Did you say “this fall” by accident. Because the data you are presenting is for LAST fall, when a lot of the schools were remote or hybrid or else they were doing fuck-all to prevent the spread of COVID.
Literally every single person I know who had pulled their kids out of school last year has now put them back in school. Even the racists and homophobes who were saying six months ago that they would never put their kids in the hands of the “CRT and gender-confusing” agenda again.
I think the real point is, the “work several shitty jobs for minimum wage” plan is already adding financial stress to a whole lot of people. People under 35 these days aren’t worrying about their retirement or what might happen after a divorce, when they’re already having troubling finding a place they can afford to rent, and they can’t see any improvements on the horizon.
At some point, a lot of them are just going to say, “Screw it, no matter how hard I work, I’m not getting ahead, so why work at all?” And it’s looking like, “At some point” is right now.
Dueling anecdata - my daughter-in-law now teaches in an ‘online academy’ in Kansas. Basically, if you don’t want to send your kid to in-person school, this company teaches them via Zoom.
They hired a bunch of people for this school year, and DIL still ended up with two 50-kid classes (kindergarten and first grade) to start because they ended up with a bunch more kids then expected (and of course didn’t do the responsible thing and say “no” - there was money to be made! (and the kids did need a classroom)
She only had the double load for a week (she kept the 1st graders), and I think the class size has been reduced but haven’t asked her recently.
But of course the age of the kids means there is (hopefully) someone home with them even when they are ‘in class’. No idea (and I doubt she generally knows either) if they are work-from-home folks and stay-at-home parents worried about sending their kids back but know they aren’t a good choice for ‘real’ home-schooling.
Yeah, we have this tendency to disparage the 1950s “Leave it to Beaver” “Father Knows Best” kind of households, but it looks like a lot of people have decided there was some merit to that set up. I’ve seen Facebook memes about how the standard 40 hour work week was predicated on the worker having someone else at home doing all that housework.
I’m sure we’ll see some differences between the new single income families and those of old, so perhaps we can salvage what was good about that arrangement, and leave behind a lot of what was bad.
Sorry for the consecutive posts, but here is a nice article/semi-rant/schadenfreude on employees ghosting employers, and how the employers can’t believe they are being treated that way.
The common refrain from parents in my circle is that they dropped out of workforce because there was no job, or no school, or no daycare during the pandemic. Many would like to go back to work, but daycare slots are incredibly hard to find, and more expensive than ever.
Daycare isn’t a thing you can flip on and off light a lightswitch, if you get a slot, you never give it up until your kids age out or move away. We’re lucky our kids aged out this year so we could go back to work.
It is hilarious that you think that parents pulled kids out of school in 2020 because of dissatisfaction and not because everything shut down due to the pandemic. You know there was a pandemic, right?
Apparently not in Alberta.
I haven’t had to look for a job for over 25 years now, but even back then, I saw a lot of companies that would just never get back to you about the job.
I think the worst one was when I drove to another city for an interview, and then found out via a third party that the company started laying people off less than a week later. Great planning there, jackasses.
I can’t even imagine what it must be like these days.
Yup.
Taking proper care of a household, especially one with kids, is a full-time job; depending on the household and the kids, sometimes more like two or three full time jobs.
It was a serious problem when society assumed that this job would always be held by the woman in the household (and assumed that every proper adult household had a woman in it to do the job.) But it’s also been a serious problem that we’ve been expecting, for the last couple of generations, that all that work would be done in somebody’s (all too often still mostly a woman’s) “spare” time.
People have dealt with this, to a large extent, by paying other people to do most of the work (some of it often just doesn’t get done, which produces its own problems; as does doing it instead of sleeping). This is a setup that does work out well for some families. It’s not a good bargain for a lot of people, including a lot of people who’ve just been assuming that that’s how the world has to work. Some of them discovered in 2020 that it’s not how the world has to work, after all.
Yes. There is a lot of this too. We cancel the childcare, roll back some expenses, and realize… you know what? We don’t actually need 2 incomes. We don’t want to go to some shitty job where 70% of the take-home wage ends up being paid to a stranger to raise our kids. People are realizing that traditional home arrangements are a lot more satisfying than doing the dual-income juggling routine, especially with employment arrangements being as precarious and exploitive as they’ve become. Employers demanding that workers return to offices that seem indifferent to safety. People are responding to this by leaving the workforce in droves.
