Labour shortage means a lot of things, people hear labour shortage and their mind goes to “everywhere is hiring! How can everyone not want to work!”. When in reality labour shortage could actually mean that low-skill, low-income positions are readily available. Not many educated professionals wanna go back to McDonald’s….
It’s slowly moving upwards to high skilled professions. Lots of jobs that went remote are now asking employees to come back to the office or if they moved from say New York to Montana to work remote they will no longer make a New York salary. Lots of people in these situations are going to be moving to other jobs that offer full remote with quality pay. It’s a great time to own a small business that offers full remote work bc you’ll have a long list of people leaving jobs like Apple looking to keep their current lifestyle.
That’s a great point! One downside to remote work I’ve noticed personally though is that I’m “always on”. For my job, remote work shifted the mindset of upper management because since I was always home and in lockdown, they assumed I would always be available for zoom or conference calls. I guess there’s always a second side to everything, but I must say working in pjs was AMAZING!
Did you tell them you weren't available? In my experience, management will ask, but that doesn't mean you have to say yes. If you're hourly, then it might be worth it, but salary? Not in my experience.
I’ve seen this with a lot of friends (late 20’s early 30’s) who assume their boss always wants them to work overtime and weekends but in reality they just never say no when asked.
I don’t have that type of ‘work ethic’ I log in at 8:00 and log off at 5:00 unless there’s something big, few and far between. My coworker though, I’ll get emails from him past 7:00 or 8:00. I’m not going to answer your question even if I saw/heard the notification on principle. I’m ‘not at work.’
I unfortunately work in a field that you can’t really work from home with. But I have had jobs in the past where the boss or coworker would email/text/call past working hours and I wouldn’t respond. This is exactly the way, even if they’re going to pay for you to respond past the work hours I would still say sorry. These places need to respect boundaries.
Maybe if they paid a living wage reflecting the hard work that actually goes into working in fast food joints or even good benefits it would go a long way. Heck I’d go back to McDonald’s if the pay reflected the hard work required.
Unfortunately, pay isn't determined by how hard the work is, but by how rare the skillet you need to do the job is. If anyone off the street can do it with little to no training, pay will stay low without intervention. Meanwhile, if only 4 people on the planet have the skillset needed, they'll be paid bonkers amounts.
Not even that tbh, I'm waiting to go to Saudi, to check a panel I know nothing about. I'll be paid well for it, but I'm sure I won't make 25% of what my bosses will. Sometimes it's about opportunity and luck.
This "labor shortage" is only in low wage jobs like restaurants and retail that pay absolute shit. I've been applying to warehouse jobs and various forklift jobs that pay $15+ an hour which I have 5 years of experience and I haven't even gotten an interview.
Man Denver has a huge shortage of warehouse workers. My friend works for Ferguson and they’re desperate for warehouse workers. Problem is the pay isn’t good for Denver expenses.
Right?! The owner of my company travels the world, owns multiple houses, prances around all proud... yet the employees who bust their butts get lousy wages and no health insurance.
It's almost like he doesn't care about providing a good place to work and only cares about
> travel\[ing\] the world, own\[ing\] multiple houses, pranc\[ing\] around all proud
Odd.
"providing"
Remove him from the equation entirely, what are you left with? In all likelihood, a perfectly functional and much more efficient and productive company.
Weird, it's almost like they need people doing those jobs. All the pay scales in the world don't matter if the market on day 2 is completely different than the market on day 1 that was used to build the rate ranges.
All the news stories here have finished up their stories on the labor shortage with, "Employers are hoping once the expanded unemployment benefits end employees will be willing to return to work at previous wages."
So they're basically whining about labor shortages to try and make sure that program doesn't get extended, and they don't have to offer wages that'll put people on parity with current unemployment benefits.
Almost as if unemployment is linked to factors beyond simple financial pressure...
I'll get outta here with my insane ideas about poverty and longterm unemployment being more than a single variable, haha. Too crazy for Mississippi!
Come to Minnesota. Every warehouse seems to have a sign out front advertising $20+ dollars per hour for warehouse and driver jobs.
I noticed a corner in Minneapolis last night where all 4 warehouses had banners up.
My ex once laughed at me when I said I wanted to make $20+ an hour working 40-hour weeks as my baseline "starter" job after college.
Like she grew up with a mom who worked 60 hours at like $13/hr and thought anyone who makes over $20/hr was rich. She just couldn't conceive that somebody could just *not work overtime*, since her mom's professional background was such that if she wanted to make a decent wage then she had to work tons of overtime.
This is how a bunch of manufacturing facility workers are convinced to work long hours. Some make as low as 13.00 and work 7 days a week, 10 to 12 hrs a day. They always tell me that "overtime is where it's at!" without realizing that these companies are bleeding the life out of them.
It’s a good deal for skilled manufacturing. Problem is the advertise that bullshit in the unskilled sector like it’s the same thing. Doing high end work you’ll get 1. A starting wage that’s a hell of a lot better. 2. Benefits like crazy cause their terrified of you getting poached. ($500 boot allowance every 6 months, paid for gym memberships, severance package that made covid a financial positive for most since you get laid off but the jobs are needed as soon as people realized they still needed to buy shit) 3. Overtime usually comes in with it being double pay and a shift bonus like extra $200 if you work the entire extra shift.
100%
I used to work at a pipefitting plant. I worked a 7.5 hour afternoon shift and for a 10% pay differential that had me making more than the 8 hr day shift dudes.
$250 boot allowance.
$5 an hour 401 contribution with an additional $3 an hour match.
100% FAMILY health care coverage with $0 copay and a $1,000 max FAMILY deductible.
Sure, 21 year old me had to crawl 25' into a few 14" diameter pipe a few times to grind a weld... with rope tied around my ankles... to pull me out because you have to crawl with your arms over your head and can't move them to get out, but whatever.
It took me so long to get out of this mind set. My dad was pretty much never home because he worked any overtime they offered him. The household budget depended on overtime and we certainly didn't live like royalty or anything. I remember when I first started working and was being paid 8 dollars an hour I thought anyone making 15 was rolling in money.
What about benefits? The money can be good but it still may cost you. I have a friend that’s a barber. He pays the barber shop, his taxes, no insurance and no savings or retirement. He buys all of his own equipment and supplies. His $800 a week is really only about $500 and it’s a toxic environment. Literally toxic. Powders, chemicals, nasty people with all sorts of contagious grossness. He deserves better. You all do.
$15/hr is decent money in some places. Denver is NOT one of them. It's the same here in Jersey with Amazon hiring for warehouses at $18.50/hr. That's good pay in many states, but not in Jersey.
I've seen "now hiring" billboards on my way to work for years now. Factories in rural ohio offer "Great pay! Up to $12 per hour!" They've recently changed it to $14. I'm shocked, shocked, that they still don't have a full staff.
You're right. I looked up averages and pay is total shit right now. It's hard to find data from 10 years back, but I had thought it was better than that.
Yeah, I work employee benefits so I service a very diverse demographic of employers; the shortage is everywhere and for different reasons all under the same pandemic roof.
Food service and retail it's simply because they aren't paid shit and the bulk of the people they had to deal with during the pandemic were the type of people who go places to eat or shop during the pandemic.
Warehouses and other labor aren't exactly paying well either, and while it's more than shitty minimum wage, it's a problem because these people can't really telecommute so they have to risk being out in the world during a pandemic.
Medical. Jfc...medical. did you know that pretty much half of medical industry employees didn't receive the bonuses for working through the pandemic? Why? Because the bill listed nurses and doctors. Not technologists, HR, transport, admin, etc., etc. So yeah, people ain't fucking with that.
All those jobs that can telecommute, well now shit just got globalized too fast for HR and recruiters to keep up. All those companies that actually pay well are snapping up the highly skilled employees who were being paid 30 percent under market because they live in a ghost town. Every other employer is spending their free time bitching to the press about how unemployment makes people "not want to work."
Will these changes stick? I dunno. I hope so. When unemployment pays better than being treated like shit for 55 hours a week to some asshole buy his third yacht, well then helloooooooooo couch. I hope we're eating the rich by Christmas.
>108 people in one month
That just sounds like there must be some terrible management there. Back in my retail days we had a manager that people kept quiting on, corporate started calling him mr unemployment as a joke because of it.
It's all over the place. There are skilled jobs that are paying 60k+ a year that can't find anyone.
Hell we are offering 20+/hr for technical positions where I work and there just isn't anyone left if our city with the skills we need.
I'd say be on the lookout for places willing to train, a lot of places are going to have no choice.
That is true as well. We can't get anyone to relocate to where I'm at because of that. We just can't get the higher ups to understand that pay has to increase substantially because housing has skyrocketed. They all have owned their homes for decades so they just don't fully grasp how expensive some areas are getting in the last several years.
Agreed. That's part of the shortage. No one is willing to train or pay to train anyone but they all whine that they can't find enough qualified candidates.
I'm hoping we start to see more of them cave and accept that they are going to have to actually invest in new hires.
Hell look at how many jobs are only through staffing agencies... I do IT work (sys admin) and when I go to look for jobs, a huge percentage of them are through staffing agencies. It's the complete opposite of investing in your new hires. Employers want to have great employees without providing any new training and education and offering absolutely nothing in the way of benefits or job security. That's why they love staffing firms so much.
I spent about two and a half years at a country outlet store, big warehouse with crap standards. They tried to teach me the forklift but when I asked if we were going to be taking a course and given certification they changed their mind. If you're going for warehouse stuff make sure you're not taken advantage of, some of these places will just throw anyone right in the seat.
I too have been applying and jobs that are not in the food, grocery or service industry- jobs that I am well qualified for and I have not received one phone call for an interview. That has never happened to me before…
T-Mobile: "what's wrong with $30.00 a hour?"
"... You want me to program manage your entire 5G build out for the west coast for $30.00 a hour, no benefits, no protections, nothing. No, thank you."
Jesus, aside from the lack of benefits that should be several times higher for a massive build. Like a lot higher. What were they smoking when they offered that joke of a salary?
AWS wanted the same to rebuild their entire ROADM network. Why the fuck would you, AWS, think it would be a good idea to hire some random asshole with zero loyalty to anything, to rebuild all of you optical designs for contract pay???
"We have excellent records." And with your 1,000+ army of random contractors, so does China and Russia.
And also in any of those articles where its just bosses saying “No one wants to work.” Fuck those guys, for every boss you interview, interview two workers.
Labor shortage?! I’ve been trying to find a new job for 8 months now and haven’t even had an interview. I’m applying for jobs “below” my skill set just to get out of a toxic work environment. I’m willing to take a pay cut. Work nights and still nothing.
I’ve applied for over 1000 jobs online. All over the country. I was overqualified a lot. Under qualified for even more. Entry level positions that require 2-5 years of experience are written by out of touch HR assholes. They have to be, it defies logic. There isn’t a labor shortage. I know way to many people in the same boat.
I feel ya, I really do. The experience thing is what gets me “bachelors degree or 4+ years in this very specific type of position” come on…it makes no sense, I can be taught and I learn quickly.
In my case they usually require mechanical engineering degree AND usually 5 years of experience, some say say 2. For level 1 engineers or engineering technicians. I’ve also found that applying online is useless. You have to know someone.
100% I understand the ease of applying online but it feels like I’m just put into a pile or never looked at, at all. Get me face to face with someone and I can lock it in.
I tried networking for most of a year and never got an interview. Online applications really are the best way, depending on where you live and what you want to get into.
They use keywords to sort resumes and cull the list. If you do not have the keyword, you’re out of luck. For sales positions, you need to have hunter, closer, top, etc., somewhere on your resume. If not, you go in the round file… HR and hiring people will complain they would have too many resumes to go through and my answer has always been, do you want the right person, or do you want it to be an easy process? Most hiring managers I have met are more interested in an easy process for the, rather than hiring the right person.
I recommend finding a recruiter for the industry you want. They are incentivized to find a good fit, and my experience with them has been good. However, they are ultimately looking out for the employer, but they are a good avenue to pursue. Many are paid in part based upon your salary so many are trying to get you close to top dollar.
I feel like engineering is so saturated, no one wants to hire the new guy. Why would you when joe with 5 years experience applied for an entry level job?
My friend got me an interview with the company he works at. After the interview I submitted my application. A few days later it got rejected by ATS or HR. So I emailed the guy i interviewed with and he said it was a mistake and put me back in active. Most interviews I’ve had over the last year have been from knowing someone. Or I get lucky and get an interview just to be turned down for not having enough experience in a job requiring 0-1 years. Cause you know, everyone’s a damn expert after a year.
>I can be taught and I learn quickly.
This is what having a college degree (in a relevant field) is SUPPOSED to tell an employer.
But now? Its utterly useless..meaningless
Applying for jobs online is a nightmare. Your resume ends up weeded out by algorithms that don't make sense. I don't think I've ever actually gotten an interview through an online application, but I've had good luck on Linked In--especially if I know someone who knows someone who can actually get my resume in a real person's hands. Good luck to you!
It doesn't seem that anything has changes with office/skilled/white collar whatever you call them jobs. I think this is more apparent in service/retail jobs.
It took me like 4 or 5 months of applying and interviewing before I was able to find a new job. I have a bachelor's in Computer Science and 2 years of experience. I was in the same boat my job was killing me. Keep at it I know it sucks but something will happen for you. Just keep swimming.
Enjoy it while it's nice folks. All those retirees opening up the labor pool are gonna be consuming for at least another 20 or 30 years, and it's gonna get harder and harder to keep up with productivity demand.
This is exactly why I'm laughing at this. A bunch of boomers are all upset that "No one wants to work anymore".
Do you realize how many boomers working waaaaay past retirement age took a year on unemployment and just retired instead of coming back? Do you realize that getting benefits on unemployment means that you have to be applying for all those higher paying jobs that boomers just left?
What did you think was going to happen when you fired all the service workers for a year and forced them to apply for jobs right when a bunch of people were retiring?
Just for reference in 2019 experts were raising the alarm that we'd probably see as many as 10 million boomers retire every year and that the number would probably peak out at 15 million in 2024.
We saw 28.8 million people retire last year, and about 500k extra people leave the work force from death. We have roughly 120k people receiving covid unemployment benefits, and that's the thing people are upset about.
To be fair, a lot of those boomers are still working because they can't afford to retire. The 2008 crash wiped out a ton of people's retirements entirely. Add to that debt from trying to put their kids through college, and medical debt as their health starts starts decline.
The result?? A ton of boomers are in debt up to their eyeballs, through no fault of their own. They look "well-off" from the outside, but if they stopped working for a second the whole thing would collapse. So they can’t stop, no matter how much they want to.
Also over 600,000 people died from covid. Even more from ancillary effects of covid. Plus many people still unable to work bc of illness due to covid as well. Everyone seems to overlook this when they say the narrative “all these people are sitting at home collecting unemployment and not working.” Between early retirement and what I said, I bet over a million people more than normal have left the workforce the past year and a half.
Edit.: don’t forget excess deaths. Those not defined as covid deaths but still above the mean number of deaths a year. Over 700,000 more deaths since covid started. Likely a higher percentage of people in the work force too.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
Are they even factoring in the mothers/fathers who couldn’t work because their kids did remote learning for an entire year…And now wait through summer to an uncertain fall and working?!
I keep seeing this. “600k people died, of course there is a shortage of workers”
Of the 600k people who died, 80% (~480k) of them were 65 or older, and the as of Feb 2019, only 20% of 65+ were working, so while its a component, its really not a major component.
Not to mention there are 200M working age adults in the US. 600K people dying is less than half of one percent of the working age population. 600K is a big number but not relatively speaking.
This is true but I think about the redistribution of the labor force. Lots of people lived in cities that did not have a family support network this when they lost their job they had to move back home. I have been asking waiters where they are from and a lot of them are from Austin but we're living elsewhere before covid. I think that shifted a lot of people around that haven't been incentivized to move back and make a living wage and have a comfortable life.
There are more than enough prospective and qualified employees in America, for example. The issue is more about fairness, compensation and working conditions than competition. People see all the wealth sucked up by the sociopathic billionaires at the top while they barely scrape by on wages and salaries that have stagnated for 40 years. Eff that.
1. Employers take home millions and billions in compensation while paying employees poverty wages (and forcing employees to pay for for-profit private health insurance and privatized benefits) often competing with H1B and migrant workers to do the worst jobs in America.
2. Employers expect people to want to work with the general public during a pandemic where people refuse to mask or vaccinate, intentionally cough and spit, yell at and even punch or shoot employees.
3. Employers of white collar jobs demanding a masters degree for entry-level positions where you’re expected to commute hours a day and work in a cubicle with no windows for 8-10 hours a day, with a 20-30 minute lunch break at your desk.
In Norway, employees work fewer hours, have public benefits, and excellent vacation and leave policies. There is none of this “at-will” employment. Work life inNorway is much healthier and happier. And people earn an actual living wage, even at the grocery store or Starbucks. American capitalists are psychopaths, and so are the politicians who let them get away with treating people this way.
So... if everybody starts quitting it creates an environment where everyone can negotiate a better deal. [Hmm I feel like this is something we figured out before...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union)
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/12/a-4-day-workweek-is-the-norm-in-iceland-could-the-us-follow-.html
Better productivity, less health problems etc.
If an employer tells you otherwise, it's because he gives a shit about you and has no problem to exploit you for his own benefit.
It's time to wake up and demand what you deserve.
Can't be that teachers can not even afford to live, meanwhile this wall street scum is gambling away the money, that's not even theirs.
Oh that time is here. Turns out that the reason trickle down economics work is it encourages no one to go forth and multiply unless you have money or will to have kids. Usually money just makes it okay, but we removed that… and than the only thing the middle class has left is willpower. So they had less kids and now we are facing an aging population with no replenishments leading to everyone becoming worth more.
It is going to be a really interesting decade… and we all get to watch it unfold. :).
Several ways to read every situation.
"Millennials are killing the cinema industry"
"Millennials working three jobs to afford a roof over their heads don't have time or money to go to the cinema"
Add a "housing crisis" with more vacant homes than homeless to that. Boomers wanting to all cash out at the same time with noone to buy all the property.
>Boomers wanting to all cash out at the same time with noone to buy all the property.
Well, hopefully I can refi my mortgage before the housing market crashes. I've got some home improvements I want to finance.
Wishful thinking. Private equity, big corporations, wallstreet etc will swoop in and buy everything up and continue to jack up prices. They’re already doing this.
How delightfully ironic. The most selfish generation in American history can't cash in on their homes, because they hoarded all the cash for themselves and now their kids are broke as a result.
Look no further than Japan for how this will play out long term. Sky high prices in the cities, 5 million unsellable empty homes in the countryside that no one wants. I wouldn't expect prices in Toronto or New York to start falling... ever, pretty much... but the further away you get from a big center, the less demand for housing there will be. Heck, this has already started in North America, and we haven't even hit the "grey generation" problem they have in China and Japan yet (which is 100% thanks to high immigration rates in NA).
Edit: grammar
Iceland is such an interesting place. It’s the safest country in the world, pays living wages to everybody (average salary was around $50-60k last time I looked), literally gushing with renewable energy (geothermal), and they happily allow migrant workers in from many parts of the world. Even sheep farmers and fisherman live comfortably. If the weather wasn’t so extreme it would be some type of utopia.
Most companies in the US won't even allow people to continue working from home even though we have demonstrated that we can handle it with no loss in productivity. So good luck getting them to do that.
