Where have all America’s workers gone?

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/01/24/where-have-all-americas-workers-gone

by ianai • 3 years ago

38 108 3 years ago

ianai• 3 years ago

“The ageing of the population accounts for the loss of 1.9m workers (0.7% of people aged at least 16), while the overall drop in lfp, mainly among the old, is responsible for a further 0.5m (0.2%).”

“In 2022 an average of 1.6m Americans missed at least one week of work per month to recuperate—whether from covid, flu or something else—up from 1m before covid.”

In short, the people likely to retire did it in response to Covid at increased levels. And illness (still including covid) has increased work absenteeism by 60%.

They did mention “quiet quitting” but to my eye more in passing-it’s clearly not the driver and they seem to admit it with a limp mention of it. “most quiet quitters are high-earning workers, whereas the biggest labour shortages have been in basic service jobs”

cratermoon5• 3 years ago

One of the economic calculations I learned many years ago was about two-income families with young kids. If both parents work, and the kids are too young to be self-sufficient, that requires some kind of day care, which can be expensive. Plus. commuting costs something, too, including the extra cost of maintaining and insuring a second vehicle as well as other costs of ownership. There's also other expenses and tax implications in a two-income family.

In short, it turns out that the total after-tax disposable income for a dual earner family can end up being less than if just one person, the better-paid one, works, and the other takes care of the kids and handles other family things.

Which brings me to my question: how many people quit or lost a job and discovered that they were better off and happier when one person worked than when both? I'd like to see some studies about that.

hadlock• 3 years ago

About a third of people over 55 I've talked to in the last three years decided to go ahead and retire. Covid is usually two weeks from infection to recovery (seems to get 80% of the population once per year), and 30% of employees have "brain fog" for another 2 weeks - 6 months after. 1% of the population died across 2020-2021. These aren't small numbers.

nonethewiser5• 3 years ago

There should really be much larger tax breaks for having children. Dont just blunt the cost.

scarface7417• 3 years ago

It’s not just that. There are a lot of dual income workers who are only able to work because of the free labor of older relatives - grandparents.

They not only died at a higher rate, older relatives would be and should be reticent to have constant contact with kids that have been at school half the day.

etempleton4• 3 years ago

Some, perhaps, but make no mistake that most families with kids find it absolutely required to have two incomes these days. I would even say the increase in participation by women have helped stave off the labor shortage, but it was always coming.

The baby boomer generation is finally retiring. They worked longer than any other generation and they now hold most of the wealth. Caring for this generation is going to be a massive challenge. Nurses are already at a premium and it is going to get worse.

There aren’t going to be enough nurses, teachers, cashiers, servers, etc. Any job that is tough and is traditionally underpaid will have to increase wages to compete or, and this is sadly more likely, standards will be lowered. This has already happened with teachers. Not enough teachers, no problem! Degree optional.

There are two potential solutions:

1. Increase wages for less desirable jobs to increase labor participation. 2. Relax immigration policy to increase immigration.

mbfg• 3 years ago

There seems to be a good number of workers laid off, at least in the tech sector. In case you are really looking for them.

scarface7417• 3 years ago

It’s basically only in the tech sector.

simonblack3• 3 years ago

Retired or fired.

That leads to the disaster of a huge loss of expertise and manual skills.

Sure we can rebuild factories that have disappeared, but who is going to work in those factories? Who knows how to do fitting and turning these days? Who is skilled in designing equipment? Who knows how to use a sewing-machine? Who knows how to use explosives in mining? What about the use of a soldering-iron? And many more skills which have disappeared.

Then there is the huge amount of background knowledge and expertise that has also disappeared. What is the best design for a ship? Where can we get the cheapest materials for refining X? What is the best, fastest, or cheapest process for refining X? Should we be refining X? Maybe it would be best to use Y instead, because it doesn't corrode as easily as X.

Offshoring is quick and easy. Onshoring is a completely different kettle of fish.

Once manufacturing goes, it very rarely comes back to anywhere near the extent we had before. That capability is gone forever.

nonethewiser5• 3 years ago

Seems like you're talking about jobs that were eliminated. I agree with your diagnosis in that regard. But the article is about unfilled positions. They aren't unfilled because they fired people.

TedDoesntTalk• 3 years ago

Who knows how to use a sewing-machine? Who knows how to use explosives in mining? What about the use of a soldering-iron?

YouTube videos! /s

cudgy9• 3 years ago

“Offshoring is quick and easy. Onshoring is a completely different kettle of fish.”

