Not to detail the thread, but every right wing news story about how the lazy poor people are living large on that $2000 they got six month ago and how it’s the job of the government to plunge them into financial insecurity in order to maximize shareholder profits is followed by a story showing thousands of highly motivated laborers amassed on the Southern border begging to be allowed in so to they can work a crappy low wage job.
Maybe there’s a solution in there somewhere.
You can’t derail this thread by making the same point the OP did earlier. 
Here’s the problem: No one knows if the current labor shortages are due to the pandemic, or because people are being paid to stay home. And wages are sticky - if you offer someone $20/hr to work now because you can’t find workers, and then in September when the covid checks run out the price of labor for that job drops back to $15, you are now carrying a work force more expensive than your competitors. And telling workers you are cutting their pay by $5/hr doesn’t work.
This is what ‘regime uncertainty’ looks like. When governments muck about in markets, it clouds the decision-making of everyone else because they can’t tell if changes in demand are organic or the result of a temporary intervention. With labor markets it’s even harder because it’s more difficult to unwind hiring and pay decisions. Then there’s all the money printing and inflation, which makes it even harder to figure out what to pay workers.
I’m guessing a lot of businesses are just muddling along with the workers they have, waiting to see what happens when everything is completely open again and what labor markets look like once the idiotically generous pandemic relief is done.
Did you skip over the part where I mentioned we have called the police to enforce the rules? And that self-entitled piece of shit snowflakes react with violence towards the police?
I’m going to get specific here: these jerkwads are always White Republican Trump fans. Always. And if they don’t get their way they get violent. What, exactly, do you propose we do? Get in their face and risk a beating or shooting?
We did have store security trying to deal with this. Within two days of trying that one of our “big burly guys” was punched repeatedly, had his nose broken, and was threatened with death for asking that someone wear a mask. We had a couple weeks where the local police were stationed at our door and there were still violent confrontations. With the police. And a bunch of arrests.
I don’t think most people get just how opposed some people are to wearing masks.
95% of the public were behaving and wearing masks and complying with requests. But you have a bunch of two-legged pieces of used toilet paper ruining things for the rest of us.
Well, me, it’s what I’ve been doing for a living. I didn’t volunteer, I showed up for my shift one day and the rules had changed for all of us that worked there. I was told that I could either deal with the new situation or quit, but if I quit I would not be able to collect unemployment. So it for me it was either work in that environment or starve and be homeless. So that’s why I did it. YMMV.
But yeah, that is one reason retail is having such a problem with staffing right now.
Where am I “pretending” that it isn’t an issue?
Hey, I get it - we’ve lost staff because their families didn’t want them working at our store during a pandemic with all the hazards and dangerous possibilities. That’s why many retails outlets are short staffed right now.
We had the freakin’ local police station outside our entrance for weeks, and still had problems! I’m sorry, but my employer is NOT able to activate the National Guard on our behalf, which would have been the next step up.
It wasn’t about the boss “allowing” it - it was a bunch of violent, self-entitled jackasses threatening other people.
^ This. Trump’s little circus and his pandering to his “base” are the cause of this sort of crap. These assholes showing up, wearing their politics on their hats and jackets and shirts and screaming about “rights” and “freedom” and threatening to harm other people was just throwing fat on the fire.
This is NOT the fault of employers, it’s the fault of politicians and a society and enabled and coddled the perpetrators of violence. But most of all it’s the fault of thugs who put their fears and politics ahead of public safety and the safety of others.
I agree the politicians shouldn’t criticize those not willing to risk their lives for minimum wage. Also for more than minimum wage - I’m solidly middle class these days (yay me) but I completely understand why others would find my current income a fair trade for physical risk. But the poor/lower class/retail workers/etc. have always been a handy scapegoat.
That might be true of some industries, but we’ve been hiring for over a year now to keep our staffing up. There have been a number of times the store has almost closed from lack of employees to run it, both from people quitting and from covid outbreaks (the company shuffled people around when possible to cover gaps but it was rough. Very rough). It’s made a tough year even tougher.
Yeah, I get all that. There’s something else going on as well that started some time ago. There appears to be a number of good jobs that young people just won’t do. I chatted with a factory manager who said they were critically short of people, but every time they’d bring someone in for an interview they’d do the tour, then simply ghost the company after being offered the job.
This was a good job in a clean high-tech factory, which paid over $20/hr plus benefits, and they didn’t even require a high school diploma for most positions.
My speculation is that one of the issues is that cell phones are not allowed on the factory floor for safety and security reasons, and young people just couldn’t deal with that.
Other than that, I got nothin’. I would have killed for a job like that when I was getting started, but now they simply can’t find workers. Most factories are having problems like this, snd it’s a big factor driving automation.
