Do you mean the $2800 we all got once, 3 years ago? Or something else?
I don’t doubt that there were TONS of shoddy PPP loans that went out, but many got called out and needed to be repaid. How are people making the money to repay those loans?
Do you mean the $2800 we all got once, 3 years ago? Or something else?
I don’t doubt that there were TONS of shoddy PPP loans that went out, but many got called out and needed to be repaid. How are people making the money to repay those loans?
We did this exact thing at our municipal pool. We paid for the training if you stayed on to work for the city. Also, as a perk, they worked it out with the local school system to give you a physical education credit for your training class! I haven’t heard a peep about lifeguarding, or closing the pool, since that program was introduced.
Same thing happened with my sons. My oldest got a job at a local McD’s when he turned 16. He told them he could work weekends but couldn’t work Fridays as he had school M-Th and wanted at least one day off. After a good long while (2 years or so) they started scheduling him on Fridays. Not being the confrontational type he just gritted his teeth and dealt with it. Finally it got to be too much. He was almost done with high school but his grades were in the toilet so he went back to the manager and asked to have his Fridays back so he could work on finishing school. The manager told him he needed my son to work Fridays because they were understaffed so no dice on the schedule change. My son thought about it for a day then went in and handed in his two week’s notice. The manager got pissy and bitchy because my son was a good and dependable worker and didn’t want to lose him.
Fast forward a year and my younger son is putting in applications around town for his first job and applies to the same McD’s. He gets an interview, explains his availability, and they hire him. Shortly after his training period is over and he’s on his own the manager complements him about his work ethic and then comments about how hard it is to keep good help. My son didn’t say anything in return, but the irony didn’t escape him – he knew why his brother had quit the same place a year before.
Treat your employees better and they’ll stay. It’s really not that complicated.
Oh! I just remembered another story. The friend I mentioned upthread with the chef-trained wife? The wife had a job as a cook in a local Italian place. The owner was a colossal dick and treated his employees terribly. Something happened, I don’t remember what, and several of the dishwashers/busboys quit en masse. The owner then had to come in and do dish duty for a while until he could hire replacements, who also quit shortly after. The owner was mightily incensed about this.
The restaurant shut down a couple of years later, and good riddance.
I have no knowledge of running a business, but it seems to me that if you a) want to make and keep your business as a going concern and b) depend on having reliable staff to make a) happen, then treating your employees well should be no-brainer. Since this seems to happen only rarely, there must be some calculus that I’m just not privy to.
Anecdotally, my agency and many like it are having a massively difficult time finding talented workers. I believe this is because our incentives aren’t strong enough. But yes, we gets tens of applications where nobody is qualified. So there are people wanting to work but few qualified to take those roles.
Our most recent HR person was a great fit culturally but she didn’t know what the fuck she was doing. She was there less than a month.
Right. It’s pretty clear that at the pandemic, a bunch of people over 55 said “fuck it, time to retire”. It’s pretty striking when you look at the graph for 10 years.
But you really don’t see that in 25-54 now, as it returns toward a historic high.
It makes so much sense - but there are some who don’t want to change how they do things… so…
In the case of mine above, the 2nd pool manager asked the first “how do you make sure the newly trained lifeguards don’t just go to a different pool?” They apparently did not make them sign anything to agree to only work for the pool that trained them. The answer was “We pick local kids - we know they want to work close by home, so we don’t lose many. And those we do lose - we say good luck to them and we’re happy that another pool got them. Cost benefit analysis says it’s a winning strategy for us”
Yep. But the breakdowns are interesting. Imprecise eyeballing before vs after pandemic:
Total: down 0.5%
Men, 20+: down 1.5%
Women, 20+: down 0.5%
Teens: up 2%
White: down 1%
Black: up 0.5%
Asian: up 0.5%
Hispanic: 0%
So it looks to me that adult white men are the lazy bums causing the labor shortage.
I retired earlier than I probably would have had there not been a pandemic. To a certain extent, I was afraid that if I waited too long I would die before retiring ( which was no doubt affected by me living in NYC and knowing multiple people who died from COVID ) which would also have left my husband without health insurance due to the way my pension works ( if I die while working, he gets a lump sum payout but no insurance other than COBRA. If I’m collecting and picked the joint option, he gets insurance forever. ) My daughter decided not to return to work when her job mandated returning to the office . Her husband’s job stayed remote and eliminating daycare and commuting expenses made it affordable for her to quit. She wouldn’t have quit if her job had remained remote - but now that she knows she doesn’t need the income, she also won’t look for another job at least until both kids are n school. And I’m sure some single people ended up becoming full-time live-in caregivers for their parents. I’m sure others saved a lot because they didn’t take vacations for a couple of years - I know I saved enough just from no vacations or restaurants to pay for new kitchen cabinets. Nobody left the workforce because they got a couple of thousand dollars once - but there were probably also a non-trivial number of people who inherited enough money unexpectedly to retire a few years early or take a couple of years off till they find a job they really want.
Oh, nice cite!
