https://archive.ph/2022.05.30-145611/https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-worker-shortage-means-pools-camps-closed-11653918501
I actually am looking for a second job for the summer and no one wants to hire evenings/weekends only. They want part time with full availability. The manager at the community pool I applied to actually asked me if I could cut back hours at my full time IT job to be available enough to lifeguard. They'd rather just have no one then hire one guy and have at least two days covered. Brilliant minds managing America's retail and customer service centers.
Only tangentially related but something that awes me the more I learn about more jobs is just how incompetent so many people in so many jobs are. Its a miracle all this hasn't fallen apart already.
I’ve worked in a variety of industries and I’ve had the same exact thought at every job
Reminder that there was a study claiming the US was under counting and approached 900k+ covid related deaths back in 2020.
YES good point I am just so tired of these “why does nobody want to work” pieces which ignore a million bodies in the fucking ground and god knows how many permanent disabilities
There's a book by Walter Scheidel called The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century where he talks about the "4 horsemen" of leveling inequality; mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues. And what we're seeing now is pretty much straight out of his chapter on the rise of labor power after the black death even to the point of them attempting legislation to reign in labor power.
June 1349, the crown passed the Ordinance of Laborers:
Since a great part of the population, and especially workers and employees (“servants”), has now died in this pestilence many people, observing the needs of masters and the shortage of employees, are refusing to work unless they are paid an excessive salary. . . . We have ordained that every man or woman in our realm of England, whether free or unfree, who is physically fit and below the age of sixty, not living by trade and exercising a particular craft, and not having private means of land of their own upon which they need to work, and not working for someone else, shall, if offered employment consonant with their status, be obliged to accept the employment offered, and they should be paid only the fees, liveries, payments or salaries which were usually paid in the part of the country where they are working in the twentieth year of our reign [1346] or in some other appropriate year five or six years ago. . . . No one should pay or promise wages, liveries, payments or salaries greater than those defined above under pain of paying twice whatever he paid or promised to anyone who feels himself harmed by it. . . . Artisans and labourers ought not to receive for their labour and craft more money than they could have expected to receive in the said twentieth year or other appropriate year, in the place where they happen to be working; and if anyone takes more, let him be committed to gaol.We're in fuckin' 1349 motherfucker. You are a serf. Bitch, you live in Buckinghamshire. You are a peasant. You need to give your fuckin' lord the grain. Your fucking children, you've had 15 children. You've never taken a bath. You've literally never. washed. your. penis. You've never used toilet paper. Motherfucker, you have worms. You are dying. You've had 40 children, 3 of them are alive. 2 of them are child soldiers in the Duke's army.
from NATOpedia: "The ordinance has largely been seen as ineffective.[4] Despite the English parliament's attempt to reinforce the ordinance with the Statute of Labourers of 1351, workers continued to command higher wages and the majority of England (those in the labouring class) enjoyed a century of relative prosperity before the ratio of labour to land restored the pre-plague levels of wages and prices. While the economic situation eventually reverted, the plague radically altered the social structure of English society.[2]
It was later repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 1863 and the Statute Law (Ireland) Revision Act 1872."
lol eat it rich fucks. It makes me happy to know that, if only for a time, they didn't get what they wanted.
Do you have a source for that number would love to learn more
Don’t feel pressured to dig something up if it’s not handy I’m not trying to debate bro you
I forget where i found the source, but the Cdc estimate that every 1 in 5 cases results in long covid. A survey of 100k cases found 26000 people are still having symptoms after over month: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Study-reveals-long-COVID-risks-17200501.php?IPID=SFGate-HP-CP-Spotlight
For the UK they think 2 million have long covid: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/01/two-million-people-in-uk-living-with-long-covid-say-studies
I'd imagine higher since they've dropped any pretense of prevention.
And a ton of immigrant labor doesn't want to come to the usa any more.
A ton do. They're just bottled up at the border indefinitely, because a handful of xenophobic pricks in fly over country hate brown people.
Which, ironically, further empowers labor. They literally would rather hurt brown people than protect their own economic interests because they feel so confident that they can grind us into dust.
someone I know said that most of the deaths were people over 50, and that they don't contribute much to the labor force.
Lol nobody retires in this country those old people were most definitely still working
I've also seen this and agree that it's probably true (most covid deaths were / are older folks). Even if you say they weren't working (which I disagree with), this demographic has most of the country's money, so when they die, their kids get their stuff, and then have less of an incentive to work for shit wages, thus "nobody wants to work anymore."
yeah exactly. there are knock-on effects to ONE MILLION people dying.
Plus retirees watch their grandkids frequently, less of them around means more people looking at daycare and deciding that between being impoverished and paying for daycare, and being impoverished and having one of the parents home with the kids all day, the second one sounds less horrible.
Yeah this is what happened for me, at least. I was working as an EMT and got real burned out during the pandemic and had to quit so I didn’t kill myself. The only reason I was able to do that and survive was because my wife and I both lost a grandparent and we were able to use our inheritance to pay off the last $50,000 on our student loans.
Hasn't immigration also tumbled since the beginning of the pandemic? I read that there has been something like 1 and a half million fewer immigrants than there would be if pre-2020 levels had been sustained.
Lmao blaming labor costs.
Mother fucker, no one is going to work for you for free. Especially while cost of living is this crazy.
If you can't afford to pay people, they can't afford to work for you.
I find this particularly fascinating at the local government levels. Big cities that have been attracting tech talent for a decade while decimating affordable housing supply have nowhere for their seasonal workers to live.
Homelessness increases due to housing crisis and reurbanization and yuppies start screaming about the homeless. So cities now fight homelessness with camping bans and increased policing. The police also want more money because their suburban homes are more expensive too. So the city pours money into "cleaning up" and basically anything but adding affordable housing. They need those property taxes to stay high, because the tech corps they all recruited are in the city tax free. All the new wealthy ghouls dodge city taxes too.
All of this, ALL OF IT, could be prevented with affordable housing. So many aspects of the American economy are in overdrive off a cliff BECAUSE OF HOUSING.
Death to America :amerikkka:
Only work, no house. also I won't hire you if you're homeless
Have you considered renting an efficiency unit with four of your closest friends?
Just watch out, because this might be illegal thanks to laws from the 1950s banning same sex cohabitation.
JUST. PAY. MORE. It’s really not that fucking complicated. Pay more. Offer good hours and benefits. That’s it!
You don't understand, I don't want workers, I want all of the money. Why would I give workers some of the money?!
A lot of small businesses really can't pay more. They've been on shitloads of life support from the American government / American imperialism for who even knows how long. They get squeezed by labor at one end and big business (which supplies them with the shit they resell) at the other end. They're really very fragile and collapse the moment anything goes wrong. Also, their owners tend to be the most unbearable fucking human beings on the planet who have no idea how to even conceive of, much less handle this problem.
With my experience with small businesses I'd say it's more column b than a.
You motherfuckers it’s you who won’t call us back
Enjoy your plundered Covid relief money, though
“Now Hiring” my ass
10% of workers at my job have been out sick for the past month, on top of people quitting or retiring because having to cover two jobs at once is awful.
Plus with gas being so much more expensive lately and no alternative forms of transportation available in a lot of places you'd lose money working a minimum wage job and trying to fill your tank
Omfg these small business tyrants need to cope, get the fuck over your self you don't have a right to own a business, you also can't complain when the market doesn't go your way.
