America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/08/september-jobs-report-takeaway/

by heavyset_go • 5 years ago

56 50 5 years ago

washingtonpost.com

newaccount20212• 5 years ago

I think its more basic:

1. the restaurant they used to work at isn't there anymore

2. they moved back in with the parents and stopped giving a shit about the future

3. still living off their unemployment and stimulus...it will go to zero one day, but not today

4. even with a substantial raise, most jobs they qualify for will still leave them impoverished, so whats the point

America's unemployed need deflation more than they need a raise. A 50% drop in housing costs will serve them better than a 15% raise. The number of Americans who would benefit from a substantial deflation rises every day.

throaway46546• 5 years ago

Unemployment was already cut off on 9/4. There are no more stimulus checks that I am aware of.

IG_Semmelweiss• 5 years ago

I have another thesis.

Take a sample of all the last few major economic crisis. For example the 2008 credit crisis.

Check if available jobs persisted open, 18+ months subsequent to crisis.

If they didnt, then something is different in this crisis vis a vis all prior crisis.

Take a look at confounding factors. What do you see?

-Huge subsidy of unemployment via federal checks and unemployment expansions.

Pay matters, but pay does not exist in a vaccum. Work pay is assessed relative to other pay, including pay to not work.

fallingknife• 5 years ago

Isn't COVID unemployment all over now, though?

ComputerGuru2• 5 years ago

It depends on state. Red States happen to have recovered better.

https://wallethub.com/edu/states-covid-recovery/90947

pavlov• 5 years ago

“something is different in this crisis vis a vis all prior crisis”

How about that, during this crisis, workers risked catching a deadly disease? Many have seen relatives and friends die.

The financial crisis didn’t make going to work potentially deadly. Covid-19 did.

pessimizer• 5 years ago

This is a bizarre take. The recovery from 2008 was the slowest recovery in US history (marketed as the longest period of growth in US history), and it probably permanently damaged the size of the workforce. Prime age employment was down IIRC 10% for years.

dantheman• 5 years ago

I think expecting to get back to 2008 as recovery is misguided. The bubble of 2008 wasn't real growth, it was a bubble.

thephyber• 5 years ago

I never understood the expectation that the upswing from every debt cycle can be equally fast compared to the last wave. Doesn’t this assume that all economic conditions pre/post 2008 are the same?

Financial products and regulation changed. Cloud, gig apps, smartphone apps, social media all changed the work landscape right around 2008.

steanne• 5 years ago

then the states that cut off the extra unemployment early would have seen greater job growth then the states that kept it up. they didn't.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/states-that-cut-unemployment-be...

imtringued2• 5 years ago

People love talking about how government spending causes an artificial boom. In my opinion it just increases flexibility in the debt market by giving unemployed people access to government debt via unemployment benefits. Of course, it's still a band aid and we should figure out other ways like sharing work by making the hours per week one can work flexible according to what happens in the economy.

The fact that entire people end up unemployed and then need to be bailed out by the state is just grossly inefficient compared to e.g. firing 50% of their work hours. I say this because every human contributes a baseline of demand for things like housing and groceries. Firing workers also fires the consumer that demands housing and groceries which leads to a downward spiral that is much worse than just the inefficient production of goods and services that nobody wants.

kleinsch• 5 years ago

The unemployment expansion ended July 31. Yes, it’s relevant, but the article is about this month, not two months ago.

zeckalpha• 5 years ago

There was a series of stimulus from 2008-2011.

gizmo686• 5 years ago

We are not past the crisis. Unlike most financial crises, the underlying crisis is still ongoing 18+ months pasts the start

0des5• 5 years ago

An otherwise insightful (but somewhat crass) comment seems to have been immediately [dead] upon being posted, but I think they might be on to something.

Readers: I hope you don't mind me momentarily intervening in the voting process, but I will post the comment below for others who may not have show-dead turned on to see.

EDIT: Even more curious, the majority of this accounts otherwise normal posts seem to be [dead] as well. Is this a result of HN shadowban, or is this outside influence by a very motivated dissenter? Curious what I've stumbled upon here, as there are quite a number of accounts like this I'm noticing lately.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=newaccount2021

https://imgur.com/1CUqXja.png 0 minutes, dead.