Offshoring is onshoring in the opposite country, so this makes no sense.

simonblack3• 3 years ago

Offshoring is onshoring in the opposite country, so this makes no sense.

Offshoring is the loss of your own workers and expertise.

Onshoring back to your own country is hopefully a regain in workers and expertise. But as I said, that is a completely different kettle of fish. Onshoring overseas manufacturing back to your own country doesn't happen because all those workers and expertise that your country used to have in the past, before those manufacturing companies were offshored have been lost.

Onshoring to the opposite country means that opposite country is the country which gains in both skilled workers and also expertise. Their gain is your loss. Their economy grows, your economy dies. Their workers get richer, your workers have to go on the dole.

Once upon a time, in the 1980s, I had relatives who worked in a Paper factory in Michigan. I wonder where those guys from that town are working now. I wonder how many people, if any, that Paper factory employs now.

Oops. Seems that paper mill was shutdown in 1994 and demolished in 2002. China is today's biggest paper producer. Who coulda foreseen that?

https://www.swmpc.org/downloads/mill_historysignfinal.pdf

rqtwteye2• 3 years ago

Workers were told over decades that they are dispensable and all gains should go to owners. Especially low wage workers get treated terribly (by customers and employers) and don't make much money. It's not exactly surprising that people opt out as soon as they can somehow.

The shareholder value ideology has destroyed the social contract that we are all in the same boat.

rootusrootus• 3 years ago

That's not what I'm reading from the article. Seems more to do with people electing to age out early from work due to the pandemic.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2022081pap...

“The Great Retirement Boom”: The Pandemic-Era Surge in Retirements and Implications for Future Labor Force Participation

hirako20002• 3 years ago

But the article isn't answering the question. It gives some interesting facts but wouldn't put the finger anywhere near what's actually going on.

And I concur, the capital greed and dehumanised workplace dynamics make more workers give up. Most stay employed of course, but gave up nonetheless. Curious to see what's next, the stick has proven far less effective than the carrot, in the long term in particular.

Ambitious1325• 3 years ago

In which case the problem would resolve itself, in 2-3 years as less people (relatively) are retiring.

scarface7417• 3 years ago

I have no idea why people think this is a new concept.

This stop being the case decades ago when pensions started being phased out for 401Ks

And this is not a bad thing, I cringe at the entire paternalism of expecting the company to take care of you and the “we are family” bullshit.

listenallyall4• 3 years ago

While you are cringing, local police/fire men/women, and many other municipal workers are retiring at 45-55 and will collect a hefty chunk of their top annual earnings, for the rest of their lives. And you're paying for it.

alex_young• 3 years ago

Doesn’t this also line up nicely with us turning off new immigration? Of course the population skews older after you do that - there’s no one to fill in the working age population.

Edit - here’s the data if anyone is interested: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/net-internati...

neonate• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/KcAac

sammalloy• 3 years ago

Retired, fired, or killed by covid. Covid killed a huge number of US workers, and for some strange reason that nobody can figure out, all the workplaces who refused to help protect their workers are either completely silent about their complicity in their deaths or saying ridiculous things like "nobody wants to work anymore".

Covid caused huge shortages in US labor market, study shows
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/13/us-labor-sho...
“Our estimates suggest Covid-19 illnesses have reduced the US labor force by approximately 500,000 people,” say the study’s authors, Gopi Shah Goda of Stanford University and Evan Soltas of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s economics department.
“Covid-19 illnesses persistently reduce labor supply. We estimate that workers with week-long work absences are 7% less likely to be in the labor force one year later compared to otherwise-similar workers who do not miss a week of work for health reasons.”
The study adds: “Many who fall ill but survive Covid-19 suffer from enduring health problems … approximately 500,000 adults are neither working nor actively looking for work due to the persistent effects of Covid-19 illnesses.”
How much of our labor force has been lost to COVID-19?
https://www.marketplace.org/2022/01/24/how-much-labor-force-...
Richard Johnson, who researches the economics of aging as a senior fellow at the Urban Institute…took excess deaths and COVID deaths by age and applied labor force participation rates by age. And he got 300,000 workers who died as a result of COVID. Add that to the long-haul workers, and we’ve lost 1.9 million workers — or 18% of currently unfilled jobs.

dv_dt2• 3 years ago

In the UK, they can trace some of the missing workers directly into a surge of long term health problems - likely from covid directly or covid induced other issues. This was predicted by many public health experts I was following in the middle of the first waves of Covid.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-63625989

darth_avocado• 3 years ago

Workers are right there, just not at the price point employers want them to be at.

