People have no-showed interviews or not responded to offers for years, that is nothing new… although it is markedly more common since COVID. In the past maybe half of the people I scheduled for an interview would no-show or cancel, my experience this year has been maybe four out of five who schedule end up “ghosting” the interview. That sucks but you know, whatever, we don’t have enough people scheduling in the first place that I have to worry about running out of time slots.
What is infuriating is when they take the offer, ask for two weeks (to give notice to their current employer), and then drop off the face of the earth. Or when they take the offer, ask for two weeks, sign the employment papers, come in for training, and spend an entire morning showing enthusiasm for the new job - then disappear over the lunch break never to be seen again. That kind of stunt makes us worry you got into a car accident or something.
Which did happen by the way. I previously wrote about our six-month quest to fill a full time position. We finally filled the position and about a month into the job, the new employee just didn’t show up to work or return anyone’s calls. It turns out she did get into a terrible motorcycle accident and was in the hospital. I’ve tried to keep up with her, we were hoping she would recover and be able to come back, but I haven’t reached her in weeks and have reason to suspect she is depressed or may have had serious complications in surgery.
Another factor having nothjng to do with pay or working conditions is simply that there have been large sectoral shifts in the economy, and it takes time for the labor force to adapt.
Economists tend to treat labor as fungible, but it really isn’t. Just because there are now a million waiters out of work and a million jobs open in trucking and construction does not mean those waiters can just shift over, or want to. An unemployed teacher is not going to take a job on a road crew except as a last resort, even if they are technically qualified.
It is going to take time for the labor force to adapt to the huge changes to the economy. And the additional cash that people have accrued during the pandemic is buying them time to choose.
Lots of people got Covid benefits because they were working at the time. Then they stayed home, got used to that, didn’t spend much money and accrued a bunch of savings. Now they are asked to go back to work, and instead they quit and look for something better.
Part of this is just wealth. People have more options now than they used to. When I was young I did lot of really crap jobs. I didn’t have the option to decide I’m too good for them, because I needed to work to survive.
The quits rate is up. 5.2 million people left their jobs voluntarily in August. Now I’m sure many of them immediately got a new job. But the people not working today aren’t necessarily the ones who weren’t working yesterday or last year.
The political party that was claiming that people would rather sit on unemployment than go back to work has just decided to allow those fired for refusing to get vaccinated to be able to collect unemployment! You can’t make this up.
As I’ve said before, Republicans have developed talking out of both sides of their ass into a fine art. I’ve even seen them manage it in the same sentence.
Another thing I thought of about how are people surviving without work…my boyfriend was laid off from Penske a year ago. He cashed out his 401k and his pension and lived off that for a year (along with some eBay & Craigslist sales). Not the smartest move, but for people living day-to-day, paycheck-to-paycheck, that money sitting in those retirement accounts is awful appealing if it means not having to work, and having time to find something else. Had he been eligible for unemployment - there was a problem with his work history as he had been off due to injury for a while before layoff - he probably still wouldn’t be working.
I do believe when my brother was between jobs, before covid, he did something similar with his retirement accounts. I don’t think people my age (40s) are thinking too hard about retirement. I know I am in the mindset of … I’m never going to retire. I’ll die here.
I recall articles from late 2020 that people were raiding their retirement accounts less than expected. But haven’t seen anything recently. And I’m not sure how this is even tracked.
Yeah to be honest I don’t really have much data to go on, just my personal anecdotes. Almost all of my friends kept their jobs during the pandemic so no one but my boyfriend had to make the choice to raid it. And as I said, my brother who had done it pre-covid. I just don’t get the feeling that my friends are working too hard on aggressively saving for retirement. Personally I have an IRA but it’s weak. I don’t contribute the max. I’d rather spend my money on fixing up my house than stashing it all away for the future. It would be NICE to be able to do both but I’m living in the now. And seriously expecting to be dead by 70.
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). 531,000jobs 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…
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.
A question. And this not meant to be a gotcha or anything, I’m just trying to get a better understanding of what you’re saying.
When you say jobs were created, does this mean jobs were created – as in, positions that didn’texist before? Or simply extant positions filled? Or something else? For instance, if I open a widget manufacturing company and need to hire, say, 10 workers, did I create 10 jobs? If I can only hire 7 people did I only create 7 jobs?
Or do those 3 remaining open positions count as the “jobs created”?
Does this mean that people are either a) not losing their jobs and / or finding employment as soon as they want to or b) does it simply mean people who were working have dropped out of the workforce and are not collecting unemployment? For instance there was discussion (probably in this very thread but I can’t go back and look) regarding two-income families now surviving on one income due to the pandemic. Those individuals were part of the workforce, now are not, but that’s mostly by choice. I don’t know how those individuals affect the numbers. They were gainfully employed but now are not as a direct consequence of the pandemic.
Forgive me if these are ignorant questions. The stats regarding unemployment has always been confusing to me.
I think you should take the tin foil hat off here. A more reasonable thesis is that the pandemic has made a lot of labor data very difficult to gather, and it’s not easy data to gather during normal times.
This particular statistic is new claims. BLS also has data on the number unemployed, and the number participating in the labor force (whether employed or not.)
