Lack of low-wage workers... where have they gone?

In My Humble Opinion
61

IAN nearwildheaven and cannot speak for them, but IME usually renters are expected to pay rent for a month’s occupancy at the beginning of the month. It sounds as though nearwildheaven’s landlord is letting tenants space out their monthly rent payment over the whole month of occupancy, by chipping in a bit here and a bit there as they have the money.

If I paid my November rent to my landlord in dribs and drabs throughout November instead of up front on November 1st sharp, I’d get smacked with late fees. Which is perfectly reasonable, since my salary is paid regularly and I signed a lease stating that I’d pay my rent by the first of the month of occupancy.

You’re right that essentially, these tenants’ situation is simply that they’re permanently one month behind on their rent and are “saving up for their rent payments” in an account owned by the landlord rather than in a bank or a mattress. But the fact that it’s worth the landlord’s time and trouble to set up this system attests to the unpredictability of the tenants’ income streams.

62

That is exactly what the rental office is doing. It’s not something you can just do; you do have to sign up for it but it enables people to pay their rent “late” without penalties, as long as the balance doesn’t carry over into the next month.

I’m very fortunate to not have to do this, that’s for sure.

63

Anecdotally speaking, it’s possible that these companies crying about not being able to find workers are actually just not hiring workers.

By the end of September, Holz had sent out 60 applications, received 16 email responses, four follow-up phone calls, and the solitary interview.

Businesses can save a ton of money on payroll expenses by not filling vacant positions, and when customers complain they can point to “lazy people don’t want to work, we can’t find employees” to explain the shorter hours, longer lines, and worse service.

Maybe not most, or even many, but it’s probably an additional reason that jobs aren’t getting filled-- some businesses just aren’t hiring despite their claims of being unable to find workers.

64

This is very literal, too. It’s not just trends in how likely they are to seek employment. There are fewer young adults than there were a decade ago.

I’m sure covid exacerbated things, but there was already widespread discussion of a labor shortage before it hit.

65

This:

That said, we do have some survey data. I linked in the other thread to one where people list spouse working and care responsibilities as top reasons for not urgently seeking work

66

Also having a cash cushion IIRC.

67

In the UK, the shortage of truck drivers caused a bit of political storm. Now it is a shortage of taxi drivers. Getting a cab is difficult and expensive. That is on top of the crisis in hospitality, care homes, retail, health car…the list goes on an on.

It is clear that the lockdowns have had a major effect on the labour market. These businesses always had issues with recruitment, training, pay rates that were not addressed for many years. Suddenly Covid appears and puts many businesses on ice for many months during which workers have had time to reflect on their job situation and the constraints it makes on their lives.

I guess that when you are busy, you gave no time to sit around and think about whether the way you make a living is good for you and what are the alternatives. You just keep up with the pace of work, consumed by the routine and dynamic.

That link has been broken with the ‘stay at home’ directives to socially isolate and break the virus transmission. During this time people the Internet has become a window in the world and it is easy to find information and pursue personal interests. Time enough to do some career and lifestyle development.

It is unsurprising that the exploitative, low pay, long hours jobs are worst hit. They had it coming. But there are also well paid jobs that are very bad. Businesses that managed productivity by herding people into big offices so they can spend all day sending and reading emails to their co-workers sitting nearby. Endless schedules of meetings and tedious presentations. Operating processes and procedures that were never really thought out and just made a lot of work to keep going. The workplace was full of absurd behaviour that was considered normal business practice.

I cannot help thinking that re-considering work and how it is organised is something that is long overdue. Much if it is based on the 9-5 routine that supposedly could only be done in an office under the watchful eye of your boss.

The world and technology has moved on and it will favour employers who can adapt. However I fear that many are stuck in the past and just try to recreate the same control systems with new technology. It is all they know.

The lockdowns happened all over the world. It think the same big questions are being asked everywhere. Or is it just a post lockdown restart and soon enough we will be back to ‘normal’? People will vote with their feet.

Well managed businesses that are good employers will survive. Hopefully it will weed out the ‘zombie’ businesses that were kept alive by years of cutting corners and cheap credit. Isn’t that what economic recessions are supposed to do?

I would like to think this is a much more fundamental change to work patterns. So much work practice is rooted in the past, for reasons that make little sense in the present. A clear example is the retirement age. It came from a time when people did not live much past 65 during the hard labour of the industrial revolution. Why does institutional education stop so early in life? Why is unemployment such a sin? Such rigidity makes little sense.

There are a lot of changes to that are very overdue.

68

But they’d have to be actually insane to do that, though. Why would you deliberately torpedo your own business just to spite the unemployed? I mean, if I was giving advice to someone on how to drive away your customer base, “shorter hours, longer lines, and worse service” would be just about perfect.

And therein lies the problem. Apparently a whole lot of business owners/managers seem to be actually insane.

69

Lots of them have absolutely no experience at making their businesses attractive places to work. It just wasn’t necessary for a long period of time. And some of them have businesses that are completely built around the assumption that they’ll never have to do that.

70

When I was a teenager in the late 1970s, fast food employers in my hometown could be brutally selective. Some of them had grooming standards up there with the military. I was fired once for letting my hair get too long.

Within a few years that had ended. I always thought a major cause was the boomers aging into adulthood. They no longer had to work minimum wage jobs, and fast food employers had to rely on the smaller Gen-X cohort.