In other words, in this case it isn’t automation taking jobs, but the lack of workers forcing automation.
This, ‘A security guard got punched!’, reasoning quite frankly amazes me. Security guys get paid for the service. Bouncers get punched in bars, but the bar owners don’t throw up their arms and announce, ‘What are we to do?’
What they do is hire more security till the customers get the idea. Why? Because they value the safety of their staff and their customers.
What they don’t do is decide they can’t possibly enforce the restrictions. People shouldn’t be bullied out of health safety measures, in my opinion.
Right.
Is there a reading comprehension problem here?
After the security guy got punched the local police force started guarding the door. I just went back and checked and yes, I did mention that in my prior post.
And then the police started getting violence and threats.
It’s not that we sat on our thumbs and did nothing - the problem is that the maskholes wouldn’t stop.
No, people shouldn’t be bullied out of safety measures. But when those bullies have the support of people with power and they’re walking around armed the problem of dealing with them gets a lot more difficult.
What would you have had us do? By all means, share this - retail outlets across this country struggled with this problem for over a year, they would LOVE to have an actual solution.
I agree, that’s all I was saying.
~Max
You do, I don’t. So be it.
~Max
It’s not the businesses fault someone else breaks the law. If hired security and even a police presence are not enough, I’m comfortable saying the business has done its due diligence.
~Max
OK, got it. Looks like I got a bit at cross-purposes there. Sorry about that.
I’m with you, and you’re with what I wanted to say. My daughter lives in a Trumpist place, but a high income one, and though she hates the maskholes there is no violence.
I’ve never a person without a mask in my grocery store, and the customers would shame such a person if they showed up. But we’re a horrible libertyless place that doesn’t allow every Tom Dick and Harry to carry a gun.
But I live in the Communist Bay Area.
My conjecture is that the job may have offered no advancement, or was overly repetitive (and thus an excellent candidate for automation anyway) or the hours weren’t stable. It’s easy to make a guess. is it also possible the leaders were toxic or they got a bad vibe from something else?
I think most people want to work; of course there’s always exceptions but I honestly believe the vast majority of people want to work. It’s not enough anymore to just cover the bills; people want their work to have meaning and to make a difference. McJobs don’t cut it.
Nope. The job was in an aviation factory. It’s not assembly line. some workers did composite layups, some worked on engine plumbing, others in quality control. I talked to lots of workers in my role to gather requirements, and they were happy and liked their jobs. They had health care benefits, a retirement plan, etc.
How high yoh could climb would depend on the job you were hired for and your education, but anyone could rise at least to the level of floor supervisor or shop steward or head of QA - positions like that.
The average age in that factory was mid-50’s, and pur job there was to document and digitize as many processes as we could, because they had no apprentices for the older workers to train before they retired, and the company was wprried about losing all their domain knowledge with them.
The average age of factory workers in the U.S. is in the mid-40’s. And there are shortages of workers. Something’s going on with young people that seems to make them avoid factory work.
They don’t want to be treated like shit?
It’s called readily available office work. Trying to get an office job when you haven’t had one before is very hard, but the labor shortage we have now affects even office work. Those spots fill up as soon as they open, because people will damn well take being seated in front of a computer typing and clicking all day instead of doing more physically intensive tasks. Eventually, any job involving actual manual labor will pay much better than office jobs, simply because fewer people will put up with it. You can already see it a little now - I saw an job ad for siding installers that was paying more than my job as a 5-year experienced CPA. Not much more, but I can’t imagine it’s nearly as hard to learn to install siding than it is to become a CPA. It is a lot harder on your back though.
What Sam was describing wasn’t a McJob, though.
While you listed a number of reasons you left one out - parental influence. A lot of parents will discourage factory work, or the trades, and push their children towards jobs with more status and perceived more money (in actuality, some of the trades pay very well).
Looking back, I think I might have done well in a trade and been happier, but that was absolutely off the table for me when I was young enough to get into one. It’s a shame, because we need plumbers and mechanics and electricians as well as doctors and accountants.
Social perception of it as low-status and potentially dangerous. A lot of the parents and grandparents wanted out of factory work and want “better” for the young folks.
I’ve worked in an office, in a factory, in construction, and in retail. They all have the potential to treat you like shit. Some of the worst situations have been in nice, clean, pretty-looking offices.
Not as much book-learning, no, but doing it well requires some skill that has to be learned and doing it efficiently requires giving a damn and some practice/experience. In addition to the physical demands of lifting, climbing ladders, etc. and the hazards of tools and heights you also have to put up with all kinds of weather.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
From 1987’s The Reckoning, David Halberstam:
