I am going to bump this one with some news which play into the themes of this thread. Some of this may merit another discussion – if someone wants to break it out, that’s fine – but we’re past month 6 of the Great Nahployment, it hasn’t stopped, and in some ways, it appears to be… permanent?
RECAP
When I last left this thread it was being debated as to whether the finest economic minds the GOP had to offer were correct in their ending of the extended COVID unemployment benefits in their states, most of this occurring by July 31st, saying this would bring the poors back to their jobs at Popeye’s and Walmart. There was a very disappointing September jobs report, following a couple of rather lackluster summer job reports, where only 194,000 jobs were added in the ninth month. Odd because the anecdata I am hearing, both here on the Dope and elsewhere trends towards a tight job market – people hired prior to background checks being completed, the situation at fast food and casual dining restaurants, successful strikes at John Deere and elsewhere… but, regardless, the data was the data.
What was happening? People weren’t returning to work, they were kicked off unemployment, and the lines at fast food places are worse than ever.
Well…
For starters, the BLS began to quietly revise… in footnotes… the disappointing summer numbers upward. June had 112k jobs added to its report. July, 148k jobs added. A month after that, another 248,000 jobs were found to have been created… all told, over 626,000 jobs were created between June and September which were not reported in those months reports but added in afterwards.
Then the October jobs report was released (11.5.2021). 531,000 jobs were added .
And then, last week, jobless claims fell to the lowest amount since Sugar, Sugar by the Archies was playing out of transistor radios every day, with a mere 199,000 people filing for unemployment .
This is where we stand today, a vastly different employment situation being portrayed by the media (and the BLS) than 2 months ago.
/RECAP
Here’s where this gets tricky – there is a LOT to talk about here, some of which is rather tangential to this discussion, the other part which ties directly in.
TANGENTIAL
The man in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a Trump holdover with the following resume over the past 20-years:
Oh.
Chief economist for the Senate Republicans, you say? Director of the Heritage Foundation… impressive! A stint as VP at the very conservative Mercatus center? Nice holdover until given the BLS gig!
I’m sure his obvious conservative credentials didn’t impact the quality of the data he was giving the American Peo…
Oh. And when you do the math, you find that job losses were underreported by around 920,000 for all of 2020.
So, when Trump was in office, this guy consistently underreported job losses.
And now that Biden is in office, he is now underreporting job gains.
Oh… one last thing. Guess who is in charge of the inflation numbers everyone is suddenly jumping about?
That’s right!
/TANGENTIAL
It’s fascinating what the above numbers and anecdata imply:
They’re not coming back.
Not even at the ‘high’ nahployment rates of $10, $12, $15/hour for jobs which… up until to February 2020… you could keep fully staffed, 24/7/365, for $8/hour.
Only the highest paying restaurants have pre-COVID employment levels, the lower ones on the payscale food chain are struggling, reducing hours, menu items, service options (no more walk-in business at many places, not because of COVID, but because of the demands placed upon the currently reduced workforce by the drive through and delivery orders). Interestingly enough, restaurants which always struggled… ala the undercapitalized family Taquerias… they are still doing their thing, it’s the mid-tier restaurants with $7-12 plates and large dining areas, which are beginning to shutter around here. And Subway’s. Noticed a number of closed Subways, but it could just be one large franchisor with multiple units giving up the ghost.
Same thing with retail outlets – reduced hours, Christmas around the corner and many places have signs saying “See you Friday morning at 7am, enjoy your turkey!” which is industry code for “We were concerned if we made our employees work Thanksgiving night they would just refuse to show up. At all.”
They’re just not coming back. Not @ $14/hour they’re not. Not in the numbers it takes to make your Chili’s or Ann Taylor’s fully pre-COVID operational they’re not.
And so, we’re left with why? And the why is murkier now than when I started this thread back in late April, early May:
-
It’s not the disease – while it killed over a million in the US (like Biden’s job numbers, I fully expect figures… especially the 2020 death toll… to be revised upward) – the majority of deaths were in the elderly demographics.
-
It’s not America’s too-generous social safety programs.
-
It’s not that the jobs aren’t out there.
-
It’s not that the jobs are minimum wage. Hell, I’m going to give conservatives credit here , just you watch: Via your inept handling of the COVID disaster, coupled with a 20-year fight against raising it, capping it off by acting like anti-vaxx barbarians to restaurant and retail staff for 9 straight months which happened to coincide with an era of conservative-inspired racial violence, you conservatives have finally achieved a labor market where the minimum wage is no longer needed to keep your donor’s businesses running, because your donors employees now want 3-5 times as much to do the same job the minimum wage sufficed for in 2019. Good going, guys!
Being treated like useless assholes, seeing white woman after white man yell at Hispanics shift manager on TikTok for seeming hours, they just don’t want America’s shit anymore. They’ve pared down their lives, found other means of making that $400/week, they understand there is no future in this country for them, that your once exalted ‘essential employee’ is now, to Mr and Ms conservative, just another asshole requiring them to wear a mask, there’s no chance of you saving for retirement – hell, you can’t even save for a used car anymore, much less a house, much less be like your grandad in the 1960s who had a boat and a vacation home on a factory-workers salary.
LOL. No wonder the plutocrats took Grandad’s salary away from his son and grandkids, slowly grinding them down while stock options rose ever higher. Any surprise his grandchildren and great grandchildren no longer want to participate in the Great American Experiment?
But I digress…
Of course, the older ones who are tired of America’s shit have retired as well – Krugman goes so far as to call it the Great Retirement, and it does impact our labor markets.
Anyway, it’s Thanksgiving, I have to get going, but I wanted to make note of the wild changes in the labor market, and yet not a one of them making an impact on the Nahployment issue.
Those who want to work are already working. If you want more workers, even here in South Texas it looks like $18/hour is the floor for a fully staffed fast food restaurant. You start at those wages, you’ll be fine.
Maybe.