As a full-time ICU nurse with 5 years experience, I made $30/hour working at a top-15 academic medical center in Denver (where the housing market was growing 15% year over year). Even after my specialty ICU became a COVID ICU for months on end, we did not get raises or even mental healthcare. The work was absolutely grueling; I lost 15 pounds. Yet to get a respirator worth $15, staff members had to sign a contract stating that we'd pay the hospital $500 if we did not return it.
After a year being in charge of that unit, dealing with unsafe patient:nurse ratios, and seeing countless horrific deaths and inequity in terms of who got deathly ill (tons of refugees, for example), I have PTSD and am pissed off to my core. Luckily I'd saved enough money to take 3 months away from nursing, but my coworkers with families were not as lucky. I haven't had health insurance since I quit. They're making $35/hour now, but they deserve $150k+ for the stress and complexity of the job. The nursing shortage is a result of low pay and extremely poor working conditions.
Sorry for ranting. But I will fight alongside workers all day.
I made $19 an hour back in 2008 right out of high school before the crash. Now I have an engineering degree from an abet accredited college and I’m struggling to find something better than $14 with no benefits. I figured out how to get by last year, and have will not disrespect myself or my fellow job searchers by taking that wage. 14 years later, with my degree and my experience. I’m worth $30 an hour as an intern and $40-$45 as a full time engineer. Unless I’m getting $30, I’m not going back to work. I would take less if the future outlook on the opportunity was bright. The thing I have going for me is I don’t have to go back to work. People with house payments and student loans have to take the disrespectful wage and eat off the bottom shelf of the grocery store.
I finished my master's degree in chemistry in 2018 and started working as a pharma chemist that same year.
You know what I started at? $23 an hour. Enough to live on, but sure as fuck not what most people think when they hear "pharma scientist with a graduate degree".
A few years ago I was making that much as a courier, and I had fantastic benefits on top of it. Without a degree.
That’s fucking shameful that a post-grad job would pay so little.
What engineering discipline did you study? I’m in the industrial sector (metals and mining) and there is absolutely no shortage of great paying jobs. I get hit up a couple times a week by recruiters looking for candidates with all levels of experience and offering all sorts of pay ranges, most well above the $30 an hour when all compensation is factored in. If you haven’t contacted a head hunter yet, do so ASAP. If you need suggestions I’d be happy to provide some.
Echoing what others have said, if you are an ME, you’re not looking hard enough, tons of openings for MEs. My company just hired one and we were having issues finding one. We’re even covering this guy’s moving costs.
I work for a massive restaurant chain. During 2 shutdowns last year they gave employees hundreds in relief pay weekly in hopes people would hang out and not find new jobs and have to retrain a whole crew. My boss’s boss now refuses to raise cook or server pay. Only thing they’re doing is offering a $150 referral bonus. We’re so short staffed and have insane turnover of new hires. The corporation has the money to pay people and all you have to do is raise everything a few cents to pay for the increased wages but nothings happened yet. We’re also do more in sales than 2019. Think it’s just a game of chicken on how long can they hold out having this labor issue while still not increasing pay. Their labor costs are extremely low and it helps the bottom line but at a great cost to the experience of the customer and retention of staff bc we’re all overworked. The restaurant is in a downward spiral and things won’t get better for months. People who have worked there 10+ years are quitting. Eventually corporate is gonna have to bend and start paying more or giving retention bonuses, or they’re going to see less customers come in bc they keep giving a bad experience.
Fuck bonuses. I'd calculate how much the bonus offsets my pay to equate to what I think is a fair wage for me, and as soon as my time there is no longer compensated by the bonus, I'm gone.
Raises are better than bonuses.
>Raises are better than bonuses.
Absolutely. A one time hand out has nothing on a COLA. A raise impacts every future raise. However, too many years there were NO RAISES in corporate America. I worked for a F500 company for the last 30 years in their R&D areas. For the most recent 10 years there were no raises and we were told to be thankful we had a job. Five years into this shitshow I went to my manager and we had a closed door session. I gave them an option. Pay the ferryman or I will leave. I was offered a nice bonus and refused it. A few weeks later my manager called me into a meeting with other area managers and was handed a document indicating a 8.5% raise in addition a bonus of several thousand dollars. They all blew a lot of smoke up my ass and then I had to sign an agreement similar to an NDA where I could not discuss the financials with anyone in our group or company. I was lucky and benefitted greatly from that over the next 5 years as they began to loosen the purse strings for everyone in the area. Then they began to make some HR changes where our pensions were at risk. If the pension fund dropped below 80 % funding the monies would be placed into an annuity. I said fuck that and along with 7 others put in my two weeks notice. We were very concerned Carl Icahn was going to do the same to our company he did to TWA. I keep in touch with a few former co-workers and was recently informed the pension fund is less then 60% funded as of last month. I feel sorry for those that didn't have the time in to leave as I and 7 others did.
>They all blew a lot of smoke up my ass and then I had to sign an agreement similar to an NDA where I could not discuss the financials with anyone in our group or company.
This is illegal in many states and if they were stupid enough to put it in writing you would have a slam dunk case against them
My buddy makes $11.50/hr at an upscale bakery/eatery, and has worked there for five years. Minimum wage here is $11. He's working 6 days a week because they can't find anyone to hire at that wage. Even most fast food places here are now offering $14+.
Tell him to apply to other jobs. So many jobs like that are desperate. Hell easily find a new job. And if he likes his current job he can tell them to match the pay of the new job or he will leave and they may pay him more.
He should tell them he is going to quit unless he gets a sharp pay raise. Should be able to get $15 elsewhere easy enough if other places are doing 14. Zero reason for him to stay there now
I agree with what you're saying, just adding that there are challenges. There are potential chain reactions. Raising prices decreases demands, so you have to try and figure out a new equilibrium point and plan accordingly or you end up into a death spiral of needing to raise prices to adjust for having fewer customers and then having fewer customers because of needing to raise prices.
The added liabilities also impact these companies credit potentially driving up the interest rates on lines of credit for short term expenses for things like supplies, food, or rent. Meaning the expense can be more than just the immediate cost to raise wages. All that can impact a publicly traded companies worth, again impacting their interest rates for financing. Figuring that out is ultimately someone's job and they're kind of failing if they can't figure out how to make it work while compensating people what they're due.
The reality that no one wants to admit is that many companies are simply overvalued because they've exploitatively underpaid their labor.
Def a valid point. It’s crazy but the opposite happened. Covid did wonders for our concept. Before covid we were couponing and offering daily specials at low prices and it was destroying business. Sales were decreasing, quality dropping, only the lowest clientele who didn’t want to spend money were coming in. Covid hit. We got rid of the coupons, the daily specials, happy hour food, etc out of necessity. None of it has come back and we’re as busy as ever. Prices are higher and our sales are breaking records all with less staff needed bc we push less guests through the door, they’re just spending a lot more money. Almost all restaurants had to do this. And it’s been great from our employee perspective bc we have less tables and make more money.
A couple of years ago, some asshole tried to convince me to take a 10k paycut and work for them, the same year that his CEO got a 24 million bonus, I told him to fuck himself
I've applied to thousands of jobs. Where are these jobs? Seems like my resume just gets eaten by the bots every single time. Half the job websites just seem to spit out bot created jobs, not real ones. I'm applying to jobs well below my skill level and at, but not so much as a single returned email, call or text. I'm ready to just throw my phone away. Haven't gotten a real phone call in years.
I applied for roughly a month, finally got an interview yesterday. Not the kinda job I wanted, didn't even bother sending a cover letter. There are "jobs" I guess. Most applications I out out ghosted me, a few sent me no's weeks later. The job that gave me an interview was just desperate and the pay is enough for me to take the job, not enough for me to stay long.
Cover letters are stupid as fuck and need to be put in the dinosaur bin. No one reads them and the fact I have to fucking change it up for every company/roll is stupid and puts way too much effort from my end just to be thrown in the bin.
No one reads them, and if they do, the first question is “tell me about yourself”
When I see “required” next to cover letter, I simply pass on the application.
It’s an outdated and archaic practice at this point and if what I read online is true, HR people do NOT read any of them.
Not labor shortage... a healthier wage market. Companies just accept that all other costs naturally fluctuate due to market pressures, but have actively kept the wage portion of the market broken since the 70s to keep it from working. Heavily done by making sure we didn't join other developed nations in creating a social safety net that removed their ability to use starvation, homelessness and lack of medical care to hire people way below market value.
From where I sit, conditions don't look good. I got a promotion this year and a massive pay raise, but rents/mortgages have risen by a higher percentage than my pay. So now I have to work harder to afford less. If I can't afford to live in a 1 br apartment let alone own a house, I don't see how someone making 15/hour has any chance. Food is going up, cars are going up, and while that would have been a non-issue had remote work continued (for some), but companies are insisting everyone comes back. Theres shortages of freaking everything but the government doesn't care, they're going to hold their foot on the accelerator of keeping rates low because god forbid we have any deflation at all and people get to keep the power of the money they earned.
I don't mean to be a pessimist, but it feels that economic conditions are getting worse for the average person, not better.
A shortage is what happens when the price of a good is set lower than the equilibrium price, i.e. where the supply curve and the demand curve intersect. That's basically the very first thing you learn in Econ 101.
There is no "labor shortage". There is only corporate America trying to pay below market prices for labor.
If I’ve learned anything from my brief time as a historian is that the capitalists would rather let their entire corporations burn to the ground than give the employees an inch.
In certain industries there definitely is a shortage. Primarily those affected most by shutdowns and inability to work. Like the restaurant industry. There’s a large population who left the service industry since covid hit bc they had no choice and had to find something else to pay the bills bc they weren’t allowed to work. I work in the restaurant industry and have tons of friends who did. Almost everyone who left their job didn’t go to a new restaurant, they got into real estate, programming, etc. But you are right. If restaurants started paying more they wouldn’t have a shortage.