What’s the matter conservatives, hasn’t this always been your dream? Did you think it would come without consequences?
You seem to be assuming that the second job involves making a lot of money. In many cases, especially the jobs that aren’t getting filled, they don’t. No 401K. Probably no health insurance. Possibly unpredictable hours. Subtract the cost of day care and take out and a commute from a crappy salary and you don’t have much. Yeah divorce might be worse, but it is no picnic for a woman with a low wage job as it is. Not to mention the stress of who stays home from work when a kid is sick and who is responsible for picking the kids up for daycare.
Yeah, I was thinking more of the teachers, nurses, office workers, etc. who are getting out of the workforce. If a family has enough savings to enable one of them to stay at home, that’s probably a family where both people were in reasonably good paying jobs. Someone staying at home will be giving up a lot in lost income, retirement, and heath insurance. And getting back into the workforce years later may be more problematic since employers don’t like seeing long gaps in employment and may be reluctant to hire older workers.
Another group I thought of was older workers that are dual income empty nesters may voluntarily make the decision to leave the workforce. They may have decided to work to get extra money for the expense of raising kids and paying for college, but now that’s in the past and perhaps the extra money isn’t as appealing.
Also, the scorching hot real estate market means they’re already making money from property they own.
And that’s the heart of the matter. “Oh, so sorry, you ‘don’t like’ the gap on my resume? Well fuck you, who else are you going to hire?”
Business has had the upper hand in hiring for so long, they’re convinced that they should have the upper hand for the rest of time. Having the upper hand is what let them institute more and more stupid, arbitrary rules like this. But now, they need to learn that’s not always going to be the case. Enough employees have learned they don’t have to beg for a job that employers are going to have to change their attitudes if they want to continue in business. It may take years for them to really grasp this, though.
Yeah, I saw some numbers that showed something like 2 million more people retired in the US in 2020 compared to the normal expected number of retirements. And that’s not just older people doing part time work for pocket money. A lot were office worker types who decided to retire rather than deal with all the pandemic issues.
Being older, they tend to be in more senior jobs - which means there are a lot more of those jobs that need to be filled, and where do those workers come from? Yep, from the younger workers with lower-paying jobs. Middle managers become upper management, office drones become middle managers, warehouse workers move to the office, burger flippers move to the warehouse, and suddenly no one needs to work at McDonalds any more.
I suspect the norm of dual incomes may be shaded by clustering of these households. Keep in mind many households only have one adult.
40% of households have multiple earners, down from 44% in 1980 (I can’t find if Census tracked this earlier). If we exclude households with zero earners, then it’s 52%, down from 55%. Just as an interesting aside, both of these peaked in 1989 at 46 and 58%, respectively.
If we restrict “families” to married couple households with minor children, then it’s something like 50%. I don’t have a time series, but IIRC that too peaked around 1990 after rising steadily as more women joined the (paid) labor force.
Yeah, but they have to live somewhere, and you can’t eat a house. Could of course downsize to pull cash, but that’s a one-time deal.
But some people could pull a lot of cash, if they wanted. I’ve been looking at my local real estate market, and if I was willing to compromise a bit on where I want to live, I could buy a new place outright and probably walk away with close to 200k in cash. If I were more frugal than I actually am, that could let me coast for several years with no job.
And that’s on top of a stock market that’s near record highs, so their retirement accounts and any other taxable accounts should also be looking nice.
Not health insurance, since if the spouse has a good job the person staying home is covered. The thing they have to do, and are probably doing, is computing the incremental income from the job. If the good job becomes effectively a MW job, it might not be worth the aggravation, especially if the higher income earner is making enough to live on.
And a lot of it is psychological. If you love your job, you’ll probably stay with it, but lots of people don’t love their jobs, thanks no doubt to crappy employers. How do you value the removal of stress? I retired just before 65, and while I loved my job I also loved not having to commute and not having to wake up early.
Horatius covered what I was going to say about gaps quite nicely.