I think it actually ends today. I’ve been having trouble finding the number receiving the supplement as of it running out. IIRC about half of states already ended it early.
Looks like the supplement runs out for 1.6M, with 1.1M already having had theirs stopped by their states. But 7.5M have their benefits run out entirely ~today.
And in states that made early cuts, only about one in eight who had their payments end have found jobs. Per this wapo article:
summarizing this paper, which I have yet to read:
So that suggest some employment boost in the coming months. But there’s some discussion about spending decreases, which could dampen employment. I’m not going to attempt any predictions.
These people are idiots. They are clearly, obviously wrong. This will not go as planned.
Thanks for the clarification.
Ok… there’s something I’ve been struggling to figure out with the whole unavailability of low wage workers right now.
Is it something fairly permanent, like there were a lot of better jobs out there for low-wage people, but too many of them had the tiger by the tail, so to speak, and the pandemic/lockdowns have let them actually catch a breath and get better jobs?
Or is it more of a temporary thing, where they’re taking advantage of stimulus checks and other pandemic safety net items, and not working those jobs, because they don’t have to right now?
I mean, the people who used to work all those low wage jobs are somewhere. Are they working? Is it just that they’re working part-time in other jobs because the low-wage ones are so bad, and they have some pandemic-related relief? Or is it something more structural, where lots of them have new, better jobs, and there literally won’t be enough people to work those jobs once the safety net stuff is gone?
If anything, I’m seeing MORE issues due to lack of workers now in late August/September than I was back in late April when the thread started. Which set me to wondering…
An anecdote isn’t evidence of anything but one person, but I found this article from today interesting.
Basically, the author is saying he knows he has to deal with angry drunks at times being a bartender but now having to be the mask police is just too exhausting. We’ve gotten so polarised over it that he will do other jobs rather than bartend.
I’ve been wondering how many of these low wage workers haven’t returned to their low wage jobs because they finally got a good job.
My niece has struggled to find employment in the two years since she graduated from college. But she’s not going back to fast food work, because she finally found a real job where she can use her engineering skills.
I imagine that a lot of older workers, people in their sixties that were a year or three from retirement, decided to go ahead and retire instead of re-entering the workforce. Besides, Covid-19 killed or incapacitated lots of working people. If they are a lot of upper level job openings we aren’t going to hear stories about shortages of C-suite executives. Lower level executives will get promoted up and even lower level workers will move up into their jobs, freeing up entry level jobs, which will go to the people working at McDonalds because they’ve been unable to find work in their chosen field.
So the way I see it, any labor shortage is going to turn into a labor shortage in the least desirable jobs.
Historically, my head keeps going to the shake-up in the medieval labor markets post-plague, labor shortages that some historians credit for breaking up the feudal system.
It’s not just low wage workers. There are employee shortages all over the place.
I think what’s going on is a combination of multiple effects. Fear of Covid, improved finances from the lockdown and benefits allowing people to not work, being out of the workforce or working at home for a year and a half has made some people change their priorities or their tolerance for working out of the home, more spouses not working so they can take care of the kids who are not in school or being home schooled, a large number of early retirements, and probably other factors.
We’ve undergone a complex societal shift that is going to play out in many different ways. The only question is how permanent it will all be.
I would often tell my office mates on nice spring or fall day that there were often as many 10 days a year when I regretted working in an office as opposed to outside (raised in Minnesota where the winters are brutal and the summers are hard, currently in Missouri where the summers are brutal and the winters are hard).
A lot of people would indeed rather work any office job than work outdoors.
And a lot of others would rather work any outdoor job rather than work indoors all the time.
People vary. But children growing up tend to be taught, not to find the proper sort of work for them, but that the indoor jobs are essentially better than the outdoor ones and the sitting-at-a-desk jobs are essentially better than the physical-labor jobs. Many people absorb this; and some of them are unhappy all their working lives without knowing why, because they’re among the ones for whom it’s not true.
And this is likely because the type of people who become teachers in the first place are more likely to be the type who don’t want to work outdoors or in a trade, so the kids don’t get both sides of the story.