----

newaccount2021 [dead] [–]

I think its more basic:

1. the restaurant they used to work at isn't there anymore

2. they moved back in with the parents and stopped giving a shit about the future

3. still living off their unemployment and stimulus...it will go to zero one day, but not today

4. even with a substantial raise, most jobs they qualify for will still leave them impoverished, so whats the point

toomuchtodo4• 5 years ago

Very similar to the "Lying flat [Tang ping]" movement in China [1] [2] [3].

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/the-lying-flat-movement...

[2] https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1007589/tired-of-running-in-p...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping

indymike2• 5 years ago

A 50% drop in housing costs will serve them better than a 15% raise. The number of Americans who would benefit from a substantial deflation rises every day.

Except servicing existing debt would become nearly impossible as wages went down, but that pesky car payment stayed at $500/mo.

newaccount20212• 5 years ago

young people haven't taken on debt yet, they will be better served by a world where things are cheaper

older Americans with high debt loads are DOA no matter what

imtringued2• 5 years ago

In reality, the market isn't really naturally free in the "freedom" sense. There is coercion everywhere. It's just that ownership of land allows for the most powerful form of coercion.

Advertising companies, sales people, car dealers or realtors are all trying to convince you to spend more so they get their commission or more revenue but ultimately you can always refuse. You can always decide to live well within your means. The truth is that pretty much everything on the market that is free of coercion is getting cheaper.

Housing doesn't work like that because location is a natural monopoly. It's a basic human need that cannot be produced and jobs unnecessarily cluster in cities forcing people to move there bidding up prices endlessly. The rule of thumb has become "If you can afford the house, you can afford everything that fits inside it." Wanna build a machine shop with $100k worth of tools? Cheap compared to the $600k to $2 million house. That's the thing. Strangely enough, literally everything is getting cheap except real estate. The story that inflation has been ruining the working class for the last 10 years just doesn't add up. There is no reason why housing shouldn't obey the same trend other than artificial scarcity of either housing near jobs or jobs near vacant housing.

mjevans• 5 years ago

Relief of the housing drought to the point that prices _do_ drop 50%: I hypothesize that alone would allow the low and middle class to save again and thus hope again.

nostromo3• 5 years ago

There’s a little-used feature on HN that allows one to “vouch” for a flagged comment that is made for these situations.

0des5• 5 years ago

I use vouch all the time, including several times today, however I've never seen it on a comment, only threads in [new]

devwastaken• 5 years ago

Unemployment doesn't last very long, nor do you make much because it's based on what your income was. COVID gave special rules that extended and substantially increased the amount. That has since passed, and the amount was enough to only afford rent, food, and maybe a car payment in an affordable town.

Housing and public transportation. The two things cities don't want to fix, because city boards are fascists that know only the wealthy of the city control it.

rsj_hn2• 5 years ago

It's a valid take. Not one I necessarily agree with, but one that deserves exploration.

IMO we are facing costs and painful trade offs:

* Many insisted that the "moral" course of action was shutting the economy down during Covid to minimize deaths. Well, OK, there is a price for that in terms of destroying businesses and livelihoods, of loneliness and isolation. A lot of people are now stressed out, out of work - and those jobs are gone. Yes, new jobs will take their place, but not necessarily the same jobs in the same place.

* Many insisted that the "moral" course of action is to suspend evictions when people lose their jobs during covid. It was unfair to lose your apartment if you lost your job. Well, OK, but that means that rental prices are now out of whack from what people are earning and the new job situation. That inventory is held back from the market and from (downward) price pressure.

* Many also insisted that the "moral" course of action is to not have professional versus trade tracking in schools, that every high school should be "college prep", and everyone should go to to college. Well, OK, there is a cost for that in terms of not having a trade school infrastructure and a lot of people with no marketable skills even if they attended college or a college prep high school.

The biggest problems that we face in our economy are problems we ourselves create in trying to approach the economy as a pez-dispenser of fairness rather than as an engine of economic growth that follows emergent technical, rather than ethical, laws. By pretending we'll all just be professionals, we have a huge mass of people who have no careers and no opportunity to engage in truly skilled work, together with acute shortages of things like plumbers, electricians, carpenters, auto mechanics, general contractors, etc.

So yeah, life for a lot of people is very bleak. The take away is not to "warn" employers that they should manufacture lots of non-existent jobs for workers, but to fix our educational system so that it produces the kinds of people our economy needs, rather than the kinds of workers we think we want to be. Then rely on church attendance and government income insurance to take care of our moral concerns.

salawat• 5 years ago

The biggest problems that we face in our economy are problems we ourselves create in trying to approach the economy as a pez-dispenser of fairness rather than as an engine of economic growth that follows emergent technical, rather than ethical, laws.

