The last known civil war widow just died, last year. I think she decided against collecting the pension though.
[/offtopic]
~Max
I think it’s a misnomer to refer to many of these women as “Civil War” widows. The ones we kept hearing about for so many years, were typically young women who married much, much older men. i.e. These were typically sham marriages design to take advantage of pension plans offered.
Helen Jackson married 93 year old James Brolin in 1936, 71 years after the Civil War had ended. If my 90 year old WWII veteran grandfather had married a twenty year old in 2015 we sure as hell wouldn’t describe her as a WWII widow today. Did your husband die during the Civil War? If the answer is no then you’re not a Civil War widow. (Perhaps I’m just being a little pedantic here.)
On that note, let me add that she didn’t, in point of fact, marry James Brolin.
Darn it. I saw a pesky R that wasn’t there. Bolin.
I totally agree. Other countries provide healthcare childcare, maternity/ paternity leave and vacations plus a living wage, we should too. Employers are just going to have to step up and stop treating their employees like dirt even if (gasp) it means it hits the bottom line and they don’t get huge bonuses.
9 years! 
Welcome back!
My daughter teaches at a business school, and she was discussing the job market in her class. One of her students said that he got told by his boss that his hours would have to change suddenly. He told the boss that this didn’t work for him because it conflicted with school.
The boss said, tough, he needed they guy to work those hours. So the guy quit right there. And got a job that paid more in two days.
The boss is no doubt wondering why it is so hard to keep employees, the ingrates.
Reverse happened to our company earlier this year. An employee started a new semester and the school assigned hours that conflicted with our business hours, so she resigned.
More IME: this latest round of hiring (entry level, part-time, medical office staff) has been pretty much back to normal. The only difference is the wage went up slightly more than it might have otherwise. Most people (say 3/4) are getting back to me when I call them about their applications, and roughly half actually show up to the interview. For the first time in a long time we have the option of being choosy so long as we are quick about it - a handful of decent applicants were snatched up within days of their job application, or so they tell me.
Many people aren’t asking for two weeks notice. About half of the resumes have either a) a COVID gap, b) a string of short-term jobs from early-mid-2020 on, or c) both. The other half are like, housewives or people coming out of retirement. I haven’t seen any resume list a gig job, which I might have expected if I thought a significant number of people were trying out gig jobs around here (since our position is part-time). It may also be that the people who switched to gig jobs have a stable part-time job already, and thus wouldn’t need to apply for our position (thus biasing my sample).
~Max
CNN has the data-backed answer to the Nahployment “crisis”, and it turns out to be…early retirement. Those who posited that theory may now commence their victory lap. Those who said people are tired of crummy pay, unfulfilling work, or crappy management or can’t get child care aren’t wrong, mind you; those just aren’t the primary reasons for the dearth of workers:
People have left the workforce for myriad reasons in the past two years — layoffs, health insecurity, child care needs, and any number of personal issues that arose from the disruption caused by the pandemic. But among those who have left and are not able to — or don’t want to — return, the vast majority are older Americans who accelerated their retirement.
…Jared Bernstein, a member of President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, said that once “non-prime age” workers — those over 55 — are excluded from the metrics a much clearer picture of how the labor recovery is doing emerges because it strips out the retirement narrative.
Last month, there were 3.6 million more Americans who had left the labor force and said they didn’t want a job compared with November 2019, says Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist and professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.
Older Americans, age 55 and up, accounted for [a] whopping 90% of that increase. [Bolding mine.]
The article notes that Americans are quitting jobs in record numbers, but for younger workers, it’s mainly to take better jobs. The fact that jobs are going a-begging while employers are unwilling to raise pay or improve conditions is puzzling experts, too, and they say what improvements employers are making may not be permanent. 
But experts seem confident many older workers will return to the workplace as vaxx rates rise and COVID fears diminish.
Eh not much new here – the participation rates by age diverged early in the pandemic and are discussed above. And that article is horrible if it’s causing uninformed readers to think that early retirements are the “answer”. The 3.6M includes people who would have retired (and normally been replaced) anyway, ~1.5M.
On our previous trajectory (just going with a least squares line fit of 2017–19) we would be at a labor force of ~167M now, up from 164.6M. Instead we’re at 162.0M. Early retirements are a significant contributor but far from the majority.
Incidentally, we’re seeing ~4M and change excess job openings, which is roughly in line with the gap in expected vs actual labor force.