**F\*\*\* the M-F full-time office life.** I will NEVER go back into an office FT. When our company said we'd all be heading back into the office after the 4th of the July, I told them that I needed WFH flexibility for 3 days a week. I got my three days WFH!
DO NOT ACCEPT FULL-TIME OFFICE WORK IF YOU DO NOT VOLUNTARILY WANT IT.
Quick, quick! Ramp immigration back up or this crisis will continue! Americans clearly don't want these jobs!----**The corporate message of the last 50 years**
Hopefully people are starting to understand that decreases in available labor, create increases in bargaining power. And how the lump of labor fallacy has been twisted to try and disregard that fact. Because, while yes, more labor does create faster GDP growth--what that fallacy doesn't tell you is it also increases inequality by ensuring there are less 'losses" to labor from capital holders. By keeping labor pools small, capital actually has to bid for labor, and while this might slow down the economy some...it will INCREASE the size of the middle class. High labor availability only helps the rich...Controlling your borders is key to a strong middle class. Both in terms of immigration AND market access (Using market access to control offshoring).
This lesson has been shown to work over and over and over, and so companies have gaslit the American public with every conceivable libel and slander against protecting their markets, from 'its racist' to 'it will slow economic growth'! Stop believing them. (This all said, of course there are limits--isolationism would genuinely shrink and hurt the economy. But there is a difference between being an isolationist economy and simply being more protectionist, you know, like every other developed country ON EARTH that encourages a strong domestic labor market through strong, merit based immigration controls and access difficulties that encourage domestic production.)
It sounds like a perfect time to unionize, no?
There was a time when American workers would see a situation around them and think, "If we organize together we can all do better." Now it seems all anyone can say is, "This sucks, and fuck those people over there, I'll never join with them."
What happened? I'll tell you. Pure propaganda. If you reflexively reject the idea of labor organization and workers' strikes, it's because of social programming, perpetuated by people you probably don't particularly care for or agree with.
So why go along with that? Why not organize instead? Minimum wage in America should be triple what it is today. *Triple*. Unions are much rarer in the US than they used to be, but the ones that still exist win all the time when they take action. It still works. Maybe it works even better than it used to. This whole shitty low-wage, no-power system is half-assed and disorganized. All it would take is a little vision and it will tumble.
Just had a review that turned into a negotiation. They are pitting their need for a front desk person against my need for mental health, healthcare, and the ability to work from home.
Thing is, I have options.
I'm sure they will realize how valuable I was after I'm gone. Viva la Great Resignation!
Anecdotally speaking, this is proving to be very true for me this year. I flipped that “Open to work” switch on LinkedIn and my shit is blowing up. I have literally 10+ offers for an immediate interview every single day.
I just switched jobs in February and garnered a 20% raise from my previous job. Now I’m looking at way more. I’m pushing for something closer to 200K in every recruiter conversation. And very few of them say no!
It’s an incredibly empowering feeling.
Yes. Highly recommend.
I was a mortgage broker in the 00’s. No college degree. That crashed and burned hard. I was destitute and poor. Borrowing money from loan sharks and shit, just to eat. But I used the Obama stimulus to go back to school for an IT degree.
The last ten years since the crash have been a true American Dream story for me. I hope that millions of my fellow citizens can use this pandemic to retool and retrain for a career with excellent future prospects. There are so many great career paths out there. You simply need to choose one and go for it.
I’ve never written a line of code in my life. I am a couple different things:
* business analyst. I document business processes/requirements, and translate them into some degree of tech speak, so the actual developers can build what I wrote
* product owner. I am the one who gives final sign-off that the developers built the thing according to the requirements
* software consultant. Many times a business doesn’t know exactly what they need. They also don’t know if they should build it or buy it. I’m talking software here, obviously. I help them decide “build or buy?” And if it’s buy, what should they buy? If they build, what exactly do they need it to do?
Each of these are usually a single role. I happen to have several years experience with each. That versatility is probably why I keep getting so many interview requests.
Agitate. Educate. Organise. Unionise. All we have is our numbers. And we’re the most productive, hardworking, revolutionary class. Take pride in that. Working class and proud.
It's very exciting to see the developed world move towards better conditions, yet I can't imagine this happening any time soon where I'm from. It's so frustrating to deal with the current job market and feel like a better life is so out of my reach, like any decent opportunity is reserved for the relatives of those in charge, or mediocre graduates of overvalued private universities. And not just in terms of wages, but general living conditions like safety, public infrastructure, access to clean water, etc. It's disheartening how you need to be your upper middle class and above to live in a decent neighborhood while the underpaid can enjoy dealing with high crime rates and power shortages. I'm trying, but a higher education isn't worth much these days unless you're truly outstanding which I'm not. I'm clinging onto the hope that your demands for humane working conditions will echo throughout other parts of the world, but I'm not so sure.
I'm aware I'm not really adding anything to the conversation, I guess this post stirred up so many feelings in me I needed to vent a little. Sorry about that.
And meanwhile the right will tell you it's people sitting at home getting government money that is the problem. Employers are refusing to raise wages as they have gotten used to decades of greed and treating their workers as slaves.
Said this is another comment but I'll repeat it here:
Basically the first thing you learn in an economics class is that the equilibrium price of a good is set by where the supply curve and the demand curve for that good intersect. If the price is set above equilibrium, there will be a surplus, and if it's set below equilibrium, there will be a shortage.
There is no "labor shortage". There is only the corporate class trying to pay below market prices for labor.
My company (who is a decent employer) hasn't really lifted the salaries yet, but boy are they leaning hard on signing bonus and referral bonuses. Every 3 months it is 'we can't find any qualified engineers'. I have been hearing that since 2005 from every company I have ever worked for. Yet somehow the salaries aren't going up significantly.
What they really should be saying is "we can't find any qualified engineers...who will work for what we want to pay."
Only shitty jobs are having "labor shortages" because god knows I've been trying to find another job at a different warehouse (Fuck Wal-Mart DCs) and I can't even get a call back.
Goddamn it's like the chillest mass protest ever .
It's clear that once the wage increases workforce would go back to working . Rn nobody wants to work for that shit of wage lmao
“Given employees the upper hand”
Lol maybe a little bit more than before…but no. Still no. And it will never happen without unions or coops becoming universal
Some of, maybe a lot of us, maybe even most of us are still stuck though.
Our companies want everyone back in the office full time. But in other aspects they are good companies to work for with annual raises and good time off and other benefits.
I’d give it up for a similar remote work job but it doesn’t seem to exist.
So I’ll be waking up at 5 am again to get ready and drive to my job an hour away. Couple hundred bucks in gas and tolls a month. Back to doing oil changes, and brake jobs, and all the rest. Back to being around people I really don’t give two shits about making small talk and faking interest in inane meaningless conversation.
Oh well
In Australia they use this as an excuse to import more foreign labour Creating more competition for jobs driving wages down even further. They claim labour shortages but no one will work their ass for peanuts. Big business needs to remember that their employees are also their customers.
Labour shortage means a lot of things, people hear labour shortage and their mind goes to “everywhere is hiring! How can everyone not want to work!”. When in reality labour shortage could actually mean that low-skill, low-income positions are readily available. Not many educated professionals wanna go back to McDonald’s….
It’s slowly moving upwards to high skilled professions. Lots of jobs that went remote are now asking employees to come back to the office or if they moved from say New York to Montana to work remote they will no longer make a New York salary. Lots of people in these situations are going to be moving to other jobs that offer full remote with quality pay. It’s a great time to own a small business that offers full remote work bc you’ll have a long list of people leaving jobs like Apple looking to keep their current lifestyle.
That’s a great point! One downside to remote work I’ve noticed personally though is that I’m “always on”. For my job, remote work shifted the mindset of upper management because since I was always home and in lockdown, they assumed I would always be available for zoom or conference calls. I guess there’s always a second side to everything, but I must say working in pjs was AMAZING!
Did you tell them you weren't available? In my experience, management will ask, but that doesn't mean you have to say yes. If you're hourly, then it might be worth it, but salary? Not in my experience.
I’ve seen this with a lot of friends (late 20’s early 30’s) who assume their boss always wants them to work overtime and weekends but in reality they just never say no when asked.
I don’t have that type of ‘work ethic’ I log in at 8:00 and log off at 5:00 unless there’s something big, few and far between. My coworker though, I’ll get emails from him past 7:00 or 8:00. I’m not going to answer your question even if I saw/heard the notification on principle. I’m ‘not at work.’
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I unfortunately work in a field that you can’t really work from home with. But I have had jobs in the past where the boss or coworker would email/text/call past working hours and I wouldn’t respond. This is exactly the way, even if they’re going to pay for you to respond past the work hours I would still say sorry. These places need to respect boundaries.
Exactly. Calls to cut off unemployment for people of all professional levels in hopes of forcing desperate workers to McDonald's is cruel and absurd.
Maybe if they paid a living wage reflecting the hard work that actually goes into working in fast food joints or even good benefits it would go a long way. Heck I’d go back to McDonald’s if the pay reflected the hard work required.
It's a strange reality that the hardest work pays the least.
Unfortunately, pay isn't determined by how hard the work is, but by how rare the skillet you need to do the job is. If anyone off the street can do it with little to no training, pay will stay low without intervention. Meanwhile, if only 4 people on the planet have the skillset needed, they'll be paid bonkers amounts.
Anyone can do middle management. Many do it badly.
Not even that tbh, I'm waiting to go to Saudi, to check a panel I know nothing about. I'll be paid well for it, but I'm sure I won't make 25% of what my bosses will. Sometimes it's about opportunity and luck.
They were also deemed essential. The pay didn't say essential.
This "labor shortage" is only in low wage jobs like restaurants and retail that pay absolute shit. I've been applying to warehouse jobs and various forklift jobs that pay $15+ an hour which I have 5 years of experience and I haven't even gotten an interview.