That is the most silk glove way of saying "humans should serve the economy not the other way around". Which to be honest is no world I want to live in.

kevingadd• 5 years ago

In many western countries we didn't actually shut the economy down - we left large portions of it still running and exposed all those people to covid without appropriate care (naturally many of them caught it), so at best we turned a large initial spike into a long, ongoing misery of deaths that continues until this day. Part of that is because politicians and business leaders were unwilling to stomach the difficulty of doing a proper shutdown. The outcome we got instead has all of the downsides you describe but I don't think it's correct to describe it as "shutting the economy down", at best it was a half-measure that perhaps was worse than either of the two real options.

If large countries like the US had done a proper shutdown, the Delta variant might not be spreading around right now claiming huge numbers of lives. For example, if you want to avoid having covid cripple your economy, one useful measure would be to ensure your front-line workers (food service, caregivers, etc) have protected leave so they can recuperate at home if they get covid or go get vaccinated, then return to work full-time. Instead the US tells everyone to suck it up and come to work while they're miserable and infectious. Is it any surprise our death count is enormous and the economy is in tatters?

Rental prices were already a nightmare before the pandemic, if anything rental prices tanked for a while in some areas during it. I don't think the eviction suspension is connected to that - it had bad impacts but I don't know that you can convincingly argue that one of those impacts was price.

nostromo3• 5 years ago

Childcare will continue to be a problem for the foreseeable future. The cost will keep parents, mostly women, out of the workforce.

Childcare used to be cheap, but overregulation at the state and local level have made it extremely expensive. For example, extreme caregiver to child ratio regulations really drive up costs.

On top of that you need a lawyer and a pile of permits just to open up a daycare center in several states now. Childcare could be a good job for lots of low-skill people, and could free up parents to re-enter the workforce.

Instead I imagine we’ll take the easy way out like we always do: print money and give it to parents and caregivers, which will not solve the problem and will just drive up childcare costs further.

01100011• 5 years ago

How many of the unemployed have kids? Seems like something we should have data for.

gregimba• 5 years ago

I think the overall workforce participation rate paints the reality much better than unemployment numbers. The drop was the sharpest in the entire dataset going back to 1950 and while a portion of jobs have returned the possibility we may not see workforce participation return to pre COVID levels within the next 2-3 years is a definite possibility.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

Edit:

St. Louis Fed quote from article on unemployment

For perspective, in June, we were short by about 7.1 million jobs compared with the pre-pandemic level. This analysis suggests that this gap will only close about half by June 2022.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2021/october/labor...

advael2• 5 years ago

Came here to say this. Unemployment numbers are such a joke of a statistic in a situation where unprecedented numbers of young adults left the workforce entirely in two subsequent recessions and we just don't count them

frankbreetz• 5 years ago

I don't think it's a joke, basically all statistics are useless in isolation. While it's true unemployment doesn't paint the whole picture, I see a declining labor participation rate as mostly a good thing. It implies families with one working parent, people living longing in retirement and more people going to school. If we tried to maximize for labor participation rate like we do unemployment rate, it would be a very depressing society.

newhotelowner2• 5 years ago

Lets break it down who is missing from employment.

- Almost million died due to Covid. - A lot of olders or those who can retire, left the workforce - Some took flexible jobs - like uber/lift or food delivery or groceries or amazon delivery - Legal immigration is closed for year and half. That is almost 2 million working individuals - Few people that I know who got covid, and are in 40s & 50s don't feel that they are recovered 100%. After 10 months, my manager can't smell as she used to. - People like my wife who don't need to work are staying home.

I am sure there are few other groups that I don't know about. That is a lot of people missing from the workforce and won't show up in unemployment data.

nradov• 5 years ago

The vast majority of COVID-19 deaths were in the 65+ age group. They were mostly not employed and their deaths, while tragic, didn't significantly reduce the labor pool.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Ekaros• 5 years ago

One could even argue that many of the deaths lessened the demand for things like geriatric care. Thus it could theoretically even increase labour pool.

TexanFeller• 5 years ago

I’m very annoyed that they mention safety so prominently. With miraculous vaccines available to all ages at significant risk, and data showing those vaccines continue to be effective at preventing bad outcomes from Delta, I just don’t think safety is an issue anymore except for exceptional cases like the immunocompromised.

America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter

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