My employer is raising the hourly pay of some entry level positions to $21-24 an hour. That doesn’t include incentive and other bonuses available to those positions throughout the year. I expect we’ll have to bump the pay for some others as well. I jokingly told my coworkers I was going to apply for one of those positions. It’s a pay cut, but it’d be far less stressful than my current position and with fewer responsibilities.
And as I said back in post #917,
Given that about one out of every 100 Americans over 65 died of COVID in the past two years, there are probably a lot of 80+ COVID victims whose asset legacies made early retirement more feasible for their 55+ offspring.
My gut reaction was, “It can’t be that high!” But yeah… There’s been about 543,000 deaths from Covid in tye US among the over-65 crowd, which totals about 54 million people, so Covid has killed almost exactly 1% of all Americans over 65.
Early retirement is rampant. My wife had no intention to retire early before Covid, and has been working from home since. Something about that has made her hate her job, and now she’s thinking of retiring early. Several of her workmates, including her boss, also recently retired. All were under 60 as far as I know, and at least her boss told her she had no intention of retiring soon just a year ago. Now she’s gone.
Maybe when you work in the home the job starts to be seen as intrusive, or the social contact you get working in an office is more important than we thought.
Maybe. Could also be that the massive suckitude of the whole COVID situation has just made it that much more difficult for people to keep putting up with anything they don’t like. (See also: rising rates of relationship problems and divorce.)
I wonder how current early-retirement rates among the WFH crowd would compare to corresponding rates if there had been a big shift to WFH for a different reason, and no pandemic.
If it were voluntary, I suspect a lot more people would be a lot more happy with it. I did voluntary WFH full time for a few years, and loved it. I like that the pandemic has let me return to full time WFH, but the experience is definitely different.
When it was voluntary, I could get out of the house to do other things pretty much any time I wanted. With restaurants and other places shut down, such was no longer possible, and even now, there’s a reluctance to go out because the pandemic is still out there. So WFH under these conditions is far more stressful than it was previously.
My sister-in-law has decided to retire, at 55. It’s a mix of ‘having just about enough money to do it’ and ‘can’t stand this dam’ job and my dam’-fool boss anymore’. Her husband will continue to work. She may try finding a charity gig.
My previous job had evolved into a heavily WFH position until January 2018 when a reorganisation put my group under a new Senior VP who decided to shake things up for the sake of shaking things up and prohibited WFH 99% of the time. Because, of course it helps with team building to have your VP standing at your desk and shooting the shit with you face to face about fantasy football or some other trivia.
There were lots of reasons I left, but the lack of flexibility definitely was one of them.
In a post Covid world, having to go back to the office ‘because I said so’ is a much more dangerous game for managers to play. People will take the highway option in that ‘my way or the highway’ option.
My job wasn’t as bad as that, but the reasons they had for asking people in my job to come back to in-office work were mostly BS. Part of my job was training new hires, but we weren’t actually hiring many people at the time they changed the rules, so they had to come up with some other BS excuse for us being in the office.
So it ended up with me in-office for three days a week, which were the least productive three days. My two days at home were enough to meet my goals, though. So in-office days were basically, arrive as late as I could and still get parking, and leave as soon as plausibly acceptable, with a long lunch in the middle there. There being no need to actually interact in person with anyone almost all the time, no one ever seemed to actually notice. I kept getting top marks on my annual evaluations.
So almost entirely pointless.
There is one huge issue which I don’t understand about all this talk claiming that retirement is the cause of the lack of workers :
fast food.
The industry most affected by the inability to find workers is the restaurant business. (and retail stores in general.) Food and retail workers usually aren’t close to retirement age. And usually they dont make the kind of salary that leaves them free to just decide that they don’t need to work any more.
We’ve had quite a few employees leave due to both our vaccination policy as well as our returning to the office. Many of them have gone to employers that are allowing them to work remotely 100% of the time. At some point we’re going to have to make a decision about working from the office or working from home. I’m on a hybrid schedule where I work from the office three days a week. Is there some reason I need to be in the office those three days? Not really. (Though I do prefer to work from the office.)
For many places, I suspect the real reason is that they’ve got all that real estate (office space) and don’t like to see it unused.
I tried going to Texas Roadhouse on 12/31 and they told me in would be an hour-and-half before my wife and I could get a table. There were a lot of empty tables but they didn’t have enough staff working. We went to a Chinese restaurant instead, and, man, they were swamped with online orders and were barely holding it together.