At some point it’s better to not work than to work at a job that pays nothing. Personal anecdote: my friend’s wife was a host at an upscale restaurant. They decided to have a baby during the pandemic, the wife went back to work and within 2 weeks quit. Why? Because the childcare was more expensive than what she made. It was cheaper and more fulfilling than the money she was making. They got rid of a car because she no longer had to go to work and she now had the time to take care of everything in the house which brought their costs down. Eventually she started her own little shop on Etsy and makes a nice little side income. They are actually in a better place without that job than they were with it.

scarface7417• 3 years ago

No they aren’t. I know plenty of people who won’t go back to work at any price.

nonethewiser5• 3 years ago

How can they afford that?

maphew• 3 years ago

How do these people pay for their necessities? (Honest question)

Supermancho• 3 years ago

I know plenty of people who won’t go back to work at any price

The statement you made is both badly phrased and irrelevant. What you meant is that you know people who wont go back to a previous job for any wage, which is so absurd (and baseless) that it's effectively noise.

rubyfan2• 3 years ago

At some point this may become a significant source of stress for the primary bread winner.

Dual income families enjoy a level of insulation that single income families do not. In the single income family the primary bread winner has double the stress, 1. inherent in working and 2. knowing there is no realistic replacement of income if they fall ill, get caught in a layoff or just hate their job and need a break everyone is counting on them to provide.

This might seem better in the short term but over the long term I’m not convinced it’s better.

D13Fd• 3 years ago

The problem is childcare costs are enormous right now. It’s really hard for many people to make more than it costs for someone else to watch even just 2 kids.

bradlys• 3 years ago

The thing is - this stress isn’t any different than when you were single and alone. You were likely living at a standard of living that required you to keep your job. Now you’ve just got some people who are also dependent on you for it.

It’s not really that different in the scheme of things. You had to work before and you have to work now. That’s the reality of our capitalist system.

candiodari3• 3 years ago

The problem is what you're complaining about is not quite what you think you're complaining about. An economy is fundamentally feedback loops. I get that they're very complex, but that doesn't actually matter as much as you'd think. Simplified.

customers spend -> tax + cafe -> cafe employs -> tax + money for your wife -> wife wants childcare -> tax + childcare -> childcare employs -> tax + money for their employees -> employees go to the cafe employing your wife ("goto 10")

What you're complaining about is that money going through this cycle decreases. What MUST happen for this cycle to exist, is that the money stays constant. Now obviously I'm not arguing for zero tax, I get that tax is a valid part of this cycle. However, you must see that tax is the big parameter we can change here (and that it must go down, on the plus side, it doesn't need to go down by much). The absolute requirement for these cycles is that money must keep circulating, ideally forever, and the government is supposed to adjust that by controlling the main lever they have: tax.

(Now this ignores that there are many "tax-like" levers, like average rent in an area, bank interest, insurance costs, ... but they would have to change by a lot more than tax would. Also there's a LOT of cycles in the economy and they must all be balanced, not just one)

dmonitor• 3 years ago

the fact that local businesses have fallen by the wayside in favor of franchisees must be a major contributor. money that would stay in the community is instead shipped off to franchise owners in who-knows-where. the total money in the system gradually decreases when the top of the food chain lives in a distant land.

xracy2• 3 years ago

I think the real problem that your answer hides is that in order for money to circulate, we need to pick up the most stagnant money in the economy. That would be the wealth accumulated by billionaires, rather than the money of cafe workers.

I would argue more taxation of that money would allow better circulation of money for the rest of the economy. And would require fewer taxes for the cafe workers of the world.

nimbius• 3 years ago

the biggest labour shortages have been in basic service jobs.

yes, yes this is true. theyre all either dead or done. we spent decades forcing them to work for tips and bare minimum wage, fighting dirty to keep them out of unions and spending millions to avoid paying them a living wage, and in the last two years the straw that broke the camels back was demanding they put their lives at risk slinging chili's baby back ribs with no health insurance or paid time off during a pandemic where they also have to play covid police to largely ungrateful customers. when the time came for raises bonuses and benefits, we threw together about three months of service-sector hero porn, televised ads golf clapping the dwindling masses of exhausted underpaid slaves for their "Sacrifice" as we laud them for their heroic efforts to rack up back-pay rent debt theyll have to service the minute the government decides covids over because its too expensive.

so yeah we're all out of people willing to do this kind of work because it sucks, and the economist cant seem to figure out why nobody wants this fresh new hell anymore.

dv_dt2• 3 years ago

That and jobs for some people, even min wage jobs can be sticky. If you're just making it, it can be hard to break the routine and give up money from hourly pay to make time to look for a new job - even if its a better job. So with covid, people saw the blatant lack of safety net that they were living with and many got kicked out of work anyway, I think some managed to move up and out of t he worst jobs.

cookie_monsta• 3 years ago

There definitely seems to be a lack of analysis about this. I flew back into Australia recently and we had to wait ~ 2 hrs for our luggage to come off the plane because there weren't enough baggage handlers to cope with the volume.

