3.9% unemployment, the article says. Yet not enough people are working? I thought the current wisdom was that unemployment should be right around 4-5% in a healthy economy.
They can’t get anyone to do the icky jobs. And certainly can’t get them to do them for starvation wages.
If we’re really that hard up for workers there are literally tens of thousands of people who would be happy to move here and work. But for too many “immigration” is a dirty word even if their ancestors did it.
Well yes, but then I’d have to say that doesn’t speak very well of a system whereby importing others to work for starvation wages is preferable to raising wages.
Ideally, we’d raise wages to a living wage level and then, if we still need workers, invite more to move here.
Anecdote: Don’t know about other areas, but in my region, coffee shops are springing up like mushrooms, and in most cases fading away almost as rapidly. I suspect that the main reason is because the owners just plain old had no idea what they were getting into.
My local-business page on Facebook had someone who mentioned that her cafe would be closed for a couple days due to lack of staffing, and most of the responses were along the lines of, “You might be able to get, and keep, employees if you would PAY them.” Yeah, that’s not a good sign.
Those are different concepts. If you have 500 jobs that need to be done (“need” defined loosely here) and only 400 people who want to be employed, even 0% unemployment means you have 100 vacancies.
The economy has grown since January 2020, so there’s more demand for labor, but the workforce has also shrunk a bit.
Which to me would indicate a tight(er) labor market, though instead of the price of labor going up in the form of increased compensation, the business interests in post ‘Citizens United’ America lobby in the form of political pressure to vilify the lower paid underclass in the ways we’ve seen over the past year.
So from Bloomberg, Covid19: U.S. Hospitals Struggle to Match Walmart Pay as Staff Flees Omicron.
It seems incredulous that anyone would work for $8 an hour even in better times but I believe it. And I never thought I’d hear the day when workers preferred Walmart to other employers. Strange times.
Did you read the article in the Failing New York Times entitled “No More Working for Jerks!”? Certainly the most interesting front-page article today.
This has always been the case to some extent. As bad as its problems have been, it was rarely the worst place to work, even in the retail sector. It’s just big and ubiquitous, so everyone is familiar with it. Nobody in another town is going to care if Nicolae and Elena’s Small-Town IGA bounces the payroll checks again.
The fresh meat seafood counter is closed the other day at my local store. As is the bakery. Or they are just making much less stuff, but the glass cases are all empty.
The deli has about half what it usually does.
You can find what you want, but often a substitute. Oddly Trisket and Wheat thin crackers are never there when I am.
But I understand. I’m sure higher wages would help though, and I think everyone is seeing that light.
Earlier this winter TPTB decided this would be a good time to rearrange every thing. This was done during the busiest time of the year. So not only are the tourists lost in the store (they always are, understandable) but so are the locals.
So during a freaking pandemic, and staffing shortages, with the need for social distancing people are wandering the store wondering where their peanut butter ran off to, keeping us all in the store longer.
I’m sure staff is none to happy, and spends a lot of their day showing people where stuff is.
This happens every 5 years of so it seems. Fine. But during a pandemic when you’re short staffed? 
That’s 3.9% of the civilian labor force. Which has shrunk by 2M over a period when it normally would have grown by 2-3M.
If you’re not in the labor force, you don’t count toward U-3.
How about a summary then?
My boyfriend was laid off from Penske Truck Leasing in 2020. A dirty, tiring job. I think he up to about $21/hr. He had been there 8 years and they just up and eliminated his position. A year later he got hired by Walmart for $18.50/hr doing overnight stock. No customers. Just listen to a podcast and put the stuff on the shelves. When he gets his 90 days he’ll have health insurance and I think a 401k, plus a 10% discount at Wal Mart.
From what I can tell from the Walmart workers Subreddit the pay at this location is pretty high (it’s not a HCOL area) compared to others. But they were scrambling to find people.
But I’m also blown away by the appeal of this job. Wal Mart! Huh!
It was pre-pandemic too. They figured out what everybody else is now figuring out but years earlier - if you want attract and retain employees and for some of them to actually care about the job they do, you can’t expect them all to work part time at minimum wage.
Not that I’m saying this was out of the goodness of their heart or anything, but they did the math and figured out that reducing costs isn’t always a way to improve the bottom line. And that’s paying off more now when everybody’s competing for employees and they had a head start.
Entrepreneurs have a lot of cognitive biases that lead to bad decisions. My coffee shop is different, people will want to work there and give 110%. It’s not just a coffee shop, it’s like… a family. No, it’s a movement. I’ll be friendly with the staff to make up for lower wages. But also sometimes ruthless so they don’t cut into the bottom line. We work hard and play hard, y’know? We’re just a friendly but ruthless cool place to… hey, are you really quitting before you even bought your first uniform?
Hence the episode of “I Love Lucy” in which the diner owner eventually explains that his business model is to sell the place to people who would just love to own a diner and have fun running it, and then buy it back at a heavy discount after the new folks have been beaten down by reality.
When I lived in Alaska, there was a local motel with a restaurant and bar whose owner did exactly that. He sold the place several times, and carried the loan himself. Every time, the new owners went broke, and he foreclosed, keeping the down payment and mortgage payments. For some reason, the place was irresistible to clueless investors, because he did it several times.
That’s great! I felt a little bad about posting about a work of fiction, so I’m relieved to learn that there are real life examples.
A small personal data point: a friend’s daughter has a small child and is going to college part time. She works retail because she needs a flexible schedule to accommodate the important things in her life. Last week the young lady looked at her schedule for next week and found that she was scheduled for times and days she had blocked off. When she protested she was told that she was going to have to just figure something out because they needed her at work.
She spent about five minutes thinking about it and figured that if she quit there wouldn’t be a conflict, so she walked out and went across the street to a different gas station and was hired on the spot. Oddly enough management at her ex-job didn’t seem to understand why she would pick her child and education over selling gas, cigs and beer but whatever.