Why has the workforce participation rate cratered? If people simply changed to a better job, that figure would hold steady. Instead it shows us that millions of Americans decided to stop looking for work.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
Just 1 percent, 63% to 62%, which could just be aging demographics since a greater and greater proportion of people in America are going to be too old to work, especially for hard labor work like cleaning hotel rooms.
Also, hotels (and other low pay to quality of life at work ratio employers) were already struggling before COVID. COVID just accelerated the inevitable.
Of course, prices are set at the margin, and so if hotels (and other businesses like restaurants and retail) were used to paying the lowest pay to quality of life at work ratio, then I guess it would be accurate to say their problem is a couple million people decided to no longer work, because presumably a greater proportion of those who decided to no longer work would have been from these least desirable to work in businesses.
By comparison, during the 2008 recession (Dec 2007 to June 2009, approx 18 months long), about 1 million people exited the labor force.
Table A on page 5 has one breakdown. Table B on page 6 has employment by industry.
Which is exactly as it should be. ~Half the country doesn't want them. If that results in hotel stays being absurdly expensive (or perhaps changing laws so that hotel rooms don't need to be cleaned between guests), then so be it. America is democratic, and the people have spoken, so now let them suffer the consequences.
I do not think there are any laws requiring this. It probably just has not been price competitive enough to hand a customer the housekeeping cart at check in.
Another portion is no longer able to work those jobs (especially service sector jobs where one is required to show up for a shift or get fired). New data shows long Covid is keeping as many as 4 million people out of work - https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-data-shows-long-covid...
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
> The number of persons not in the labor force who currently want a job was little changed at 5.6 million in November and remains above its February 2020 level of 5.0 million. These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the 4 weeks preceding the survey or were unavailable to take a job.
> Among those not in the labor force who wanted a job, the number of persons marginally attached to the labor force held at 1.5 million in November. These individuals wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months but had not looked for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. The number of discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached who believed that no jobs were available for them, was 405,000 in November, little changed from the previous month. (See Summary table A.)
The main factor in choosing a job is pay in the end and that's also the main variable when choosing to work or not imo.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...