Possibly also made worse by the relative scarcity of men in primary education.
Supposedly resume screening software has been resulting in millions of viable candidates being rejected:
Not that human screeners are necessarily better.
News summaries:
Really? When I was doing a lot of field work, I had an office space and would occasionally drop in. The office employees, in general, reacted with envy whenever I told them I was spending the day in the field.
So much that I once asked them…….”You do understand I’m not spending the day playing in an actual field, right?”
I buy that. I’ve read plenty of horror stories about this from before the pandemic. I can just imagine how gaps in employment which was the kiss of death before but are common now would cause lots of good resumes to get rejected. And how understaffed overworked HR departments and managers don’t have the time to review by hand.
I think it’s an attitude of the general society. Kids don’t only get it from their teachers; they get it from the degree of respect that they see others in general giving, or not giving, to particular types of work.
With the expansion of work-from-home, I expect the number of applicants to rise significantly for jobs that have that option. Rather than just getting applicants from just the few zip codes around the office, they’ll get applications from across the country. If HR doesn’t have the resources to hand-select applicants from the local area, they certainly aren’t going to do any better when the whole country can apply. I would suspect they will need to depend even more highly on automated filtering to find suitable candidates.
But I’m not sure that applicant filtering is really affecting the businesses struggling to find workers. There’s lots of stories of employers not getting applicants to call back or show up for scheduled interviews and some new hires just walk off the job after just a few days. It sounds like those companies are able to find applicants, but they can’t get them to show up or stick around.
Could they not just tweak the software to stop kicking resumes with employment gaps? Surely there are user options that can be adjusted?
Our lawn care provider has not been able to get a crew to show up to cut our lawn several times this year. I have cut it myself four times with a walk behind mower. I save $85 but I hate mowing.
A son of a friend who is not college bound and a couple of his friends get hired by this company. They are trained and sent out to do jobs. Second house, the homeowner stands outside yelling at them to work faster, making them redo stuff and just generally being an ass. Calling them names.
After a couple of hours of this they walk off the job. Customer raises he’ll with the landscaping company owner and he fired the boys. I asked him why, he said they have to learn that “The customer is always right”!
Dude, you are losing business right and left because employees are your most valuable resource and you don’t realize it.
I can’t vouch for the other two boys but my friend’s son is a very polite, honest and hardworking guy. They’ve gone back to working construction where they don’t have to deal with customers at least.
Some of them went home.
No joke, Trump made things so uncomfortable for undocumented workers a lot of them went back home. And then when things shut down and the jobs weren’t there more of them went home because they could be unemployed at home without the hassles of being somewhere illegally. Of course, that doesn’t account for everyone.
Some of them are working. Some of them found other jobs that may or may not pay better, or may or may not be less of a hassle.
I also know of about a dozen people who used the time off to get their act together and get BETTER jobs - more pay, benefits, etc. so why would they ever go back to the low-wage job they had?
Also, a certain number of people stopped working to take care of the kids and either still have to do that do to a shortage of child care, or discovered that no, they didn’t actually NEED the additional income and have chosen to work at raising their family.
I think upthread women leaving the workforce was mentioned, but I rarely see it talked about in the “won’t somebody think of the employers” articles. 1-2 million women have not returned to the workforce after leaving for covid related reasons. The reasons they don’t return are varied, but include such obvious stuff as closed schools, inability to find child care, and preferring being at home over working.
That is a huge number of people simply gone from the workforce.
Another big one I don’t see mentioned often is immigration, both legal and illegal. Covid has reduced legal immigration to the US, which reduces available workers. A few decades of anti-undocumented immigration efforts, culminating in the outright xenophobia of the previous administration, plus pandemic related things, have reduced the number undocumented workers.
Also, a bunch of people died. Many of them were not in the workforce anyway, but killing a few hundred thousand people under 65 is going to reduce the labor pool.
Some of the women may return if when need the money, but many can’t without reliable child care, regardless of the money situation.
Ending of unemployment benefits and such obviously won’t change immigration and death related labor losses.