The Mercatus Center is a Koch funded libertarian free-market oriented think tank and not an unbiased source.
Another wrinkle… Tele-work.
I work in/for a county that has 4 major ski resorts and lots of recreational opportunities. Tourist central.
Many affluent people own second homes/condos here and rent them out part of the year. I think that a lot of folks that can tele-work have decided to work from their vacation home. I mean, why not?
This is just IMHO, but I think this is one of the reasons there is a seasonal worker shortage here. There’s no place to rent, and if you find a place, the price is even more ridiculous than a few years ago.
Another BIG problem is short term rentals, Air-B&B’s or what ever. Instead of renting for months, or a year. They are renting to people on vacation. And since the COVID lock down has mostly ended, people are out in droves.
While I live 15 miles from town, when I go into town I see more, and more, and more people milling about. And while it’s good for business, the businesses are struggling to serve them.
Also, teleworkers can now work from anywhere are are renting up air-bnbs for a month at a time to explore the area while working. I have two coworkers that have been doing this the past year. Both are avid outdoors lovers and have done some long-term stays in places like Moab, Durango, etc. Work a bit during the day, hike and mountain bike in the evenings and weekends. And they both get paid plenty to be able to afford this type of lifestyle.
I’ve made it clear that I want to continue to work from home. Boss and Grand Boss are trying to consolidate the folks want to or have to come into the office into one space. Plenty of room. It’s all still up in the air. We have proven that we can work from home, and get more done.
I have a very nice cube at ‘work’. Corner office, great views plenty of room. Was told that Grand boss is looking at it for himself. TPTB do need a place to hang their hat. Works better for meetings and such. Whatever.
I have a great set up at home, there is no need for me to be in the ‘office’. Many don’t have a good set up for home office. Mines perfect. I did change over to Starlink for better internet and bought a new workstation. I’m good.
I am one of the lucky that the forced work from home was a HUGE benefit. I do feel for those that lost lives, jobs and sanity.
My school district saw more retirements last year than they have ever seen in a single year before. Lots of teachers just said “Fuck it!” when faced with all the hassles of Distance Learning and the asshole parents in this redneck town who refuse all mask mandates. The teachers would rather retire a little early than mess with all that, plus retiring means they don’t have to be around the disease-ridden plague monkeys that children always are.
I’ve got a good friend who teaches Head Start. Doozy of a hard job at the best of times due to its nature, and with additional layers of difficulty both due to covid and due to some clueless administration.
She wasn’t, originally, going to retire until a couple years from now. And she’s still working. But she’s getting herself to work each day, at this point, only by telling herself that she can quit any day if it’s just too much. Somebody gives her too much crap on some given day, she’s likely to be out of there.
I’m one of the opposite. I was able to work from home and could continue if I wanted. But I like going into work (I have a very nice office with a great view). I have a short bike commute, and it breaks up my day. Before I was always home and felt always at work. I’m so glad to be back in the office. Maybe when we are ready to retire and move to a larger home with a dedicated office, I might consider working remotely for a while (yes, our retirement home is larger than what we live in now).
I’m hoping that people like you and I will balance things out. I do have a co-worker that would like to be in the office a few days a week. She really doesn’t have a good set up at home. My bosses boss home office is his kitchen table, no wonder he has his eye on my cube.
I have about a 100 sq. ft. office loft over our bedroom that keeps things separate for me at home.
Interesting to see 500 no shows among part time employees for the University of Texas’ football game.
I wonder how much of it is due to the Governor’s fervent demands of no vaccine or mask mandates?
Earlier in the thread it was asked if other countries are experiencing this.
Britain is looking at potential food shortages because their agricultural workforce has dropped up to 34% in the past year.
A good chunk is Brexit-oriented, yes. But Britain also has 1.6 million unemployed, so this will be an interesting test of labor market wage elasticity.
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For the employer, they have to pay more to get British people to do ag work.
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But… they may make the case that if you want to eat, you’d better get your ass to work and not complain about the pay.
We will see. Hell, imagine if Britain has to impress school kids so they can harvest. Likely won’t get to that… it’s not WW2… but it will be an interesting winter regardless.