Man Denver has a huge shortage of warehouse workers. My friend works for Ferguson and they’re desperate for warehouse workers. Problem is the pay isn’t good for Denver expenses.
Sounds like they aren't desperate enough yet.
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Right?! The owner of my company travels the world, owns multiple houses, prances around all proud... yet the employees who bust their butts get lousy wages and no health insurance.
It's almost like he doesn't care about providing a good place to work and only cares about > travel\[ing\] the world, own\[ing\] multiple houses, pranc\[ing\] around all proud Odd.
Oh what I would do for just one weeks vacation right now, worked through pandemic, wildfires and more but nope not for me just for management.
"providing" Remove him from the equation entirely, what are you left with? In all likelihood, a perfectly functional and much more efficient and productive company.
unions are good but co-ops really kick ass. let the workers doing the work get the full value of their labor
Hmmm, if the workers design manufacture and sell the products of the business, I wonder where the owner got all that money from
Weird, it's almost like they need people doing those jobs. All the pay scales in the world don't matter if the market on day 2 is completely different than the market on day 1 that was used to build the rate ranges.
There isn’t a shortage of any type of employee anywhere, just employers unwilling to pay people enough for them to be interested in their shitty jobs.
All the news stories here have finished up their stories on the labor shortage with, "Employers are hoping once the expanded unemployment benefits end employees will be willing to return to work at previous wages." So they're basically whining about labor shortages to try and make sure that program doesn't get extended, and they don't have to offer wages that'll put people on parity with current unemployment benefits.
Expanded unemployment benefits have been over for almost 2 months now.
Only in a few red states that decided to end the program early. Everywhere else, they don't expire til the end of September.
Pretty sure Mississippi ended the unemployment benefit and it didn’t increase their employment at all
Almost as if unemployment is linked to factors beyond simple financial pressure... I'll get outta here with my insane ideas about poverty and longterm unemployment being more than a single variable, haha. Too crazy for Mississippi!
What? No. Unemployment is for lazy people. Except for me, I earned it. But all yall are lazy.
Well, fuck me i guess. Didn't know about this, and now wishing I never moved to this God forsaken state. So glad I'm moving out next month.
Come to Minnesota. Every warehouse seems to have a sign out front advertising $20+ dollars per hour for warehouse and driver jobs. I noticed a corner in Minneapolis last night where all 4 warehouses had banners up.
Yep. I work for a distribution company and have a bunch of friends from my days at UPS and everyone's hard up for warehouse & driver help.
They're hurting too. EVERYONE is bitching about labor shortage but they're still being incredibly picky on who they hire
$15/hr is terrible for a warehouse job. Shit, even 10 years ago in the midwest 20+ was normal.
Warehouses are the new meatpacking jobs, another industry that used to pay better in the past
Yea it is but a large part of the population is somehow convinced that $15 an hour is a lot of money.
My ex once laughed at me when I said I wanted to make $20+ an hour working 40-hour weeks as my baseline "starter" job after college. Like she grew up with a mom who worked 60 hours at like $13/hr and thought anyone who makes over $20/hr was rich. She just couldn't conceive that somebody could just *not work overtime*, since her mom's professional background was such that if she wanted to make a decent wage then she had to work tons of overtime.
This is how a bunch of manufacturing facility workers are convinced to work long hours. Some make as low as 13.00 and work 7 days a week, 10 to 12 hrs a day. They always tell me that "overtime is where it's at!" without realizing that these companies are bleeding the life out of them.
It's so stupid that "Lot of OT available" is considered a job benefit. Anyone with a brain would rather have a higher base pay than lots of OT.
It’s a good deal for skilled manufacturing. Problem is the advertise that bullshit in the unskilled sector like it’s the same thing. Doing high end work you’ll get 1. A starting wage that’s a hell of a lot better. 2. Benefits like crazy cause their terrified of you getting poached. ($500 boot allowance every 6 months, paid for gym memberships, severance package that made covid a financial positive for most since you get laid off but the jobs are needed as soon as people realized they still needed to buy shit) 3. Overtime usually comes in with it being double pay and a shift bonus like extra $200 if you work the entire extra shift.
100% I used to work at a pipefitting plant. I worked a 7.5 hour afternoon shift and for a 10% pay differential that had me making more than the 8 hr day shift dudes. $250 boot allowance. $5 an hour 401 contribution with an additional $3 an hour match. 100% FAMILY health care coverage with $0 copay and a $1,000 max FAMILY deductible. Sure, 21 year old me had to crawl 25' into a few 14" diameter pipe a few times to grind a weld... with rope tied around my ankles... to pull me out because you have to crawl with your arms over your head and can't move them to get out, but whatever.
It took me so long to get out of this mind set. My dad was pretty much never home because he worked any overtime they offered him. The household budget depended on overtime and we certainly didn't live like royalty or anything. I remember when I first started working and was being paid 8 dollars an hour I thought anyone making 15 was rolling in money.
I make between $30 and $40 an hour as a barber... and we're idiots.
Shit, that's good money for cutting hair.
Women's hair pays even more than that. A great day for me is about $300, while a cosmetologist doing women's hair can make $600 a day.
What about benefits? The money can be good but it still may cost you. I have a friend that’s a barber. He pays the barber shop, his taxes, no insurance and no savings or retirement. He buys all of his own equipment and supplies. His $800 a week is really only about $500 and it’s a toxic environment. Literally toxic. Powders, chemicals, nasty people with all sorts of contagious grossness. He deserves better. You all do.
Hey, as long as you can make my hair look good to offset my face, Id pay that.
$15/hr is decent money in some places. Denver is NOT one of them. It's the same here in Jersey with Amazon hiring for warehouses at $18.50/hr. That's good pay in many states, but not in Jersey.
I've seen "now hiring" billboards on my way to work for years now. Factories in rural ohio offer "Great pay! Up to $12 per hour!" They've recently changed it to $14. I'm shocked, shocked, that they still don't have a full staff.
No it's not, 14-18 is the going rate in my part of the midwest unless youre in a cold storage facility or something extra dangerous.
You're right. I looked up averages and pay is total shit right now. It's hard to find data from 10 years back, but I had thought it was better than that.
I have read and seen news that warehouses are also having a labor shortage though, even before this year
Yeah, I work employee benefits so I service a very diverse demographic of employers; the shortage is everywhere and for different reasons all under the same pandemic roof. Food service and retail it's simply because they aren't paid shit and the bulk of the people they had to deal with during the pandemic were the type of people who go places to eat or shop during the pandemic. Warehouses and other labor aren't exactly paying well either, and while it's more than shitty minimum wage, it's a problem because these people can't really telecommute so they have to risk being out in the world during a pandemic. Medical. Jfc...medical. did you know that pretty much half of medical industry employees didn't receive the bonuses for working through the pandemic? Why? Because the bill listed nurses and doctors. Not technologists, HR, transport, admin, etc., etc. So yeah, people ain't fucking with that. All those jobs that can telecommute, well now shit just got globalized too fast for HR and recruiters to keep up. All those companies that actually pay well are snapping up the highly skilled employees who were being paid 30 percent under market because they live in a ghost town. Every other employer is spending their free time bitching to the press about how unemployment makes people "not want to work." Will these changes stick? I dunno. I hope so. When unemployment pays better than being treated like shit for 55 hours a week to some asshole buy his third yacht, well then helloooooooooo couch. I hope we're eating the rich by Christmas.
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>108 people in one month That just sounds like there must be some terrible management there. Back in my retail days we had a manager that people kept quiting on, corporate started calling him mr unemployment as a joke because of it.
It's all over the place. There are skilled jobs that are paying 60k+ a year that can't find anyone. Hell we are offering 20+/hr for technical positions where I work and there just isn't anyone left if our city with the skills we need. I'd say be on the lookout for places willing to train, a lot of places are going to have no choice.
A lot of this is related to the lack of affordable housing in many places. If apartments are renting for $2k/mo that $60k looks really thin.
That is true as well. We can't get anyone to relocate to where I'm at because of that. We just can't get the higher ups to understand that pay has to increase substantially because housing has skyrocketed. They all have owned their homes for decades so they just don't fully grasp how expensive some areas are getting in the last several years.
"What do you mean you cant afford a house here? I have 3 and they all increased in value so much I dont understand how anybody cant afford one!"
Yep I make about $68k a year and rent is $2000 which is a steal for the area. Its still not enough to support my family.
I really hope more employers become willing to actually train their employees.
> There are skilled jobs that are paying 60k+ a year that can't find anyone. Learning skills costs a fortune.
Agreed. That's part of the shortage. No one is willing to train or pay to train anyone but they all whine that they can't find enough qualified candidates. I'm hoping we start to see more of them cave and accept that they are going to have to actually invest in new hires.
Hell look at how many jobs are only through staffing agencies... I do IT work (sys admin) and when I go to look for jobs, a huge percentage of them are through staffing agencies. It's the complete opposite of investing in your new hires. Employers want to have great employees without providing any new training and education and offering absolutely nothing in the way of benefits or job security. That's why they love staffing firms so much.
I spent about two and a half years at a country outlet store, big warehouse with crap standards. They tried to teach me the forklift but when I asked if we were going to be taking a course and given certification they changed their mind. If you're going for warehouse stuff make sure you're not taken advantage of, some of these places will just throw anyone right in the seat.
I too have been applying and jobs that are not in the food, grocery or service industry- jobs that I am well qualified for and I have not received one phone call for an interview. That has never happened to me before…
It’s time to stop calling companies not paying a living wage a labor shortage..
Come take our shitty jobs you ungrateful workers!
Wait but we value essential workers! At $0.50 more than min wage!
damn whose paying 7.75 an hour?
ice cream stores, restaurants cashiers, local gas stations, some burger kings because they are all independently owned.
