https://www.businessinsider.com/over-4-million-workers-quit-record-labor-shortage-great-resignation-2021-10
I stand with Bill, the manager of Old Glory Hole Tavern who is still putting up signs he designed in MS Word with passive aggressive comments about how no one wants to work anymore.
To be fair to Bill, he does have the oldest registered glory hole in Kentucky, people should be honored to work there
"yes, hi I am here from the State of Kentucky's official glory hole registration office"
“Listen bud, this here glory hole hasn’t been recertified in nearly a decade. We’re gonna need a full, long, and hard inspection before I can sign off on anything.”
I don't understand how this is happening? How are people affording rent and food? Are people resigning to genuinely sit out or resigning to immediately take a job somewhere else
I think it's at least partly because during the earlier days of covid a lot of people moved back in with their parents, sold off cars, gave up healthcare and cable along with other long term reductions in living expenses. If you are confident you aren't immediately going to starve and go homeless you can handle a lot of smaller day to day expenses with gig work, giving a strong point to negotiate in an entry level forever jobs market.
I quit my job in April of 2020 when they refused to shut down for covid when my state went into lockdown mode and actually made more money through unemployment monthly than I did working. Plus I moved back in with my mom due to health issues and she doesn't make me pay rent, so right now I'm just slowly dwindling my savings while living off of ramen and potatoes.
what I don't understand though is what are these other jobs they're getting? I could quit my job tomorrow, but I'm not really in a position to do anything radically different than what I'm doing. I'd just end up in the same position I'm in now, albeit in a different location. With the amount of bullshit certifications and experience you need for like every job these days, how are people able to find jobs that are so much better than what they're doing now?
Because the labor shortage is there too. Those jobs you need bullshit licenses for are lying. They need workers more than licenses. I got callbacks from about half the ones I applied to and ended up landing an engineering gig with no college degree
When people have to tighten their belts for over a year, a lot figure out how to make it work and get used to it. They don't like it, but they learn how to deal with it. So when some company comes along and offers shit conditions and shit pay, they know they can deal with it a bit longer.
A lot of people moved back in with family during the initial wave of Covid and don't want to move out to work a shitty job. Or after 1.5 years they got something marginally more comfortable than service work, even if it still pays like $14/hr. Or older people just retired rather than go back to work and risk Covid.
:think-about-it:
spoiler
No but really, you're not part of the unemployment figure unless you're seeking work with the help of the state, I think.
Yeah you're right, unemployment doesn't include those not actively looking for work, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
People are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work.
Kinda cool how there are like 10 different measurements for all these things and they just choose the one that makes their ideology work.
Like literacy rates in America are worryingly low if you use international standards
another manager at my store is quitting in a month. nobody is being replaced. i'm leaving whenever i can when i can square away my CDL training. this is a grocery store so i imagine if things got bad enough the state would have national guard stocking shelves so the locals don't start a treat riot.
I got a buddy who’s gotta get his CDL-A (he’s got his B already). He was supposed to take the test this week.
I guess the guy who was gonna run the test that day got sick, so the testing company had to cancel and reschedule—3 months from now. Apparently instead of rescheduling everyone, the people from that day are just getting screwed and having to wait in line all over again. My buddy’s work tried to throw their weight around (big company) and pull some strings with the testing company, but no luck lol
Sounds like a real disaster, where there isn’t even enough labor to really run the testing.
Also turns out, a lot of the CDL licensing places are just privately-run. Fucking crazy stuff.
So good luck, I hope you can make the changes you wanna make without having to wait too long!
Doesn't Goodwill do CDL training? Goodwill is privately owned though isn't it.
Just gotta apply like crazy, leverage applications against each other. Tell one you got a better offer from another, tell your company you got a better offer from someone else, etc.
This is basically what marketized labor is and it's bullshit. You are a commodity that needs to be sold. Generating demand for yourself can actually help you get better wages, but only to a limit. Anything drastically good is going to require collective action because the difference between laborers is only small and a group of workers withholding labor can drive up the price of their labor in a market context.
People don't want to do shitty low wage depressing jobs where they get abused and the schedule determines their whole life, imagine that. The signs say "No one wants to work anymore" but the truth is no one ever wanted to work in the first place. At least not as a shit job for shit pay.
