Job Openings Are at Record Highs. Why Aren’t Unemployed Americans Filling Them? | Hacker News Reader

Job Openings Are at Record Highs. Why Aren’t Unemployed Americans Filling Them?

wsj.com

20 pointsharambae33 comments

My sister went from making $11/hr at a book store to $20/hr staying at home on unemployment. She didn't spend any of it on anything but rent and utilities (we were already providing food for her). She went from being in debt to having about $9k in the bank. She plans to live on this until it runs out and then return to work as a service worker. She moved in with my mother to make that runway longer--she figures she can make it last somewhere between a year or two.

I don't think she's unique in this. A lot of millenials were poorly educated with job skills and personal finance. Accordingly, they dug themselves into debt with student loans and credit cards that obligated them to take shitty service jobs with no prospects. COVID-19 and extended unemployment benefits let them dig themselves out of that hole by doing nothing, but they still don't have an internal motivation that money and assets are good things to acquire.

They work to live, not live to work. They won't go back into the workforce until their personal circumstances force them back into the workforce and I don't blame them at all.

This seems to imply millennials are lazy. They're the most educated generation in US history, and at the same time, the poorest in at least 60 years.

COVID relief funds are only paying them more than their normal wage because they got paid so badly to begin with. All older generations have averages incomes significantly higher than what COVID unemployment pays. And that's despite Millennials being more educated than all of these prior generations.

It's finally given many of them the freedom and agency to choose their jobs rather than take the first thing they can find to avoid going broke. Many of these people looking for jobs were also the first laid off at the beginning of the pandemic. Why should we feel bad for companies that treated these people as disposable?

There's not a "worker shortage". Companies are complaining that they have to raise wages to attract talent because workers are shopping around and getting counter offers.

This is not unprecedented. The same phenomenon happened after the Spanish flu, and was arguably a big factor in the collapse of the fuedal system during the black death.

Wide scale destruction of jobs followed by increased demand gives workers leverage. You have a huge group of people not afraid of being jobless because they already have been.

We have to remember that 600k people are dead too. A decent chunk of available labor is gone forever.

COVID restrictions blocking employers from hiring foreign labor is also a factor. There's increased competition for American workers because it's harder to import cheap labor

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

474,000 of those deaths are to people aged 65 and older, so probably out of the workforce already due to retirement.

And the rest would be those with existing serious health conditions and so also likely to be not working.

> They're the most educated generation

College completion rate is not neceserally an indicator of "education" in the sense of dealing with modern world and finances.

You’re going to have to provide evidence that millenials are poorer than their counterparts in 1970 because that seems unlikely.

I read today that 3.2 million baby boomers retired last year, many of them retiring early due to Covid. In addition, as deviledeggs said, Covid has killed many people. I don't remember the exact number but I think at least 100,000 of the deaths were of working-age adults. In addition, Covid has disabled many more so severely that they are unable to return to work. So I would say at a minimum, we're now looking at 3.5 million people who are out of the workforce.

If businesses had prioritized helping employees stay safe, they would have more employees now.

I appreciate this perspective.

I looked at the department of labor's website for hard numbers. May 2021 U-3 unemployment is below 6% and seems like a very, very typical level for any point over the past 20 years. If someone is saying "I can't hire people because no one wants to work"...I'm having trouble seeing how that's any more true now vs. in 2014, 2006, or 1999.

Sure, there's an increase in people collecting unemployment vs 2 years ago but those were at historically low levels. What we have today seems much, much more normal/typical.

Labor force participation did drop 2% pre->post covid: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...

Nevermind what the Wall Street Journal is reporting and what the unemployment data is, clearly millennials are lazy and that is the problem based on my experience with my lazy sister.

As a chronically unemployed 36 y old, this doesn't surprise me at all.

The way people pursue work and careers is weird when food and shelter are easily available.

It's not just about the economics of labor and "earning a love", it's about what people do of their lives and time.

This is an eternal debate about Diogenes, but I'm surprised how do many individuals can freely and willingly give so much of their time for work. It's a mix of belief system, markets, social hierarchy and sociology, psychology and other things.

I know I'm an odd ball, but the pandemic was great for making people realize those things.

I completely agree and have felt this happen to me personally. I maintained employment throughout 2020 but have felt quite a strong pull towards reconsidering how I spend my time and energy, and how much of it goes to "work."

Out of curiosity, do you know any literature that I could read to understand the eternal debate about Diogenes that you mention? I'm trying to understand the more philosophical questions around work and our modern culture finding itself in a quite a jolting self-aware realization about work, time, attention and our liberties -- and I'd love to read some of the existing foundational lit in this space.

I studied comp sci, so really just doing this out of a deep curiosity and an understanding that I didn't get the opportunity to study any of this in college.

David Graeber talked about stuff like this sometimes. His book Bullshit Jobs [0] is one place. He talks about the history of work in the U.S. (going back to medieval guilds, puritans, industrial revolution, consumerism, etc), amongst other things.

[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullsh...

Quote about Diogenes:

“The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.' I haven't read anything about Diogenes, but listened to several podcasts of philosophers talking about Diogenes.

Also going to advise reading Bullshit Jobs by Graeber. Add "In praise of idleness" by Bertrand Russel. The Abolition of Work by Bob Black.

The subreddit /r/antiwork is quite extreme but has good info on their wiki https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/wiki/index

I work more than I like,but have realized that I don't like not working.

I took time off for parental leave. The binding time was amazing, but I didn't do anything - even when I didn't have child care responsibilities.

Proximity certainly is an issue. Not every job needs a physical presence but many employers simply refuse to let go of the paradigm of having people gathered in a centralized physical location. Hard to feel bad for them when they refuse to adapt. To make matters worse, some that relent decide it's a smart idea to kick their employees in the mouth for pushing things in this direction by charging them $20k, $30k, $50k or more for the privilege of not commuting into a physical location each day. So those employees leave. Maybe going to a competitor. Maybe getting out of the industry. Maybe taking some time off. Wherever they're going, penny proud, pound foolish thinking is destroying many company workforces.

For other industries such as truck driving, it's understandably frustrating to increment compensation up and still not be able to fill all of the empty positions. I suspect there's simply too much money washing around through unusual channels right now, which is hiding some of the inflation that needs to happen to account for the rapid increase in the money supply. People are finding ways to make ends meet that don't involve a fulltime commitment to an employer.

I mean I love to work now but there have been times in my life when I was younger I could have made the stimulus money last a long time listening to mp3s and drinking natty ice or red dog.

A year easy. Maybe 2 or 3 with a little creativity and my parents not kicking me out.

I don't think this is exactly rocket science to figure out.

ahh, the glorious "welfare queen" myth emerges again, this time as a lazy alcoholic millennial.

It sounds like you're saying that working a shitty service job is not something anyone would willing do unless they were economically coerced into it.

I wonder if this says anything about whether our economic system is based on coercion rather than free choice.

A bunch of service industry people I know (and focusing on the good workers) used the stimulus to help break them out of the cycle of service industry work. A lot of data science certificates and real estate licenses were earned in that group over the past year, and they don't plan on going back to the service industry.

Interesting. Would be great if we could see some stats on this

I know some individuals that quit their jobs to get real estate license as well. What I wonder is how it will actually pan out, given that there are more real estate agents than open listings in America at this point.

Not sure about data science, that seems more socially productive at least. The entire economy can't consist of reselling homes at increasingly inflated prices though.

My cousin's wife did the same thing. She used to work in a bakery and since the bakery closed she switched to being a real estate agent. I think it's because real estate has good commission (at least in theory). But if the market is flooded with agents this'll just be another over supplied labor market niche. Then again, people are always buying/selling real estate so it does have job security in that aspect.

FTA:

>Forage Bistro and Lounge, a Driggs restaurant serving up crab fritters, farmers market lasagna and beef tenderloin, can’t keep up with demand, said Lisa Hanley, the restaurant’s co-owner. The bistro needs to add several employees to its staff of 17. ... Servers used to work five to eight hour shifts but are now hustling for 10 hours at a time ...

Don't work and be poor.

Work hard and still be poor.

Why work?

We've all seen how quickly our lives can be upended. I suspect the decades long decline in savings will be permanently reversed. We're all looking for security in our lives, and working for less than a living wage isn't going to be acceptable any more.

Because people realize all the money is in starting a businesses, and the prevailing wisdom is to invest in your worker's as little as possible.

Until that changes, and the Jack Welch school of thinking is abandoned, that'll probably be the way things go.

>Because people realize all the money is in starting a businesses

I wonder what sort of life experience teaches you that.

Because mine taught me that all the best scams involve starting a business, that it's really easy to get trapped (as an owner) making less than minimum wage or just losing all your money, and that small businesses are mostly run by irrational people engaged in a "race to the bottom", which is why they fail in bad economic times.

But my image of a startup isn't the SV image, or even a software business. It's the other 99%.

Did they consider adding an equity comp on top of the wages they are advertising?

wow it's almost like if u pay people to stay at home at an equivalent 20$/hr, they wont go to jobs and work for 15$ an hour. Who would have thought?

I am encountering what is apparently age discrimination in the tech industry.

This makes it seem like there are n jobs and n+m people so all n jobs should be filled. That's silly. You don't just go out and find n people in some sort of cattle pen. There might be 20 times the the available potential employees, and companies may not want any of them. Similarly the other way, There could be tons of jobs at companies that no one would want to work at. If there are vacancies at companies, the companies are unwilling or unable to react to supply and demand capitalism.

If I could do a 4-day workweek, and not have to wear a mask, I'd happily work in an office again.

Paywalled article.

https://archive.is/eA8ND

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/ma...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com