Who’d think that data could answer our questions?
Treat your employees better and they’ll stay. It’s really not that complicated.
It really isn’t. In 1981, I started working at a fast-food restaurant that was just opening. In 1985, there were still about 20 of us who started in 1981 still there. Which was almost unheard of - about as unheard of as fast food workers getting paid $2 over minimum wage. Which was why we stayed - and we got that much because the owners thought it was better for them to pay us well and have fewer people on a shift and lower turnover rather than constantly having minimum wage trainees.
Oh, nice cite!
Who’d think that data could answer our questions?
lol I avoided it for a while because of the thread title, but what the hell.
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.
Depending on specific conditions on the ground … those kinds of jobs can very much be “shitty jobs” as well.
lol I avoided it for a while because of the thread title, but what the hell.
I really appreciate you sticking with the spirit of the thread!
It feels like through anecdotes we did come to the same conclusion as the data. It woulda been a boring thread if we just looked at the data first. I wanted a thread to confirm my personal theory that there aren’t in fact a huge number of layabouts refusing to work, and somehow having money to survive.
I also feel the thread also helped open my eyes to the fact that so many people retired early - which I actually knew from personal connections but for some reason didn’t consider that to be a factor. I think because the way the “worker shortage” was perceived by the general grumbly public as being caused by people who refused to start working, not people who were just done working.
I am surprised we didn’t hear more anecdotes about people like @doreen 's daughter, who left the workforce for childcare. I would have thought there’s more of those across the country, in many economic brackets. That is a demographic I imagine most when I think of people unexpectedly leaving the labor force since covid. But maybe it’s not as big of a thing as I expected.
Which leads back to the OP’s question…Just how is everybody paying their bills these days?
As @Maserschmidt says, people are paying their bills by working. Unemployment is still at incredibly low numbers.
So we are back to the OP–why are people saying “no” ?
Again @Maserschmidt with the answer, and it is mostly (but not exclusively) retirement, early or otherwise.
“how do you make sure the newly trained lifeguards don’t just go to a different pool?”
This is the psychological principle that people would rather gain nothing, than gain something and then lose it. “We would rather get 0 new life guards, than train 4 and only get 3.”
Treat your employees better and they’ll stay. It’s really not that complicated.
I think the phrase is something like “people quit managers, not jobs.”
I am surprised we didn’t hear more anecdotes about people like @doreen 's daughter, who left the workforce for childcare. I would have thought there’s more of those across the country, in many economic brackets.
Well, my wife would fit into that category, but that was almost 25 years ago and not pandemic-related. We were both working full-time when my daughter was born, but after paying for childcare for a couple years, and relocating to a less expensive area, we were able to have her become a SAHM (with some part-time, low-hours work and volunteering). She just never went back to full-time work (both my kids are now graduated college). I would have liked her to get back into her profession after the the kids got old enough, but that’s a topic for another thread.
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) .
Not sure if you meant strictly the federal cash outlays to individuals or something broader by “pandemic-era financial relief”. But IME, while the cash outlays were helpful for a lot of check-to-check people … that helpful effect wore off years ago. The last federal checks were in March 2021. Perhaps other programs (e.g. federal rental assistance?) lasted longer and had longer-lasting effects?
Anecdotally, my agency and many like it are having a massively difficult time finding talented workers. I believe this is because our incentives aren’t strong enough. But yes, we gets tens of applications where nobody is qualified. So there are people wanting to work but few qualified to take those roles.
Our most recent HR person was a great fit culturally but she didn’t know what the fuck she was doing. She was there less than a month.
How unqualified are we talking? Are resources to train someone up (from square one if necessary) unavailable? Speaking from a position of some ignorance: It would seem that HR work could be something that could be learned on the job – but then, I am thinking more of the “paperwork” administrative side of the job and less of any people management, navigation of legal vagaries, and so forth.
I am surprised we didn’t hear more anecdotes about people like @doreen 's daughter, who left the workforce for childcare.
I might not have been clear - she left her job because they were mandating a return to the office. She had childcare available at her employer’s location so it wasn’t a matter of she couldn’t return to the office because there was no childcare available. It was that they were insisting that she return to commuting every day to do a job that didn’t require in person contact. It was basically one more example to her of how they didn’t care about employees - she worked for a medical school/hospital and at the beginning they weren’t going to allow work from home for anyone because the nurses and housekeepers had to work on-site. They relented as local governments imposed lockdowns. The only thing childcare had to do with it is that no longer paying for it was part of what made it affordable for her to quit.
Got it, thanks for the clarification!
How unqualified are we talking? Are resources to train someone up (from square one if necessary) unavailable? Speaking from a position of some ignorance: It would seem that HR work could be something that could be learned on the job – but then, I am thinking more of the “paperwork” administrative side of the job and less of any people management, navigation of legal vagaries, and so forth.
I’m not privy to all the ins and outs of staff management but I understand we almost lost one of our most valuable employees because of her incompetence. This was/is during a time of organizational crisis. We are righting the ship, but it takes time.