I hate how headlines like this loosely frame it as a problem with workers. It's like the "worker shortage" kind of garbage... we've got plenty of workers in most sectors, but there's a shortage of companies willing to pay what they're asking. Why is it never a "wage shortage"?
true. we were going to cancel a family birthday last weekend because people had covid but we found out each family currently has it so we kept it. Omicron is spreading like a flame on summer grass.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
About half have had symptomatic infections, all from different sources (not due to us getting together), in the past couple weeks. Everyone in the house, even little kids, are getting sick (fever, at least, every time), in every single case so far (unless, again, some of us have had it pass through and no-one in the house had symptoms).
If that 1/4 symptomatic rate holds for omicron (I'm doubting it, but maybe) then something like 3-4% of the country's contracting it per day. Even if not, then it's still somewhere around 1%/day, minimum.
Wages don't occur in a vacuum. If people want more pay than can be made back by selling the products, then there is no job and no product.
How about instead on focusing on ensuring there are multiple companies competing for workers of every skill level (which there are), in which case the wages are likely close to what can be paid.
Therefore any price that people are unwilling to pay will not be because the competition offers a lower price, but because they are unwilling to purchase the product at all at that price. If that happens and it causes some businesses to be unviable because no one will pay the price required, then maybe we don't need those businesses.
If companies can't afford higher wages because it would make their products so expensive that they couldn't find enough customers for them, then you can hardly call that "artificial".
I'm saying I don't think we've reached that point yet. In other words, I think prices are often as low as they are not because people won't pay more, but because companies have exploited the labor market to lower prices creating a race to the bottom.
There are very few products where a price increase won't result in less sales. Economists even have a term for it: elasticity. And they also estimate it across a massive range of goods, finding the opposite of what you think.
Look at how much trouble a inflation is causing people to see quite clearly that small price increases on goods causes significant problems for consumers.
>creating a race to the bottom
So far this "race to the bottom" has resulted in just about the richest, best paid people on the planet. Even our poverty line is about the top 15% of global income, and that's pre-tax transfer. Post-tax transfer poverty line people make significantly more.
So I don't think there's really much evidence of your claimed "race to the bottom," unless we're spectacularly bad at racing.
Because they are competing with other companies.
>They are perfectly willing to spend on other things.
No companies generally try to lower costs anywhere it makes sense, in order to compete with other companies that will also do so to compete.
If companies could simply pay magic wages, out of the tens of thousands in the US, don't you think one would buck the trend and suddenly pay awesome wages and attract the best talent and win all the markets?
Either all 10,000 companies are in cahoots, or there are market forces causing a lot of the wages to be similar. Which is more likely? That Apple and Walmart and Rural King are agreeing on wages? Or that each competes against similar companies for workers and sales?
I guess you know more about Apple's more competent co-conspirators than I do:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449737
But there's no need to do anything technically illegal companies discuss how to screw employees and customers as industry groups all the time. They reach agreements not to do various things and to co-ordinate spending on political lobbying. They will for example try to share your salary data using an intermediary to avoid one of them giving you a larger raise. That helps both companies that might lose you and companies that are trying to hire you for bellow what free market wages would settle on if we all had the same information.
I didn't write that.
You seriously think this is what's happening? People that are demanding higher wages are not getting them because it's eating too much into margin to make products viable?
If that's the case I'd argue those products shouldn't exist, but from where I'm sitting it looks like business as usual... the people in charge of pay ultimately don't want to share their profits.
So a product shouldn't exist because you don't get the wage you feel entitled to when making it?
Apparently a lot of others are willing to work making, selling, and buying products you think should not exist. I prefer the market solution.
Anyone can start a company, and pay workers awesome magical wages. Does this not happen because every single company owner is evil, or is it because there are real constraints to this dream of entitled wages, divorced from market clearing rates? Go make that company and make your ideal world reality.
Because salaries are not transparent.
Just because it doesn't mention families doesn't mean that there is some strange weird deliberate bias.
There seems to be an undercurrent of bias that faults workers in a lot of reporting. Maybe it's confirmation bias on my part, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.
In this case, the droves of people claiming sick time are most likely genuinely sick.
We're seeing this here in Spain a lot now. A bit higher up in this thread someone mentioned not cancelling a birthday because all the guests had COVID anyway. But work environments are more strict.
I have a feeling this is what they meant by stating it that way, not implying that the workers aren't actually sick. A case of COVID is easily verified anyway.
Is there any mention of hazard pay, investing in more safety measures aside from a plexiglass screen, or anything else worker-focused?
No.
And this is NPR! NPR!!!!
Right now, the US population is higher than it's ever been, but there are several million fewer workers than in 2019. That's the definition of a shortage.
Not to say that people aren't getting sick or that they aren't calling out but it's clear that the author has no authoritative basis to make any claim on the subject.