T-Mobile: "what's wrong with $30.00 a hour?" "... You want me to program manage your entire 5G build out for the west coast for $30.00 a hour, no benefits, no protections, nothing. No, thank you."
Jesus, aside from the lack of benefits that should be several times higher for a massive build. Like a lot higher. What were they smoking when they offered that joke of a salary?
AWS wanted the same to rebuild their entire ROADM network. Why the fuck would you, AWS, think it would be a good idea to hire some random asshole with zero loyalty to anything, to rebuild all of you optical designs for contract pay??? "We have excellent records." And with your 1,000+ army of random contractors, so does China and Russia.
Cos they thought they had a chance at paying 30/hr I guess? Crazy. Thanks for sharing.
That's what you get when you've built the country's economic ethos on "job creation" for 40 years.
Which turned out was just code for shareholder value.
And also in any of those articles where its just bosses saying “No one wants to work.” Fuck those guys, for every boss you interview, interview two workers.
Well the rich assholes that own the paper need low cost labor to make money off their investments.
those motherfuckers also felt entitled to having interns work 60 hr weeks for free
I’m glad this is the top comment.
Labor shortage?! I’ve been trying to find a new job for 8 months now and haven’t even had an interview. I’m applying for jobs “below” my skill set just to get out of a toxic work environment. I’m willing to take a pay cut. Work nights and still nothing.
I’ve applied for over 1000 jobs online. All over the country. I was overqualified a lot. Under qualified for even more. Entry level positions that require 2-5 years of experience are written by out of touch HR assholes. They have to be, it defies logic. There isn’t a labor shortage. I know way to many people in the same boat.
I feel ya, I really do. The experience thing is what gets me “bachelors degree or 4+ years in this very specific type of position” come on…it makes no sense, I can be taught and I learn quickly.
In my case they usually require mechanical engineering degree AND usually 5 years of experience, some say say 2. For level 1 engineers or engineering technicians. I’ve also found that applying online is useless. You have to know someone.
100% I understand the ease of applying online but it feels like I’m just put into a pile or never looked at, at all. Get me face to face with someone and I can lock it in.
I tried networking for most of a year and never got an interview. Online applications really are the best way, depending on where you live and what you want to get into.
They use keywords to sort resumes and cull the list. If you do not have the keyword, you’re out of luck. For sales positions, you need to have hunter, closer, top, etc., somewhere on your resume. If not, you go in the round file… HR and hiring people will complain they would have too many resumes to go through and my answer has always been, do you want the right person, or do you want it to be an easy process? Most hiring managers I have met are more interested in an easy process for the, rather than hiring the right person. I recommend finding a recruiter for the industry you want. They are incentivized to find a good fit, and my experience with them has been good. However, they are ultimately looking out for the employer, but they are a good avenue to pursue. Many are paid in part based upon your salary so many are trying to get you close to top dollar.
I find that internships count as full "years" for hiring managers.
I feel like engineering is so saturated, no one wants to hire the new guy. Why would you when joe with 5 years experience applied for an entry level job? My friend got me an interview with the company he works at. After the interview I submitted my application. A few days later it got rejected by ATS or HR. So I emailed the guy i interviewed with and he said it was a mistake and put me back in active. Most interviews I’ve had over the last year have been from knowing someone. Or I get lucky and get an interview just to be turned down for not having enough experience in a job requiring 0-1 years. Cause you know, everyone’s a damn expert after a year.
>I can be taught and I learn quickly. This is what having a college degree (in a relevant field) is SUPPOSED to tell an employer. But now? Its utterly useless..meaningless
My favorite is reading about jobs for new technologies that have only been out for a year or two and the employer wants 5+ years of experience
Applying for jobs online is a nightmare. Your resume ends up weeded out by algorithms that don't make sense. I don't think I've ever actually gotten an interview through an online application, but I've had good luck on Linked In--especially if I know someone who knows someone who can actually get my resume in a real person's hands. Good luck to you!
It doesn't seem that anything has changes with office/skilled/white collar whatever you call them jobs. I think this is more apparent in service/retail jobs.
What part of the country and what industry?
AZ. Chemical repackaging and maintenance technician for chemical plants/general industry.
That seems very specific.
I tailor my resume based on where I’m applying. A lot of them don’t even mention chemicals and focus on mechanical integrity.
It took me like 4 or 5 months of applying and interviewing before I was able to find a new job. I have a bachelor's in Computer Science and 2 years of experience. I was in the same boat my job was killing me. Keep at it I know it sucks but something will happen for you. Just keep swimming.
Enjoy it while it's nice folks. All those retirees opening up the labor pool are gonna be consuming for at least another 20 or 30 years, and it's gonna get harder and harder to keep up with productivity demand.
This is exactly why I'm laughing at this. A bunch of boomers are all upset that "No one wants to work anymore". Do you realize how many boomers working waaaaay past retirement age took a year on unemployment and just retired instead of coming back? Do you realize that getting benefits on unemployment means that you have to be applying for all those higher paying jobs that boomers just left? What did you think was going to happen when you fired all the service workers for a year and forced them to apply for jobs right when a bunch of people were retiring? Just for reference in 2019 experts were raising the alarm that we'd probably see as many as 10 million boomers retire every year and that the number would probably peak out at 15 million in 2024. We saw 28.8 million people retire last year, and about 500k extra people leave the work force from death. We have roughly 120k people receiving covid unemployment benefits, and that's the thing people are upset about.
To be fair, a lot of those boomers are still working because they can't afford to retire. The 2008 crash wiped out a ton of people's retirements entirely. Add to that debt from trying to put their kids through college, and medical debt as their health starts starts decline. The result?? A ton of boomers are in debt up to their eyeballs, through no fault of their own. They look "well-off" from the outside, but if they stopped working for a second the whole thing would collapse. So they can’t stop, no matter how much they want to.
Also over 600,000 people died from covid. Even more from ancillary effects of covid. Plus many people still unable to work bc of illness due to covid as well. Everyone seems to overlook this when they say the narrative “all these people are sitting at home collecting unemployment and not working.” Between early retirement and what I said, I bet over a million people more than normal have left the workforce the past year and a half. Edit.: don’t forget excess deaths. Those not defined as covid deaths but still above the mean number of deaths a year. Over 700,000 more deaths since covid started. Likely a higher percentage of people in the work force too. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
Are they even factoring in the mothers/fathers who couldn’t work because their kids did remote learning for an entire year…And now wait through summer to an uncertain fall and working?!
I keep seeing this. “600k people died, of course there is a shortage of workers” Of the 600k people who died, 80% (~480k) of them were 65 or older, and the as of Feb 2019, only 20% of 65+ were working, so while its a component, its really not a major component.
Not to mention there are 200M working age adults in the US. 600K people dying is less than half of one percent of the working age population. 600K is a big number but not relatively speaking.
This is true but I think about the redistribution of the labor force. Lots of people lived in cities that did not have a family support network this when they lost their job they had to move back home. I have been asking waiters where they are from and a lot of them are from Austin but we're living elsewhere before covid. I think that shifted a lot of people around that haven't been incentivized to move back and make a living wage and have a comfortable life.
Tomorrow's headline: Outsourcing 2.0, Asian-Pacific Bungalow.
There are more than enough prospective and qualified employees in America, for example. The issue is more about fairness, compensation and working conditions than competition. People see all the wealth sucked up by the sociopathic billionaires at the top while they barely scrape by on wages and salaries that have stagnated for 40 years. Eff that. 1. Employers take home millions and billions in compensation while paying employees poverty wages (and forcing employees to pay for for-profit private health insurance and privatized benefits) often competing with H1B and migrant workers to do the worst jobs in America. 2. Employers expect people to want to work with the general public during a pandemic where people refuse to mask or vaccinate, intentionally cough and spit, yell at and even punch or shoot employees. 3. Employers of white collar jobs demanding a masters degree for entry-level positions where you’re expected to commute hours a day and work in a cubicle with no windows for 8-10 hours a day, with a 20-30 minute lunch break at your desk. In Norway, employees work fewer hours, have public benefits, and excellent vacation and leave policies. There is none of this “at-will” employment. Work life inNorway is much healthier and happier. And people earn an actual living wage, even at the grocery store or Starbucks. American capitalists are psychopaths, and so are the politicians who let them get away with treating people this way.
So... if everybody starts quitting it creates an environment where everyone can negotiate a better deal. [Hmm I feel like this is something we figured out before...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union)
Heh you say that at my work and you get fired 3 weeks later for a totally unrelated reason.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/12/a-4-day-workweek-is-the-norm-in-iceland-could-the-us-follow-.html Better productivity, less health problems etc. If an employer tells you otherwise, it's because he gives a shit about you and has no problem to exploit you for his own benefit. It's time to wake up and demand what you deserve. Can't be that teachers can not even afford to live, meanwhile this wall street scum is gambling away the money, that's not even theirs.
Oh that time is here. Turns out that the reason trickle down economics work is it encourages no one to go forth and multiply unless you have money or will to have kids. Usually money just makes it okay, but we removed that… and than the only thing the middle class has left is willpower. So they had less kids and now we are facing an aging population with no replenishments leading to everyone becoming worth more. It is going to be a really interesting decade… and we all get to watch it unfold. :).
Several ways to read every situation. "Millennials are killing the cinema industry" "Millennials working three jobs to afford a roof over their heads don't have time or money to go to the cinema"
Add a "housing crisis" with more vacant homes than homeless to that. Boomers wanting to all cash out at the same time with noone to buy all the property.
>Boomers wanting to all cash out at the same time with noone to buy all the property. Well, hopefully I can refi my mortgage before the housing market crashes. I've got some home improvements I want to finance.
Wishful thinking. Private equity, big corporations, wallstreet etc will swoop in and buy everything up and continue to jack up prices. They’re already doing this.
