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.
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.