I heard this was related to cash that businesses got during the pandemic. As long as they were trying to fill roles they got extra $$. So some of those position openings were just song and dance so they could get government money.
That might be part of it, but employers have been crap about ghosting applicants for decades
I owned an apartment building briefly, but the name of the RE game is leveraging equity to add units and I found carrying all that debt unappealing. Mostly, I started buying stocks in the mid-90s with a focus on tech because I was a nerd and knew that segment best. I was early to intel, MSFT, ADBE, and later Netflix, and Google. I skipped the more speculative dot-com stocks and when the bubble burst I didn’t blink as nothing I was in was going anywhere.
Aside from that, I’ve focused on the top 20 of the SP500 (which is now mostly tech anyway), just buying and holding.
That’s true, but the root cause of this is not necessarily companies being obnoxious. First, HR departments have been hollowed out, so there are fewer people to deal with recruiting. Second, it is so easy to apply for multiple jobs that HR departments are swamped with applications, and those not close to meeting the requirements get ghosted. I’ve looked at 100 resumes for a job opening with very specific requirements - if 5% of them came close to meeting the requirements, I considered myself lucky.
With the HR shortage filled openings often stay up, so odds are the job is gone. I looked at my company’s listings, and it was awful.
In the old days it would be almost impossible to send out 300 applications. Today it is practically required.
That’s why networking works much better.
I haven’t read the entire thread, so I’ll limit my remarks. And none are from my personal life but, instead, from my 37+ year career in SS disability law.
I think it would be hard for anyone to dispute that there is SOME percentage of folk who simply do not want to work, or do not feel they ought to have to work. I have NO IDEA what that percentage is. 5%? 10? That still adds up to several tens of millions of folk who would prefer that someone else support them.
If you do not know such people personally or your job does not involve them, you might not be aware of how many aggregations of people live in households where everyone is living off someone’s check. Whether it be a paycheck, someone’s unemployment, veteran’s of social security disability (including child’s benefits)… IMO they are not trying to “scam” disability or unemployment. Instead, they are just trying to get $ wherever they can.
But you have to acknowledge that the job market is pretty poorly designed to provide meaningful, well paying jobs for everyone who wants one. And a lot of people live where jobs aren’t. And when you are poor, you have financial impediments to relocating, commuting, childcare…
A lot of people have made themselves unemployable through drug and other convictions. A lot of unskilled jobs are low paying and unfulfilling. I think there is some aspect that many Americans today do not think they should have to perform low paying, hard, boring work. And there is a large category of folk who are no longer able to do what they consider their usual work - think construction, truck drive, RN - and it doesn’t even cross their mind that they should get some entry-level, minimum wage job in a factory or store.
I personally object to declaring (many) people “disabled”, as my non-medical impression is that encourages people to feel their don’t have to TRY to work, and have something coming to them. And many people feel they ought not have to perform work which they find physically or emotionally unpleasant. I think some aspects of our current medical industry and literature encourage this attitude.
But, like I said, I’m not up on where this thread has gone. Was kinda jolting, tho, to check on the definition of misanthrope and realize it suits me better than many terms! 
Like a LEO, when a lot of who you see every day on the job is folks from the “problem” side of the ledger rather than the “solution” side, it slowly wears on you; any you.
Slowly but surely, your impression of Joe/Jane Average shifts farther and farther to the “problem” side. Add a bit of confirmation bias while walking through your grocery store and soon enough pretty much everybody seems to be at least a partial problem.
There’s such a big class element here, I’m sure. How are working class kids handling the transition, compared to professional class, compared to the capitalist class?
I come from professional class (doctor/teacher parents). My first job out of high school paid $25 a week, plus room (the upper story of a barn) and board (food from the farm). Wasn’t ideal, so I went into food service, earning a little over minimum wage and living with five housemates in a big old ramshackle house. After college I bounced around jobs for awhile, temping and gigging, before landing a low-paying job at a nonprofit.
Teaching sometimes feels like the big bucks.
I have heard this as well.
My usual response when it comes from a business owner (often a food service or retail place) is “No, actually, they just don’t want to work for YOU.”
And this is mostly true in my anecdotal opinion. I know many young people who quit their shitty service industry jobs during covid, and got more training, or moved to better paid job where they were treated better. Their previous employment included sexual and other harassment, terrible bosses who treated them like disposable shit, and shift work that drained them, with the bonus of crappy pay. The jobs were not actually that bad, but the way they were treated was. So they walked. (I also ask “you know, have you tried, like, treating your employees better?” This usually leads to a confused look, like I’ve just asked a cat to play the piano.
I know of other kids in High School whose parents would not let them work the typical fast food job because they did not want their 16 year old to be coughed on, spat on, insulted and treated like shit by the customers. Just "nope you are not going to work there, we’ll help you find something else.
So yes… people ARE working. In better jobs and not for shitty managers and bosses. Those businesses should just shut down sooner rather than later, so they can shut down and spare us all the complaining about how employees don’t want to be treated like shit anymore.
Another anecdote:
A friend of my son had a job at a pizza place just to pay the bills. He made it abundantly clear from the outset that he could not work on Sundays. This was a bright line for him. Two months in, the manage schedules him for the next 4 Sundays in a row. He went to the manager and let him know this was not going to happen. The manager got all pissy with him, and said he had no choice.
He did have a choice. He quit that day, and had a better job within the week.