The reason they used "worker" is because its the largest class of individuals and it IS having real supply chain issues. It ISN'T because people aren't getting paid enough but because people are sick and shouldn't work so as not to infect other people.
It's telling that 13/52 and 13/90 have stuck around so well because those are real, factual numbers. Perhaps they're entirely misleading but, at the very least, newsreaders appear to be far more interested in those real numbers than "feelings-based" articles like the one above.
Part of the magic of FiveThirtyEight early on was their deep commitment to showing the statistical analysis behind every single article. You didn't have to just trust their reporters because they had the MiniTab or MATLab printout on every article that you could read for yourself. They fully describe their methodology behind their pollster ratings and election forecasts, even if you don't agree with them. 538 has since gotten away from their statistical analyses a bit and their viewership and credibility has suffered accordingly.
They're not the BLS. If you're expecting that level of coverage then there's virtually no news stories aside from whatever government stats came out that day.
Just to check the accuracy, how did you arrive at this number? AFAICT, United Airlines has 93k employees, so alone represents approximately 0.028% of the US workforce, roughly 300x your guess, right?
At MOM's Organic Market, some of its East Coast stores have had to deal with 15 out of 50 workers out on a single day.
And at the community health center Mary's Center in Washington, D.C., half of the COVID-19 Response Team tested positive for the virus over the past few weeks."
The article literally starts with the CEO of a public company that employs several tens of thousands of people saying that 1/3 of their workers at one of their busiest facilities called out sick. The MOM's source is...their Chief of HR. The sources for the hospital were its CEO and chief nurse.
Whatever ideological point about journalism you thought you were trying to make, you did not make it.
Indeed.
Instead the headline is "workers are calling out sick in droves".
[EDIT] gruez noted below that the original post was based on an error, please don't punish their Internet points too much.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
For reference, unemployment rates in the US are recorded by six increasingly-broad measures (from U-1 to U-6). U-3 is the internationally-defined "official" unemployment representing 'everyone actively working, or actively looking for work'. U-6, the broadest measure, includes U-3 as well as "all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force" [basically, unemployed people who stopped looking for work (but theoretically want to work), as well as the underemployed].
U-3 alone does not provide a full picture of unemployment. Sometimes U-3 can go down, but U-4, U-5, or U-6 increase because workers are leaving the labor force entirely.
Based on the BLS data, unemployment has been trending down by all measures. This suggests to me that the continued decreases in the unemployment are real and not misleading.
Other tables also indicate that U-3 has decreased among all industries and age ranges:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm
My armchair suspicion is that, though the "worker shortage" was a very real issue in 2021, the problem [at least nationally] has broadly leveled-out, and that discussions on a national "worker shortages" continue to emerge from a type of, say, 'conversational inertia' when discussing localized labor shortages (e.g. problems with industry X in state/county Y) or acute shocks to supply (e.g. large numbers of people getting sick at the same time). Localized shortages or acute shocks are also meaningful and need to be resolved as they come up, but they may be only tangentially-related to a national worker shortage.
I'd love to hear more thoughts on this if others want to chime-in. I didn't do any sort of rigorous analysis on this. There could also be still substantial multi-state/regional shortages hidden among the numbers. I didn't really delve into "reality" or how the data may not actually reflect "real life" or other labor-related issues (e.g. income) -- I just like looking at these stats every now and then.
From the original comment, I was more interested in the part "It's like the 'worker shortage' kind of garbage... we've got plenty of workers in most sectors" and was curious about unemployment rates.
Whether or not it is 'distracting' is arguable, but I apologize if it was distracting.
Because big media outlets tend to side with big business over labor, despite cries about "the liberal media".
The article is about employee shortages due to sick workers. I don’t think the title is misrepresenting that.
The connotation of the headline is absolutely that workers are faking sick, even if the content of the article doesn't say that.
My previous jobs have all given me a grand total of 2 sick days plus 2 personal days. Anything beyond that would have cut into vacation days.
I think people are so accustomed to clickbait-y headlines, they see an agenda in the headlines of an organization that actually practices strong journalistic standards and plays it "safe" with its headlines, saying less than more.
"Workers are using sick days, and businesses do not have enough workers not on sick days" is a plain jane version
Is there another term for calling out sick that you believe doesn’t have such a connotation?
I'm going to assume you're not from the US, because if you are you've got to be pulling my leg.
The US has no mandated time off for workers, so many people will "call out sick" if they need time off for anything. This is especially true of lower wage workers.
Before starting to work in my career I literally never had vacation time. If something came up (good or bad) I'd have to "call out" (colloquially the "sick" is often dropped, which may indicate how normal this is). Usually this only works for a day or two at a time.
So sure, I'd call out if I were sick... but I'd be just as likely to call out for a friend's birthday, a hotly anticipated video game, or some other frivolous thing.