The people working those jobs were flat out abandoned by employers and most benefits schemes. Many/most of the people doing that job, do it part time, (by corporate design!).
Couple that with these being the folk least likely to be able to ‘wait it out’, in ANY way. They HAD to find another income stream, to get by. They did what conservatives insist is ‘the way’, they found something else, no matter how crap the job, to fill the gap.
Why would they return? To companies that didn’t help them or care about them, and still have no intention of protecting them from Covid by enforcing masking, vaxxing, distancing etc? Would you want your teen or retired auntie working that job right now? Would you feel good about their health safety? I know I wouldn’t.
My wife’s company has a newish (5 years old) building - they were requiring folks to work in-office two days a week. One reason given was to support the cafeteria (which is defensible from a ‘keep those people employed’ viewpoint). Very few people were actually doing that, and with the omicron spike they have lifted the official policy until the end of January.
But when large numbers of people retire, it creates openings for people in service industries to move up. Many of them simply found better job opportunities that wouldn’t have existed if not for Covid.
My response to this is that it’s just because fast food jobs are at the bottom of the employment food chain. For some time now, lots of those jobs were filled by people like recent college graduates and lower level managers unable to find better work.
Now those people have found better work. Earlier in the year, my niece, who graduated college with an engineering degree two and a half years ago, landed her first job in engineering……so no more fast food work for her.
When the executive retires early, someone under him gets a promotion to his job. Then someone even lower in the job chain gets promoted or hired into that new job opening. Rinse and repeat a few times, and you have a fast food worker getting an entry level corporate job.
It’s a lot easier to say “screw this job!” if you’re a teenager still living at home, and that makes up a big part of the fast food workforce.
Plus, all restaurants are looking for workers now. I suspect a lot of the McDonald’s workforce have moved up the ladder to working in sit-down restaurants.
And that’s the price they pay for having built their entire business on being the lowest rung of the industry. The only people who will work there are those who can’t get a job literally anywhere else, and there are plenty of those better jobs out there right now.
It’s the “matching game” from game theory. If you have two (non-overlapping) sets of people- X and Y, and individuals from each set only “win” when they match up with something from the other set, and the amount they win is based on the value of the person they match with, then the lowest valued people from the smaller set end up being unmatched. If there are more employers than employees, the least valuable jobs end up unfilled; if there are more employees than employers, then the least skilled (or most discriminated against) job-seekers don’t get a job.
Another thing to consider is that companies are considering people with different backgrounds to fill jobs now. In the past, their resumes would be tossed in the circular file, but now they’ll be more flexible.
As an example, the company I work for now in the financial markets is interviewing people from all sorts of backgrounds, including service jobs. In the past, you pretty much had to work in the financial industry or be fresh out of college with an appropriate degree.
That’s how I got my job in the financial sector - all my degrees are in the arts but the organization that hired me was looking for skills rather than specialist knowledge. Still in the sector umpteen years later. Some other hires at the time had science degrees, and I know at least one of my former scientist teammates is still out there working at an investment bank.
I don’t think that’s true anymore. It used to be the stereotype back in the day, but nowadays unless you want to do hardcore physics, there are tons of jobs in tech and finance for you.
Business degrees, even advanced ones, teach mostly arithmetic. Physics PhDs inevitably have significant math, computer, and increasingly, AI/ML skills. Experimentalists make very good engineers. Theorists create algorithms that can be monetized.
Now for some good news. 1-year post-PhD, only 4% of physicists are unemployed. The overall unemployment rate for those with a physics PhD may be around 1-2%. There are research positions outside of universities, and there are also non-research positions that are both intellectually engaging and financially remunerative. Further, you should not have to incur debt to attend graduate school.
Sorry, I was half joking. We actually have a couple of physics PhDs in our IT department, my sister in law is a physics PhD and enjoyed a long career in one of the largest tech companies in the world ending up as “chief data architect”. And I had a number of classmates in my IT boot camp twenty years ago who got very good jobs as developers or DBAs. But they aren’t “doing physics”. That’s why they are in IT. Because they couldn’t make $60k a year in any physics job outside tenure track teaching jobs, and they were tired of 100 applicants for every one of those openings. In IT they were instantly making $100k after an Oracle or Java boot camp. This is in 2000 dollars when $100k was good money.
But the only two PhDs I know who are actually working in physics are poorer than I am. One is teaching umpteen sections at a couple of very bad colleges as an adjunct. He really was driving Uber for a while, but found it demeaning, so took on more sections of teaching. He hates his students, and judging by the “rate my professor” sites, the feeling is mutual. Unsurprising, since he is trying to teach people physics who can’t do tenth grade math.
Sooner or later they’re going to figure out that the Worker’s Comp claims from long COVID patients who contracted it due to office work policies are like to break their asses. Good luck defending against those, control freaks.
Except if you are working in healthcare in Florida, because the executive order that forces workman’s comp insurers to cover COVID just expired and I’d bet 10,000 quatloos Gov. DeSantis will not be renewing it. I know our insurer gave us the take-it-or-leave-it-COVID-isn’t-covered-any-more just before the order went into effect, so it’s only a matter of time before they pull that move again.
Actually I think I got the notice already, that workplace exposure to COVID is as of 1/1/2022 considered part of the “healthcare services” exclusion for our plan (the nominal purpose of that exclusion is so worker’s comp doesn’t cover medical malpractice).
I wouldn’t assume that. Adjunct professors often make starvation wages, even at elite universities in major cities. I teach a graduate course once a year at a major university in a prosperous city and the money is basically peanuts.
Er, no. This is one of the most expensive areas in the country and the schools are four year “directional state universities” just not the two or three more prestigious campuses. They have acceptance rates over 85% and that is dragged down by a few majors like Nursing.
I have seen some of these students’ work. The last time I took physics was in high school in 1984. I would do better on some of the tests than they did. I mean taking the test cold almost 40 years after I last cracked open a physics textbook. Basic problem is that they seem to be very bad at algebra and basic trig.
And I’m talking about $4000 a semester per section. He dreams of getting a high school teaching job, but because education levels are high here, there is fierce competition for those as well. My kid’s Physics, Biology and Chemistry teachers are all Phds. She attends one of the “best” public high schools in a state with one of the highest education attainment levels (#1, #2 or #3 by any measurement). He might get a job teaching at a “terrible” school, but I bet he wouldn’t last very long. He’d go off on a student pretty soon I imagine in a way you might get away with in college but not in school. The motivation and behavior of a student trying to complete a “hard science” requirement of a Criminal Justice degree is probably miles ahead of one who feels like a prisoner in school itself.
Nah I don’t think that’s how it works. I don’t know anyone who is in the sit-down-food-service industry (server or cook) who started at fast food, and I don’t know anyone who started at fast food who went on to sit-down service. Fast food is more like factory work and doesn’t translate to actual hospitality jobs.
Not say it doesn’t happen, I just don’t think it’s happening en masse. McDonalds workers aren’t moving on to Applebees, they’re moving on to Target.