Many people are capable of doing other work but not capable of doing agricultural work; especially if we’re talking about hand field work.
Such work requires good physical condition. Doing it at any reasonable rate of speed requires physical condition that’s trained for the particular work. And doing it without screwing up requires knowing how to do the specific job – can you tell when a melon’s ripe enough to finish ripening off the vine, but not ripe enough to rot in the bin and screw up all the others? did you know that how to tell varies with the specific variety of melon, and the tell for one kind can be worse than useless for another? And that’s one specific job and one specific crop – and some of those tells are body knowledge, such as how much pressure it takes on the side of the stem, that can only be learned with practice. Not to mention that a bad melon can ruin others in the bin, but ignorance of safety practices can ruin or end a life.
Yes, most people in good physical shape can learn how; but very few can learn the skills and get into the condition fast. Yes, school kids used to do some of it – but school kids used to learn how.
British agricultural work is based on migrant labour. Low wages with everyone housed in shared on-site cabins (the cost of which is deducted from wages), temporary seasonal work, often just a few weeks at a time. The low wages might be fixable, and the benefits system is actually somewhat more flexible so that you can take on short term work then go back on benefits if nothing long-term is available.
But anyone who has rent to pay will still need to pay rent for the few weeks they get that work (for multiple reasons it almost always just would not be a good idea to give up your home for eight weeks) - so that reduces those low wages to, sometimes, less than zero.
It’s no good for parents or anyone with caring responsibilities. Or anyone with physical disabilities or many types of autism. There’s never any public transport that could realistically get you to the farm. The farmers do sometimes provide a shuttle bus from nearby large towns - some of them are doing that now - but that’s still a limited pool of people, and a lot of them don’t want to do that because their budget is based on tiny wages with an on-site housing deduction, not a normal minimum wage with no deductions and the cost of a shuttle bus.
There just aren’t enough suitable people living close to those areas that they can just drive in to work. The people that can drive and have a car, live nearby, aren’t disabled, don’t have caring responsibilities (or have free childcare), etc, probably already have jobs.
And yep, it’s more skilled than people think it is.
Reuters had an illuminating article on the lack of British truckers:
Other complaints included long hours (such as work days starting at 3 AM). The UK now has a problem with a lack of truckers (allegedly) caused by Brexit, which has seriously impacted fuel deliveries, and of course there’s now fuel hoarding. Foreign truckers would rather travel to other EU countries rather than the UK for work. The UK is opening up 5,000 visas for a mere three months, but the industry says it needs 100,000 more truckers. While EU drivers would rather stay in the EU, I’m sure the UK can get 5,000 truckers. I’m not sure what impact 5,000 truckers would have for only three months; I suspect not nearly enough.
One of my original points in the OP is that many people have found alternative ways to work for money outside the typical W-2 and 1099 earnings path.
Others have argued that extended unemployment insurance (UI) benefits are to blame for this, still continuing (and possibly worsening?) crisis.
And, as much as I hate it, given that this negatively impacts hundreds of thousands, millions of people… when the GOP governors decided, en masse, to impoverish their citizens as to force them to go to work, we were given an opportunity to see which theory is correct.
Are people finding alternative means of funding their lifestyles, or did they just need to be kicked off the dole, forcing them to return to W-2 and 1099 jobs?
I found this graphic which easily breaks down the measure of assistance given via the various programs (regular unemployment insurance, extended, COVID supplements, etc):
(The Y-axis is # of people, in thousands.)
As we can see, the number of people receiving extended benefits plummeted by 5,000,000 at the end of August. So what happened?
How many people rushed back to their jobs?
But… when you look at the details of the just-released September BLS jobs report, that is when it gets really weird:
So… private employment is fine. The actual unemployment rate dropped to 4.8%. There are an additional 710k people working in total. Labor force participation held steady, only dropping by 0.1%, (-184,000, almost a rounding error).
(I like Zerohedge’s analysis of the report, and some of this post is based upon numbers provided by ZH, just FYI.)
But…
Look at that last line. Government lost 132,000 jobs in the first full month of the school year. Also, note that 'Education and Health Services" lost 7,000 jobs in private-sector employment.