He wants to work. He just chose to work for a place that respected an agreement.
But I bet you that Pizza place is whining about how "young people don’t want to work anymore’
My first job was at a Mr. Gatti’s pizza restaurant in 1993 in Texas. I mostly spent my time taking cutting pizzas as they came out of the oven, placing them on the buffet, and making sure the buffet was nice and tidy. I wasn’t miserable doing the job itself, even with the occasional difficult customer, but the manager made working there a hellish experience. And then they expected me to work split shifts on some weekends which wrecked my whole day even if I’d work only 6 hours. I didn’t quit or get fired, at least not directly, they just stopped scheduling me to come into work.
how true is this? It’s been common to say ever since the covid shutdown. Supposedly, everybody suddenly had more time , so they did a lot of introspection and looked at their life goals, and took up music and art, and re-trained for better jobs.
I never saw any info that, say, etsy. com was selling more handicrafts, and I never saw indications that retraining was taking place(say, increased enrollment at community colleges). Maybe I\m wrong–has anybody got any good anecdotes?
Also… I’ve heard anecdotes that it is not just the shitty jobs that are going unstaffed. l’ve heard a few stories from managers of these “better jobs” also saying that they can’t find employees. For example, a law firm, and an insurance agency, both of which had trouble finding clerical help for their offices.They told me they barely received a couple of applications for jobs which in previous years they had plenty of applicants.
Which leads back to the OP’s question…Just how is everybody paying their bills these days? Apartments are not standing empty, rents are going up, not down …so it can’t be that everybody moved back in with their parents.
I don’t get it.
.
In my opinion, and based on my own anecdotal evidence: During the pandemic people realized they didn’t actually need as much money to survive as they thought. And they liked not having a boss overlooking their every move. So people who really didn’t need the money to survive left the workforce. That’s a lot more people than one might think.
Again, my anecdotes…
But in my experience, I have seen a lot of firms like this demand a LOT of prior experience for entry level jobs they are offering. They are not willing to train someone into the job like they were in the past. They want someone who will be work-ready on day one. Tip for them: Don’t require a degree and 5 years experience for your clerical workers. And maybe don’t offer the same pay you were offering 5 years ago, when inflation has made everything cost more. What a lack of applications tell me is that the job description is too onerous compared to the remuneration. These companies are not competitive in today’s market.
Again I would tell these companes; People want to work - they just don’t want to work for YOU. What should you be doing differently to compete? It’s a real challenge and a flip in thinking for some companies/HR/management. They are not used to having to COMPETE for employees. They are not used to having a plan for recruitment and retainment. These companies will need to wake up and smell the coffee.
There has been a lot of churn in organizations as well, which leads to a bit of chaos. “Doing more with less” has it’s limits and many companies are running hard up against reality now.
Ok but it costs money to live day to day. Are we talking older people who retired earlier than they had planned (50s and 60s) and are living off investments and pensions? Or are we talking younger people? If younger, what are they doing for day-to-day money?
I can totally see one person in a set of parents opting out of work to save on childcare, or to do homeschooling, and the family living off one income.
But in your experience, what are the people who “didn’t need the money to survive” surviving off now?
I mean isn’t part of the answer to this, and a lot of the questions in the thread, the fact that the current unemployment rate is 3.7%, which is low? People do want to work, and they are working.
I wonder how much of what’s currently in view re: this topic is a result of pandemic-era financial relief? Perhaps things will get back to what we perceived prior to the pandemic at some point (e.g. people running out of money for day-to-day living/surviving, and having to take a crappy job at a crappy business).
The unemployment rate doesn’t take into account people who have decided not to work.
I think it’s calculated (in addition to counting the number of people lined up at the employment agencies)by asking people who currently have no job “do you want a job”. If they answer “yes”, they are added to the statistic.
But if they answer “no”…then they are ignored, and the statistic (3.7%, in our example) stays artificially low.
So we are back to the OP–why are people saying “no” ?
And how are the “no”-sayers paying their rent?
Euphonious _Polemic’s post could be correct for couples. But what about the single people?
I think the labor force participation rate to also be useful for answering the “why aren’t people working” question. The unemployment rate is the number of people unemployed and looking for a job divided by the total of that with the number employed. The labor force participation rate is the fraction of the total number of people of working age who are actually working for wages.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm
January and April 2023 unemployment was 3.4% according to the chart. You have to go back to 1953 to see anything lower than that.
So I agree that I think it’s safe to say “People want to work, and they are working.”
Again, if people don’t appear to want to work for you, then you need to re-assess your recruiting and retention strategies.
Another anecdote: I was at a conference a couple of years ago and spoke to two aquatic managers from two different municipalities. They were both having a huge challenge getting lifeguards (during covid pool closures, no young folks got the required training). One person had instituted a new system, where pool staff identified likely young people in the pool, and offered to pay for their lifeguard training course. And let them know that this was an awesome place to work. The plan seemed to be working out quite well.
The other person was just doing the same thing as before; Posting ads and getting few applications. They were jealous - “our management team would never go for that idea”
Fast forward two years; Pool A is doing very well - back to regular programming. Pool B has cut pool hours, staff are burning out, revenue is down and they are in serious financial trouble. But I’m sure they are consoling themselves by repeating “kids these days don’t want to work anymore”
And at 62.5% it’s very close to the prepandemic average.