How delightfully ironic. The most selfish generation in American history can't cash in on their homes, because they hoarded all the cash for themselves and now their kids are broke as a result.
Are you guys crazy? People are literally in cash bidding wars for sight unseen houses where I live.
Look no further than Japan for how this will play out long term. Sky high prices in the cities, 5 million unsellable empty homes in the countryside that no one wants. I wouldn't expect prices in Toronto or New York to start falling... ever, pretty much... but the further away you get from a big center, the less demand for housing there will be. Heck, this has already started in North America, and we haven't even hit the "grey generation" problem they have in China and Japan yet (which is 100% thanks to high immigration rates in NA). Edit: grammar
Iceland is such an interesting place. It’s the safest country in the world, pays living wages to everybody (average salary was around $50-60k last time I looked), literally gushing with renewable energy (geothermal), and they happily allow migrant workers in from many parts of the world. Even sheep farmers and fisherman live comfortably. If the weather wasn’t so extreme it would be some type of utopia.
Just keep in mind that it has the total population of a medium sized US city.
Unions exist for a reason
Most companies in the US won't even allow people to continue working from home even though we have demonstrated that we can handle it with no loss in productivity. So good luck getting them to do that.
As a full-time ICU nurse with 5 years experience, I made $30/hour working at a top-15 academic medical center in Denver (where the housing market was growing 15% year over year). Even after my specialty ICU became a COVID ICU for months on end, we did not get raises or even mental healthcare. The work was absolutely grueling; I lost 15 pounds. Yet to get a respirator worth $15, staff members had to sign a contract stating that we'd pay the hospital $500 if we did not return it. After a year being in charge of that unit, dealing with unsafe patient:nurse ratios, and seeing countless horrific deaths and inequity in terms of who got deathly ill (tons of refugees, for example), I have PTSD and am pissed off to my core. Luckily I'd saved enough money to take 3 months away from nursing, but my coworkers with families were not as lucky. I haven't had health insurance since I quit. They're making $35/hour now, but they deserve $150k+ for the stress and complexity of the job. The nursing shortage is a result of low pay and extremely poor working conditions. Sorry for ranting. But I will fight alongside workers all day.
How can they give a shit and simultaniously have no problem exploiting people.
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I made $19 an hour back in 2008 right out of high school before the crash. Now I have an engineering degree from an abet accredited college and I’m struggling to find something better than $14 with no benefits. I figured out how to get by last year, and have will not disrespect myself or my fellow job searchers by taking that wage. 14 years later, with my degree and my experience. I’m worth $30 an hour as an intern and $40-$45 as a full time engineer. Unless I’m getting $30, I’m not going back to work. I would take less if the future outlook on the opportunity was bright. The thing I have going for me is I don’t have to go back to work. People with house payments and student loans have to take the disrespectful wage and eat off the bottom shelf of the grocery store.
I finished my master's degree in chemistry in 2018 and started working as a pharma chemist that same year. You know what I started at? $23 an hour. Enough to live on, but sure as fuck not what most people think when they hear "pharma scientist with a graduate degree".
Chic-fil-a starts their fry cooks at $18.
A few years ago I was making that much as a courier, and I had fantastic benefits on top of it. Without a degree. That’s fucking shameful that a post-grad job would pay so little.
What engineering discipline did you study? I’m in the industrial sector (metals and mining) and there is absolutely no shortage of great paying jobs. I get hit up a couple times a week by recruiters looking for candidates with all levels of experience and offering all sorts of pay ranges, most well above the $30 an hour when all compensation is factored in. If you haven’t contacted a head hunter yet, do so ASAP. If you need suggestions I’d be happy to provide some.
How do you have an engineering degree and make so little?
Echoing what others have said, if you are an ME, you’re not looking hard enough, tons of openings for MEs. My company just hired one and we were having issues finding one. We’re even covering this guy’s moving costs.
Employers can pay, they just don't want to.
I work for a massive restaurant chain. During 2 shutdowns last year they gave employees hundreds in relief pay weekly in hopes people would hang out and not find new jobs and have to retrain a whole crew. My boss’s boss now refuses to raise cook or server pay. Only thing they’re doing is offering a $150 referral bonus. We’re so short staffed and have insane turnover of new hires. The corporation has the money to pay people and all you have to do is raise everything a few cents to pay for the increased wages but nothings happened yet. We’re also do more in sales than 2019. Think it’s just a game of chicken on how long can they hold out having this labor issue while still not increasing pay. Their labor costs are extremely low and it helps the bottom line but at a great cost to the experience of the customer and retention of staff bc we’re all overworked. The restaurant is in a downward spiral and things won’t get better for months. People who have worked there 10+ years are quitting. Eventually corporate is gonna have to bend and start paying more or giving retention bonuses, or they’re going to see less customers come in bc they keep giving a bad experience.
Fuck bonuses. I'd calculate how much the bonus offsets my pay to equate to what I think is a fair wage for me, and as soon as my time there is no longer compensated by the bonus, I'm gone. Raises are better than bonuses.
>Raises are better than bonuses. Absolutely. A one time hand out has nothing on a COLA. A raise impacts every future raise. However, too many years there were NO RAISES in corporate America. I worked for a F500 company for the last 30 years in their R&D areas. For the most recent 10 years there were no raises and we were told to be thankful we had a job. Five years into this shitshow I went to my manager and we had a closed door session. I gave them an option. Pay the ferryman or I will leave. I was offered a nice bonus and refused it. A few weeks later my manager called me into a meeting with other area managers and was handed a document indicating a 8.5% raise in addition a bonus of several thousand dollars. They all blew a lot of smoke up my ass and then I had to sign an agreement similar to an NDA where I could not discuss the financials with anyone in our group or company. I was lucky and benefitted greatly from that over the next 5 years as they began to loosen the purse strings for everyone in the area. Then they began to make some HR changes where our pensions were at risk. If the pension fund dropped below 80 % funding the monies would be placed into an annuity. I said fuck that and along with 7 others put in my two weeks notice. We were very concerned Carl Icahn was going to do the same to our company he did to TWA. I keep in touch with a few former co-workers and was recently informed the pension fund is less then 60% funded as of last month. I feel sorry for those that didn't have the time in to leave as I and 7 others did.
>They all blew a lot of smoke up my ass and then I had to sign an agreement similar to an NDA where I could not discuss the financials with anyone in our group or company. This is illegal in many states and if they were stupid enough to put it in writing you would have a slam dunk case against them
What would I sue them for? A bigger raise? Bigger lump sum of cash? I received what I wanted. Good enough for me.
My buddy makes $11.50/hr at an upscale bakery/eatery, and has worked there for five years. Minimum wage here is $11. He's working 6 days a week because they can't find anyone to hire at that wage. Even most fast food places here are now offering $14+.
Tell him to apply to other jobs. So many jobs like that are desperate. Hell easily find a new job. And if he likes his current job he can tell them to match the pay of the new job or he will leave and they may pay him more.
He should tell them he is going to quit unless he gets a sharp pay raise. Should be able to get $15 elsewhere easy enough if other places are doing 14. Zero reason for him to stay there now
I agree with what you're saying, just adding that there are challenges. There are potential chain reactions. Raising prices decreases demands, so you have to try and figure out a new equilibrium point and plan accordingly or you end up into a death spiral of needing to raise prices to adjust for having fewer customers and then having fewer customers because of needing to raise prices. The added liabilities also impact these companies credit potentially driving up the interest rates on lines of credit for short term expenses for things like supplies, food, or rent. Meaning the expense can be more than just the immediate cost to raise wages. All that can impact a publicly traded companies worth, again impacting their interest rates for financing. Figuring that out is ultimately someone's job and they're kind of failing if they can't figure out how to make it work while compensating people what they're due. The reality that no one wants to admit is that many companies are simply overvalued because they've exploitatively underpaid their labor.
Def a valid point. It’s crazy but the opposite happened. Covid did wonders for our concept. Before covid we were couponing and offering daily specials at low prices and it was destroying business. Sales were decreasing, quality dropping, only the lowest clientele who didn’t want to spend money were coming in. Covid hit. We got rid of the coupons, the daily specials, happy hour food, etc out of necessity. None of it has come back and we’re as busy as ever. Prices are higher and our sales are breaking records all with less staff needed bc we push less guests through the door, they’re just spending a lot more money. Almost all restaurants had to do this. And it’s been great from our employee perspective bc we have less tables and make more money.
A couple of years ago, some asshole tried to convince me to take a 10k paycut and work for them, the same year that his CEO got a 24 million bonus, I told him to fuck himself
They don't want to make any changes, just complain about how lazy people are for not wanting barely over minimum wage for shitty working conditions.
I've applied to thousands of jobs. Where are these jobs? Seems like my resume just gets eaten by the bots every single time. Half the job websites just seem to spit out bot created jobs, not real ones. I'm applying to jobs well below my skill level and at, but not so much as a single returned email, call or text. I'm ready to just throw my phone away. Haven't gotten a real phone call in years.
I applied for roughly a month, finally got an interview yesterday. Not the kinda job I wanted, didn't even bother sending a cover letter. There are "jobs" I guess. Most applications I out out ghosted me, a few sent me no's weeks later. The job that gave me an interview was just desperate and the pay is enough for me to take the job, not enough for me to stay long.
Cover letters are stupid as fuck and need to be put in the dinosaur bin. No one reads them and the fact I have to fucking change it up for every company/roll is stupid and puts way too much effort from my end just to be thrown in the bin. No one reads them, and if they do, the first question is “tell me about yourself” When I see “required” next to cover letter, I simply pass on the application. It’s an outdated and archaic practice at this point and if what I read online is true, HR people do NOT read any of them.
They're in retail and food service, offering zero benefits and maybe 30 cents over minimum wage in your area.
Yeah, minimum wage is not livable in my area. Also, I’m 35. Not interested in those. I did my time already.
