dining room was still closed, as it has been since Covid, due to staff shortages. The manager was working the drive through and she basically said that she’s moving forward as if the dining room is never going to reopen.
We’ll, i think covid showed a lot of people they could do better than work for minimum wage. That’s not a bad thing, if we reduce some of the wage disparities in the US. But sure, you can “blame” it on covid.
I stopped short of the rest of what I wanted to say mindful of the fact we’re in FQ. It’s bad enough we’re f***ing all the workers and managers in the rest of the less wealthy world. But f***ing ~80% of Americans to boot? That’s just evil.
And I say that as someone at the percentile level that knowingly benefits from all this \f***ing. It ain’t right.
A lot of teachers quit during COVID. Largely because teaching school over Zoom was a miserable experience. They haven’t been replaced, for the most part.
BLS reports on job openings (levels and rates) by industry. “Accommodations and Food Services” is back to the pre-pandemic range (5.8% this February, down from 11.5% in July 2021.)
Wages are up. If it’s not profitable to staff a business at 3 AM, the business is less likely to be open at 3 AM.
Exactly - I think a lot of people realized that either that they didn’t need to have a job or that they didn’t need to have the job they had at the beginning of COVID but the only way COVID was involved was in making this apparent. My husband has a friend who had a job making custom orthotics. When he got the job , he could walk to work but then they moved and he ended up with a 90 minute one way commute involving a commuter railroad that cost about $100/wk. He kept the job because he couldn’t get another job that paid as much. Then came the COVID layoff. Before that job called him back, he had gotten another job. Which did pay less but he could walk to work again and it was 30 minutes one way instead of 90 so that he was actually better off with the lower paying job. His former employer is probably talking about how no one want to work anymore.
You say you’re mindful of being in FQ, and then proceed to ignore the fact that you’re in FQ. If you wish to share your opinions on this topic, do so in IMHO. Do not post any further opinions in this thread.
What actually happened was I started ranting, realized that was what I was doing and that it was inappropriate, then inserted the sentence about being FQ, intended to delete the rest, thought I had done so, hit [Save], then closed the tab without review. Oops.
Still and all, I screwed up and I own it. You are of course completely right. My apologies to one and all.