It is probably among the least desirable work. Volatile hours, busiest times are weekends and holidays, literally cleaning up anything from bodily fluids to garbage and dealing with smells.

No one outside of large unionized hotels in big cities is offering a decent salary with predictable schedule. The small franchise hotels have less than 50 employees, so they have no employer subsidized benefits either like access to 401k, public transit credits, or other tax advantaged accounts.

I mean if suddenly a competitor arrives in your industry selling the same product, with near zero marginal costs, and half the time they cannot price correctly and are happy to see "any" income there might be issues for your industry.

Edit: oh Ok - structural in the supply of labour. In the UK that is hugely labelled Brexit, but it is interesting to see a problem elsewhere - As others say Covid shock is most likely as people re-evaluate what they are willing to tolerate.

The number of places in the US that you can get a 2BR home, rental or owning, on minimum wage is basically non-existent.

We're on the verge of large swaths of the US population effectively becoming serfs. Housing is being snapped up by corporations, banks are jacking their fees and making more and more people "unbankable" forcing them into non-bank situations like payroll-company-run quasi-debit-cards where withdrawing their wages costs money.

Consider this: Elon Musk at peak of his wealth had more money than all the residents of Massachusetts (itself quite a wealthy state) combined, by a significant margin.

We're at a stage where we have what amounts to feudal lords in all but name, complete with their own private security forces going around roughing up people.