71

My take in it is the marginal increase in such a low wage job hardly covers the extra cost of working. Meaning the extra cost of commuting and clothes, incidentals and food incurred by having to be away from home eats up a significant portion of the wage. It’s just not cost effective to work for such low wages. The Pandemic stopped most people working and I think they found it to be OK enough and see how much they have been taken advantage of. This was partly because the minimum wage has not kept up with inflation so devaluation, moving so slow that it was hard to see how useless it is for many to work at such jobs. Though a forced stop had them do a face plant moment.

Working for such wages additionally devalues one’s life as many people, once they realize this, they tend not to go back on principal as well. Low wage jobs additionally have a glaring problem, they are not valued positions at all (quite the opposite), the people who work them don’t care if they lose their job, and usually there are many places they can work, so no loyalty to the company. This also speaks to the devaluing to Made in the USA, people see the workers in the USA and know they don’t care about their jobs. Our nation has become one of high wage / low wage divide and every job that can be structured in such a way to get it to minimum wage pay grade is done that way and is not sustainable.

72

Funny that you should mention movie theaters; I saw a news story last night mentioning that AMC Theaters is now marketing branded AMC popcorn. I turned to my wife and said "You know, they really ought to do one of two things at this point- either double down on the movie distribution aspect, and license their name to one of the streaming outfits like Netflix as a separate brand for new movies, or they ought to go into the home theater experience with both feet- AMC branded popcorn, candy, sound-bars for the TV, and so on, because the movie theater experience was waning pretty hard even before the pandemic.

Time will tell though… I really liked being able to watch new movies from home- there wasn’t nearly the trepidation that the movie might be poor, despite all the money spent on tickets, snacks, etc… so I was more likely to just take a chance on a couple of hours and $15 or whatever, vs. having to get a sitter, paying $30 for tickets, and a similar amount on snacks/drinks, etc…

73

And a lot of employers will put out a “now hiring” sign just to collect information for future hires.

On the other hand, I’ve heard commercials on the radio for construction companies looking to hire here. Taking out an ad costs time and money, so it seems unlikely that they are doing it unless they really need to hire people.

To counter one anecdote with another, I know someone with fairly limited skills and work experience who applied at Costco, and was working there two weeks later.

74

In the past couple of months, we’ve gotten several postcards in the mail from local businesses – restaurants, as well as small manufacturing and delivery companies – looking for employees. One of them is a small local electronics manufacturing company, where my wife had worked when she was in high school, forty years ago.

And, I’ve also gotten a number of emails from businesses which I use (again, mostly restaurants), specifically looking for employees.

Both of those tactics (as well as the radio ads you’re hearing) mean that a business is spending real money trying to find employees, even if they are sending the postcards/emails to a lot of people who have no interest at all in working for them. It does suggest, to me, that they are truly, actively trying to find people, and that their normal recruiting tactics haven’t worked.

75

Unless you believe that everyone’s lying about these jobs, that there are in fact plenty of people to hire but everyone’s pretending as if there aren’t, this tactic is a giant waste of your company’s time. That information a week later is going to be useless, not even worth keeping. So you’re going to assign an employee’s time to collect a bunch of useless crap. Really only works if everyone’s lying.

76

I have seen this pre-pandemic with independent recruiting firms building a resume bank for future jobs they may recruit for. Also, I’ve heard of companies ‘testing the market’ by seeing who is out there, but this would be a very tiny sliver of open positions posted

77

The fake job ad is common tactic used by recruitment companies to gather resumes that they can mine for contacts. The references become sales leads. This is common practice in the IT business, but you learn to spot the fakes with long lists of an unlikely combinations of skills.

I doubt whether it works at the low wage end of the market during a labour shortage.

78

“The movie theater experience” is just about the only thing that I think of that has been improved by the pandemic. Here in Canada (or at least Ontario), you need a vaccine passport to even get in the building, and when you buy your ticket online, they block off at least a few seats around you for social distancing purposes. So, with fewer people in the theater overall, and the jerks who cause problems being less likely to show proof of vaccination, you now have guaranteed elbow space, large enough that other people talking to each other or otherwise making noise is basically a non-factor.

I haven’t been to very many moves yet, but the one I have gone to have been some of the best “movie theater experiences” ever. I’d be perfectly happy if it stays like this forever.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how this will succeed financially in the long term. It will suck regardless of whether the movie theaters either go back to the old way of doing things, or just fold up shop entirely.

79

Well, maybe not “everyone”, but there’s enough stories out that of people applying for dozens of jobs with no call backs that it’s at least plausible that some of them are lying.

This guy went viral, so is easiest to find, but I’ve seen other examples of the same in recent weeks.

So Holz, a former food-service worker and charter-boat crewman, decided to run an experiment.

On September 1, he sent job applications to a pair of restaurants that had been particularly public about their staffing challenges.

Then, he widened the test and spent the remainder of the month applying to jobs — mostly at employers vocal about a lack of workers — and tracking his journey in a spreadsheet.

Two weeks and 28 applications later, he had just nine email responses, one follow-up phone call, and one interview with a construction company that advertised a full-time job focused on site cleanup paying $10 an hour.

But Holz said the construction company instead tried to offer Florida’s minimum wage of $8.65 to start, even though the wage was scheduled to increase to $10 an hour on September 30. He added that it wanted full-time availability, while scheduling only part time until Holz gained seniority.

80

Where have all the low-wage workers gone? Long time passing
Where have all the low-wage workers gone? Long time ago