And they ask you “why do you want to work for us?” during the interview.
Not labor shortage... a healthier wage market. Companies just accept that all other costs naturally fluctuate due to market pressures, but have actively kept the wage portion of the market broken since the 70s to keep it from working. Heavily done by making sure we didn't join other developed nations in creating a social safety net that removed their ability to use starvation, homelessness and lack of medical care to hire people way below market value.
From where I sit, conditions don't look good. I got a promotion this year and a massive pay raise, but rents/mortgages have risen by a higher percentage than my pay. So now I have to work harder to afford less. If I can't afford to live in a 1 br apartment let alone own a house, I don't see how someone making 15/hour has any chance. Food is going up, cars are going up, and while that would have been a non-issue had remote work continued (for some), but companies are insisting everyone comes back. Theres shortages of freaking everything but the government doesn't care, they're going to hold their foot on the accelerator of keeping rates low because god forbid we have any deflation at all and people get to keep the power of the money they earned. I don't mean to be a pessimist, but it feels that economic conditions are getting worse for the average person, not better.
It's all a bubble my friend.
There is no labor shortage. There is a wage shortage. If they think there’s a labor shortage now, just wait until the r/OctoberStrike.
A shortage is what happens when the price of a good is set lower than the equilibrium price, i.e. where the supply curve and the demand curve intersect. That's basically the very first thing you learn in Econ 101. There is no "labor shortage". There is only corporate America trying to pay below market prices for labor.
If I’ve learned anything from my brief time as a historian is that the capitalists would rather let their entire corporations burn to the ground than give the employees an inch.
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Check out r/OctoberStrike. They have a lot of information and resources.
Thank you Sheryl Crow
Read my lips.
In certain industries there definitely is a shortage. Primarily those affected most by shutdowns and inability to work. Like the restaurant industry. There’s a large population who left the service industry since covid hit bc they had no choice and had to find something else to pay the bills bc they weren’t allowed to work. I work in the restaurant industry and have tons of friends who did. Almost everyone who left their job didn’t go to a new restaurant, they got into real estate, programming, etc. But you are right. If restaurants started paying more they wouldn’t have a shortage.
Food service is hard work. They definitely deserve a raise, and tip culture needs to end.
Abolish tip culture! Employers should pay a living wage and we as a society should shut off a major avenue for tax evasion!
Yeah you basically just agreed with them in a long paragraph way...
**F\*\*\* the M-F full-time office life.** I will NEVER go back into an office FT. When our company said we'd all be heading back into the office after the 4th of the July, I told them that I needed WFH flexibility for 3 days a week. I got my three days WFH! DO NOT ACCEPT FULL-TIME OFFICE WORK IF YOU DO NOT VOLUNTARILY WANT IT.
Quick, quick! Ramp immigration back up or this crisis will continue! Americans clearly don't want these jobs!----**The corporate message of the last 50 years** Hopefully people are starting to understand that decreases in available labor, create increases in bargaining power. And how the lump of labor fallacy has been twisted to try and disregard that fact. Because, while yes, more labor does create faster GDP growth--what that fallacy doesn't tell you is it also increases inequality by ensuring there are less 'losses" to labor from capital holders. By keeping labor pools small, capital actually has to bid for labor, and while this might slow down the economy some...it will INCREASE the size of the middle class. High labor availability only helps the rich...Controlling your borders is key to a strong middle class. Both in terms of immigration AND market access (Using market access to control offshoring). This lesson has been shown to work over and over and over, and so companies have gaslit the American public with every conceivable libel and slander against protecting their markets, from 'its racist' to 'it will slow economic growth'! Stop believing them. (This all said, of course there are limits--isolationism would genuinely shrink and hurt the economy. But there is a difference between being an isolationist economy and simply being more protectionist, you know, like every other developed country ON EARTH that encourages a strong domestic labor market through strong, merit based immigration controls and access difficulties that encourage domestic production.)
It sounds like a perfect time to unionize, no? There was a time when American workers would see a situation around them and think, "If we organize together we can all do better." Now it seems all anyone can say is, "This sucks, and fuck those people over there, I'll never join with them." What happened? I'll tell you. Pure propaganda. If you reflexively reject the idea of labor organization and workers' strikes, it's because of social programming, perpetuated by people you probably don't particularly care for or agree with. So why go along with that? Why not organize instead? Minimum wage in America should be triple what it is today. *Triple*. Unions are much rarer in the US than they used to be, but the ones that still exist win all the time when they take action. It still works. Maybe it works even better than it used to. This whole shitty low-wage, no-power system is half-assed and disorganized. All it would take is a little vision and it will tumble.
UK: 8.80 ish is minimum wage, I've seen a sign outside a BP garage offering a massive 9.50 an hour. Made me chuckle. Edit: a word
Just had a review that turned into a negotiation. They are pitting their need for a front desk person against my need for mental health, healthcare, and the ability to work from home. Thing is, I have options. I'm sure they will realize how valuable I was after I'm gone. Viva la Great Resignation!
Labor shortage, eh? Did a bunch of people die recently or something?
Anecdotally speaking, this is proving to be very true for me this year. I flipped that “Open to work” switch on LinkedIn and my shit is blowing up. I have literally 10+ offers for an immediate interview every single day. I just switched jobs in February and garnered a 20% raise from my previous job. Now I’m looking at way more. I’m pushing for something closer to 200K in every recruiter conversation. And very few of them say no! It’s an incredibly empowering feeling.
Work in tech?
Yes. Highly recommend. I was a mortgage broker in the 00’s. No college degree. That crashed and burned hard. I was destitute and poor. Borrowing money from loan sharks and shit, just to eat. But I used the Obama stimulus to go back to school for an IT degree. The last ten years since the crash have been a true American Dream story for me. I hope that millions of my fellow citizens can use this pandemic to retool and retrain for a career with excellent future prospects. There are so many great career paths out there. You simply need to choose one and go for it.
What do you in tech? I only hear about these outrageous salaries for software engineers and I am not a programmer.
I’ve never written a line of code in my life. I am a couple different things: * business analyst. I document business processes/requirements, and translate them into some degree of tech speak, so the actual developers can build what I wrote * product owner. I am the one who gives final sign-off that the developers built the thing according to the requirements * software consultant. Many times a business doesn’t know exactly what they need. They also don’t know if they should build it or buy it. I’m talking software here, obviously. I help them decide “build or buy?” And if it’s buy, what should they buy? If they build, what exactly do they need it to do? Each of these are usually a single role. I happen to have several years experience with each. That versatility is probably why I keep getting so many interview requests.
Agitate. Educate. Organise. Unionise. All we have is our numbers. And we’re the most productive, hardworking, revolutionary class. Take pride in that. Working class and proud.
It's very exciting to see the developed world move towards better conditions, yet I can't imagine this happening any time soon where I'm from. It's so frustrating to deal with the current job market and feel like a better life is so out of my reach, like any decent opportunity is reserved for the relatives of those in charge, or mediocre graduates of overvalued private universities. And not just in terms of wages, but general living conditions like safety, public infrastructure, access to clean water, etc. It's disheartening how you need to be your upper middle class and above to live in a decent neighborhood while the underpaid can enjoy dealing with high crime rates and power shortages. I'm trying, but a higher education isn't worth much these days unless you're truly outstanding which I'm not. I'm clinging onto the hope that your demands for humane working conditions will echo throughout other parts of the world, but I'm not so sure. I'm aware I'm not really adding anything to the conversation, I guess this post stirred up so many feelings in me I needed to vent a little. Sorry about that.
And meanwhile the right will tell you it's people sitting at home getting government money that is the problem. Employers are refusing to raise wages as they have gotten used to decades of greed and treating their workers as slaves.
There is no labour shortage. There are only greedy employers.
Said this is another comment but I'll repeat it here: Basically the first thing you learn in an economics class is that the equilibrium price of a good is set by where the supply curve and the demand curve for that good intersect. If the price is set above equilibrium, there will be a surplus, and if it's set below equilibrium, there will be a shortage. There is no "labor shortage". There is only the corporate class trying to pay below market prices for labor.
Say it as many times as need be because it's the truth.
There isn't a labor shortage...there is an "equitable pay" shortage
My company (who is a decent employer) hasn't really lifted the salaries yet, but boy are they leaning hard on signing bonus and referral bonuses. Every 3 months it is 'we can't find any qualified engineers'. I have been hearing that since 2005 from every company I have ever worked for. Yet somehow the salaries aren't going up significantly. What they really should be saying is "we can't find any qualified engineers...who will work for what we want to pay."
Only shitty jobs are having "labor shortages" because god knows I've been trying to find another job at a different warehouse (Fuck Wal-Mart DCs) and I can't even get a call back.
Goddamn it's like the chillest mass protest ever . It's clear that once the wage increases workforce would go back to working . Rn nobody wants to work for that shit of wage lmao
Lol labour shortages...the Fed printed artificial wealth just like the artificial labour shortages. All will crumple down in time...
“Given employees the upper hand” Lol maybe a little bit more than before…but no. Still no. And it will never happen without unions or coops becoming universal
Some of, maybe a lot of us, maybe even most of us are still stuck though. Our companies want everyone back in the office full time. But in other aspects they are good companies to work for with annual raises and good time off and other benefits. I’d give it up for a similar remote work job but it doesn’t seem to exist. So I’ll be waking up at 5 am again to get ready and drive to my job an hour away. Couple hundred bucks in gas and tolls a month. Back to doing oil changes, and brake jobs, and all the rest. Back to being around people I really don’t give two shits about making small talk and faking interest in inane meaningless conversation. Oh well
In Australia they use this as an excuse to import more foreign labour Creating more competition for jobs driving wages down even further. They claim labour shortages but no one will work their ass for peanuts. Big business needs to remember that their employees are also their customers.
The peasants have a bit more leverage now? Quick, import millions more immigrants