Now… this doesn’t necessarily mean that the jobs don’t exist. We are conditioned to thinking ‘If I hear employment went down by 10,000 in the auto industry, that means 10k people were fired, their jobs no longer existing’. But that’s not entirely accurate: You can have rising unemployment in a positive hiring environment if the jobs being offered are not appealing to the population capable of holding them and they are capable of earning money via means other than traditional employment.
And this is shown very starkly here - in the one sector in which you know September employment is going to hold steady, even rise… education… we are seeing that industry struggling to keep its people employed, and failing to such a significant degree it is impacting the overall jobs report.
To quote Zerohedge:
That is 676,000 jobs lost in the education sector, the majority of them government jobs. This doesn’t necessarily mean teachers, of course - anecdotally, the teachers I know say their schools are suffering from a shortage of staff and maintenance workers. And teachers, but mostly staff and maintenance.
These two items - (1) employment didn’t grow anywhere as expected given the 5,000,000 kicked off extended UI benefits, and (2) an industry which should be hitting its annual employment peak is struggling to find workers, to me, highlights that there are millions who are checked out of the full participation of American economic life, who have stopped chasing the American Dream and are working merely for maintenance, not advancement.
I’m not surprised that education is the first industry to crack: constantly belittled and underfunded by the conservative majorities in this country over the past forty years, since 2019 a fucking shitstorm has descended upon America education because of the MAGAts and Anti-Vaxxers - from paid protesters going to school board meetings in a purposeful campaign to keep ‘Critical Race Theory’ front and center in the mind of racist voters, to barbaric anti-vaxxers shouting at children their fervent desire to kill them, to their psychotic dedication to the second amendment even as more children die for their ideological insanity.
(I can write a damn-near similar post regarding the same peoples impact on the medical field. But I don’t need to. We are living it.)
I have dated a fair number of teachers in the past couple of years and there is not a one of them who loves their jobs. They love the kids, most definitely, but their jobs, the job conditions, and the pay? lolol. Not in America.
They’re just working for their 20 years, then typically take an internal temperature test to see if they can go 5 more, as to get a nicer pension.
And so the ‘nahployment’ crisis deepens. It is not getting better, and it is spreading to the professions, especially those in health and education, the industries where you, as a simple worker bee, are most likely to suffer from the current political climate, from being accosted to being shot.
Next post, when I get to it, I’ll talk about George. He’s someone I’m interviewing for the MDS project and his story neatly dovetails into the themes of this thread.
It doesn’t affect your message, but that’s actually early September. The x axis formatting was chosen poorly.
But do carry on.
Part of the decline in education hiring may be that roughly 8 million students are now being homeschooled - up from about 2-3 million before the pandemic. I expect that to continue to grow rapidly as public schools radicalize and also because of vaccine/mask mandates.
The pandemic has caused a number of sectoral shifts that must be affecting employment. It’s not just that workers aren’t going back - it’s that they may not have jobs to go back to.
For example, local retail has taken a massive hit, but online shopping and home delivery have grown. But you can’t take an unemployed waitress and hire her as a truck driver. So we have a situation where there are both lots of unemployed and lots of open jobs. That will continue until the economy adapts.
This argument is not supported by a corresponding rise in private education hiring, Sam. If a market develops for non-public education services, this would be reflected in hiring numbers.
But those are dropping as well.
Lastly, if your argument is that unemployment is being driven because your ideological cohorts are purposely making themselves dumber via homeschooling because of fake fears of radicalization, well, I appreciate your concession that your ideology is not rational.
Is your data broken down by state? I’m curious whether Red states, with worse pay for teachers and more resistance to mask mandates is seeing this more than blue states. I haven’t noticed anything about it in the Times about New York, and I haven’t heard anything about it in my part of California.
…Schools reopened in September en masse, and employed 1.28 million more people (excluding seasonal adjustments) in September than in August. But a “normal” year, whatever that means anymore, would have featured an even bigger surge in employment. In other words, this might be a statistical artifact of a shrinking education sector earlier in the pandemic, not new information about what is happening this fall…
Probably paywalled
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/upshot/jobs-report-september.html