Yep. My company is “hiring” and has been for a while, but they’re also losing employees at the entry level. This is because to be brutally honest we don’t treat our entry level employees very well - I wouldn’t start working here if I was seeking a job today (for one, a few years after I got promoted past the entry level, they switched those positions from Salary to Hourly. When I was looking for a job out of college, that was a deal breaker for me.)
Anecdotes:
My son was working at a grocery store. They had an archaic system for scheduling shifts (paper). Frequently, his shifts would be changed at the last minute, and they expected him to know about it, presumably by going by the store every day and looking at the binder to see what shift he’d been changed to. He was going to school, and had explicitly told them the days/hours he could not work - they ignored this.
So, he quit. Got another job within a week at a different place. The store is currently whining and crying about how lazy the young people are, and how nobody wants to work anymore, and how it’s all the fault of “the government” for giving them free money. They are idiots.
Anecdote 2: Many of the university students I teach used to work as servers or in fast food part time to get money to go to school or money for “extras” while they go to school. Almost all of them have quit at this point. I’ve asked them about this, and the reasons mainly boil down to how shitty the job had become. They did not feel supported by management/owners, and were now expected to deal with stressed out customers, maskholes, and enforce rules that were poorly communicated by management. These students have either gotten other/better jobs (office type jobs) where they are treated with a modicum of respect, or are foregoing part time jobs altogether as their discretionary expenses have dropped. Even restaurants who are good to employees are feeling the pinch, because they are all being tarred with the same brush.
Bottom line - younger people are tired of jobs where they are treated like shit, and are choosing to pass on these “opportunities”. Organizations who used to be able to treat employees like shit are now confused at the lack of new suckers. So they lash out and seek to blame others, rather than examine their own shitty practices.
Well, I know you do… 
@dalej42 and @AlsoNamedBort, I also take into account the shortages seen in microchips and I read that many new chip factories being built will not be finished to meet demands until 2022. I do see that in the future robotics will do a lot; however, I do think that it will take like a decade at least to see the levels of robot use that many futurists or even economists expected to see.
Meaning that wanting to see that solution coming soon is not going to be, IMHO there will be many years before workers in low end jobs will be able to be replaced. And that solution does not take into account that new types of jobs will appear that will also demand the use of robotics.
Correlate those to the companies that got the PPP loans, and it’s probably the same list. If they “can’t hire” people they don’t have to pay it back.
It’s also true that employers have found that they can get by with fewer workers by overworking the ones they have. My employer keeps adding tasks, never reassigning them, and then takes staff out of our office and using them to staff other offices. We have been chronically short staffed for years, long before the pandemic. But now they just say they “can’t find employees.”
I don’t think people are “choosing not to work” I don’t know anyone who depends on a wage who would just decide not to work. There is more going on here. Child care is a huge issue. If you pay more for child care then you earn, you aren’t going to work.
Not only do people need a decent wage, they need hours. It doesn’t matter if you pay $50 an hour, if you are only giving me 5 hours, I’m not earning enough to live, and I’m not qualifying for benefits assuming they are offered.
But it’s easy to blame the lazy workers, rather than figure out what the real problem is and fix it.
I’ve had this username since I joined the board more than 20 years ago. I’ve only been in the robotics industry for 3 years.
I made my post partly for the irony, but also to point out that robots create jobs, too.
I wonder how big a factor this is. The entertainment industry isn’t wholly back yet. Movie theaters are down; live theater is down. I believe fewer are hitting the bars and concerts. Even before college - what’s out there for the high schoolers? This makes a lot of sense - why should you put up with BS management and BS from customers?
I don’t think that this is the case. If you offer to bring back a laid off worker, and they refuse, then that can offset a reduction in forgiveness based on reduced headcount, but you still have to spend at least 60% on payroll costs.
Hasn’t that been the trend for decades, though?
It’s hard to find good employees. I’ve hired several since the pandemic, and each one took a tremendous amount of work, usually involving dozens of applications and a number of interviews before hiring anyone. Even then, still batting less that 50% on people who actually work out.
That is a choice. It’s probably the right choice on their part, given the situation, but they are still removing themselves from the workforce, making it harder to find employees.
The flip side of that is that I only want to hire full timers, and one of the most common reasons for my rejecting an applicant is that they only want to work part time.
Now, I do require that you be able to work weekends, either Saturday or Sunday, you get to pick, and I lose some applicants that way as well. But I am open on the weekends, and need people to be there, so I don’t hire those who don’t want to work on weekends, even if otherwise qualified.
Obviously it’s not blaming the workers, as they are the ones who are not lazy. But, there are various economic and social factors that have in fact reduced the workforce substantially. I wouldn’t say that someone who finds it better to stay home than to work to be lazy, but they are factually contributing to the problem of a reduced workforce.
But, I’ll absolutely agree that blaming them is neither fair nor useful.
The real problem is a combination of many factors, both on the side of a reduced workforce, as well as on the side of less satisfactory employment and working conditions.
The “fix” on the part of the employer is to pay better and give better working conditions. That’s something that can only really be done on the individual company’s level, and those that do so will end up outperforming those who do not. That’s the bet that I made, anyway, and it seems to be paying off so far, as I watch my competitors close up shop and take all their clients.
The fix on the part of employees is more complicated, and really needs some government intervention. It’s absolutely the case that it’s hard to find an entry level job that pays enough for childcare for one child, much less two or three. You’re only going to be losing money working at even double MW if you have a couple kids to send to daycare while you work. Lack of adequate transportation is also an issue. Owning and maintaining a car is not cheap, and can cut deeply into the fiscal value you get from employment. This combines with lack of affordable housing near where employers need employees to be, meaning asking an employee to spend a fair amount of time and money just getting to work.
Personally, I’ve always been an advocate of a UBI, including affordable housing, childcare, healthcare, and education. I am in a minority of employers who advocate this, but I don’t want to employ people who are there to get a paycheck in order to survive, I want to work with people who actually enjoy the work that I provide them, and are feel they are fairly trading their time for the compensation I pay them.
It may be counterintuitive to those who think that low wage workers are lazy, but I do think that a UBI would actually increase workforce participation, as people no longer are forced into jobs they hate in order to survive, but rather take jobs they enjoy for self fulfillment and discretionary spending money. I’ll be honest, I actually liked working in fast food. But it doesn’t really pay all that well, so I moved on. If I could pay the bills working a grill, and the employers treated me with respect, then I’d still be doing that. I don’t know that I’m the only one, so if you could staff your restaurants with people who actually want to be there, then you’d have far better service than when you staff it with people who have to be there.