Posted on 06/22/2022 5:48:32 AM PDT by bort
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How about couples with young children who found out during the last couple of years that they could live on one salary with one parent staying home. They may have had to cut down on eating out, vacations, etc. but not taking little children to daycare can make home life a lot less stressful.
That’s some of it but Americans are below population replacement levels, and with half of marriages failing that leaves only a relatively small number of intact families with kids who aren’t yet school age.
“Please ask the moderator to delete your link, and repost it using tinyurl.com. It has destroyed the formatting for the entire page.”
Just went to my post and clicked the link. All looks ok.
One thing about a digitally connected world is that word spreads quickly. I suspect the $18.25 an hour is tied to unrealistic expectations. I witness companies hire entry-level staff and then expect them to do their bosses work. Their boss can't do their work because there is none; they left more than a year ago. It wasn't spelled out to the new hire in the interview. The new hire is thrown in the deep end to sink or swim and they're not getting compensated at the missing boss's rate. How long would they put up with that? Worse, how many of their social network are now forewarned?
Even pre-Scamdemic, an acquaintance who owns a small business would bitch and moan about how his staff couldn't run the business when he wasn't there; including ordering merchandise, coordinating repair of specialized equipment, making merchandising decisions, etc. I listened up to the point he let it slip he was paying them minimum wage. His staff wasn't incompetent slackers; it was work way beyond their capacity, and work he himself wasn't good at.
I repeatedly run into situations where clueless managers don't understand why rocket-scientist candidates aren't beating down the door to work for just above minimum wage. Right out of Dilbert, I run into ones who've set job requirements of more knowledge and experience than they themselves have yet it's for an underling's position, often two tiers below them.
Women in their 30s that I’ve seen are surely settling...even though I have zero interest in anyone over my wife. Most of it settles into their butts.
“Henry arms is trying to recruit CNC machinists starting at 17 dollars an hour what a joke.”
That’s crazy !
I agree 100%.
You have a reading comprehension problem. This isn’t about what “I” want. It has to do with understanding how our largely government controlled economy distorts the labor market.
My post was not about telling people what to do, but rather that what they decide to do is grossly distorted by government intervention (of all kinds).
I think it’s that the current generation of employees is *smarter* than their elders. Unlike baby boomers, they can’t be conned into believing that if you work hard, give your all for the company, and put in lots of unpaid overtime, you will be rewarded with a long-term career. They’ve watched their parents and grandparents work hard all their lives only to see their jobs outsourced to India, China, or Mexico, or to see themselves replaced by people here on H1B visas, and they’re not buying into it. They can’t be lured into taking a job by the same incentives that worked on baby boomers.
It doesn’t matter which industry; every industry and every profession has an “entry level.” Having been in management and having interviewed and hired a lot of candidates in recent years, there is a fundamental problem with the way that American management in general has treated American labor that goes back decades, and it has created a deeply cynical potential labor pool. Millennials and Gen Z workers are hard to hire, and the good ones are even harder to retain.
In response, many employers are trying to make work and the work environment more appealing: pay and benefit increases and improving the workplace and its tasks to persuade workers to stay. As larger employers figure it out, the resulting changes will necessarily be embraced by smaller employers. This does not resolve though the often trying nature of work today and its cultural and political minefield. Work loses if there is a choice between more time at home for yourself and with people you love and going to work in order to risk getting capriciously denounced as racist and be routinely ill-treated by bosses, customers, and co-workers.
Two other factors should also be mentioned.
First, over the last generation, American education -- especially public schools and almost all colleges and universities -- more and more focused on social justice, critical race theory, and the ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion -- and deemphasized useful skills and knowledge, the liberal arts, and work-readiness. The result is a wave of young workers who are boorish, undisciplined, poorly skilled, and not in tune with what the workplace requires.
This is a fundamental breach of the basic compact between education and America's voters and business community: we will educate your kids to be good people, reliable as citizens, and skilled and capable as employees, and in return you give us your kids, cash, and a free hand to run education.
The COVID lockdowns revealed just how bad American education is. The result is that we are in the early stages of a reckoning between it and the country at large. In addition to the dismal value proposition, American education is an increasingly destructive cultural and political force that cannot and will not be tolerated in most of the country. For many parents, a wife dropping out of the workplace to home school the kids is now a necessity.
Meanwhile, until American education is reformed, it will continue to produce waves of unemployable and marginally employable graduates every year.
Second, over the last two decades, American business largely prospered not by innovation but by relentless cost cutting, much of it by accounting gimmicks and by suppressing labor costs through massive immigration and outsourcing and cheap foreign goods. As that process cut more and more deeply into the workers' share of national income, it fueled the discontent that elected Trump.
That discontent continues in spite of Trump's defeat, with many disaffected workers deciding to quit and avoid work if they can as a form of protest. Indeed, the eternal contest between business and labor increasingly has a political dimension. Like the gang of idiots they are, the US Chamber of Commerce and other business leaders have even revived the American labor movement.
And as one experienced worker with a major national company put it to me when considering early retirement, since the company had lost his loyalty through years of relentless and often petty and short-sighted cost-cutting, his decision to stay was due to two major pay increases and the hope that a GOP Congress and potential Trump II administration will make things better.
Good post.
Well done sir, well done.
He was at one time chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He advanced the proliferation of electronic trading platforms and the concept of payment for order flow, which has been described as a "legal kickback". For years, his "company" donated to federal candidates, parties, and committees, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Members of the Madoff family have served as leaders of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association He served on the board of directors of the Securities Industry Association and was chairman of its trading committee.
The SEC's Boston and New York offices ignored a decade of evidence handed to them. SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro was a "dear friend", and SEC Commissioner Elisse Walter was a "terrific lady" whom he knew "pretty well".
There were six investigations into Madoff by the SEC which were botched either through incompetent staff work or by neglecting allegations of financial experts and whistle-blowers.
How is this relevant to the thread?
In addition to his other victims, Bernie Madoff targeted pension funds. American workers know full well that they need to be paid up front because there's no guarantee that the government or their collaborators aren't going to rob them in the future.
I don’t know about anyone else, wondered about this a lot myself, and then after I worked four months earlier this year, I made enough money doing it to take off work until next April... that could explain it. People, oddly enough, don’t actually enjoy work... present company excluded, of course lol
Why is 1. happening, the increase in labor demand? Shouldn’t the labor demand just return to where it was before the “pandemic”.
This certainly occurred to me, but I work at a big company, and have not noticed a significant die-off.
If it was because they all died, it seems like I would have noticed.
“…we simply don’t have the working bodies.”
Where’d they go? Are there more jobs now than before COVID?
There aren’t more businesses... at least not in my town.
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