I’m not looking for work (I’m retired), but I’m under the impression there is a LOT of work out there, but it’s all minimum wage type stuff. “Real” jobs are harder to find.
Drive down any main street and every business has “now hiring” for the last 2-3 years. I haven’t looked at the professional market since I was laid off during covid, that’s when I decided to retire.
Yeah, there are some slightly above minimum wage jobs. But the young adults with college degrees have been trained to be entitled to a high wage job, regardless of degree major. Most don’t have the discipline or patience to start at the ground level.
It too forever to find applicants who could at least pass the drug test.
All they had to do was stay clean for a couple of weeks and they would never be tested again as long as they weren't involved in an accident.
Then try to find any willing to get his hands dirty.
Finally the task was wasting so much of out time, the company farmed it out to a temp agency.
They would hire the folks and if they did ok, the company would hire them full time anywhere from in a few weeks to a year depending on how good they were.
Even then, a lot didn't stay long in spite of excellent pay and benefits.
I think the jobs out there really are just “jobs”. Dead-ends or gigs. The pay is low and it will never go up. And you’ll never get promoted because there really isn’t much of anywhere to move up to. So you can be a wage slave in a boring, low-paid pointless job with no future. That’s just a reality for a lot of people — and plenty of them went to college and got hired to a job that sounded on paper like it might be a really good job. But then it wasn’t.
There used to be “careers” out there where people could start out low, work hard, and move up. I think this sort of path has been drastically reduced.
Some older people get it. But I talk to a lot of Baby Boomers who think that the economy and demographics in 2024 are pretty much identical to how things were in 1984. But things have changed. A lot.
If you look at indeed or ziprecruiter, very average jobs that you can barely support a small family on have 100’s of applications.
People are willing to work but they need to be able to support themselves with that job.