The representative who came around and explained this to everybody waiting at the conveyor belt seemed genuinely confused by the fact that they were unable to hire people to do this work, despite the fact that this very industry has been in the media for months/years now, with reports of poor conditions, strikes, exploitatative outsourcing, etc

flandish2• 3 years ago

Oh there’s plenty of analysis. What you witnessed was marketing .. cognitive dissidence at the corp level pushed down to the lowest as “gee we are trying to hire!”

Pay more. Get more. That is the only solution. Strikes also help.

Well. Unless you are american and your president makes it illegal to strike. (Railroad workers, most recently.)

nonethewiser5• 3 years ago

While true I dont see these employers as evil. I think the reality is that small businesses are dying.

Some industries are labor intensive. If labor prices exceed a certain level, these business go under. It's not some shill for businesses. It's happened to entire industries.

There needs to be some happy balance between affordable prices and affordable labor.

u801e2• 3 years ago

According to this source[1], the labor cost for a restaurant is 20% to 30% of gross revenue. If a restaurant decided to double the pay for their employees, then their costs would go up by 50% (25% * 2). If they increase their prices by 50% and customers still provide them business, then they won't go under.

If for instance, a meal costs around $25 today, then they would have to increase the price to $37 (or a $12 increase). Looking at one regular dish I get at a chain restaurant, I've seen its price increase from $23 to $32 in in the last year. I still eat there about as frequently as I used to. Would I still get it if it was $34.50 assuming the same labor cost? I most likely still would.

On the other hand, if the restaurant decides not to increase pay and has trouble with staffing, along with increase wait times, errors in fulfilling the order, food not prepared well, then I most likely won't eat there as often, if at all.

[1] https://www.lightspeedhq.com/blog/labor-cost-guidelines-rest...

ok_dad• 3 years ago

The happy balance is when everyone can pay for modern needs and necessities and don’t have to get food stamps in addition to working at Walmart. Business owners have absolutely zero right to anyone else’s labor; it’s a privilege to be able to hire others, and should should be treated as such with proper respect and pay for the laborers.

cscurmudgeon• 3 years ago

we spent decades forcing them to work

How exactly were they forced?

Do they or their family play zero role in this and they are just “forced”.

If people were “forced”, skilled and unskilled immigrants wouldn’t be lining up to enter the US.

The only way this can be fixed is acknowledging a tiny minuscule bit of personal responsibility. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink

https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education...

Until we have singularity and order around AI to build stuff out of thin air there is a cost to existence in society.

orwin• 3 years ago

They were forced because employment is sticky, unlike work. I accept that most workers who worked for the same company for more than five years are de facto forced to work, by habitus. Forced do not mean coerced.

By making employment less sticky (Hello covid), people who felt forced to work stopped, and chose to do something else.

"Personnal responsibility" can exist even if most of our decisions are psychological nudges.

randomdata5• 3 years ago

so yeah we're all out of people willing to do this kind of work because it sucks

That's not the problem, though. The article indicates that there is not much change in the service sector, aside from some increases in sick leave. As it tells, the problem is that the service sector has exploded to want many more workers than ever before. As soon as you fill one position, two more appear out of nowhere.

the economist cant seem to figure out why nobody wants this fresh new hell anymore.

If anything, they can't figure out why the service sector is growing by leaps and bounds even amid efforts (e.g. rising interest rates) to crash the economy. As the article tells, once it finally does crash then that rapid explanation will halt and labour issues will start to correct.

walterbell• 3 years ago

https://infonomena.substack.com/p/whered-all-the-workers-go

In a November 30, 2022, speech on “Inflation and the Labor Market,” Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell blamed most of the 3.5 million estimated shortfall in the U.S. labor force on premature retirements. He also blamed a large portion – between 280,000 and 680,000 – on “long Covid.” In a footnote, however, Powell acknowledged a far more somber factor: an estimated 400,000 unexpected deaths among working age people.

nostromo2• 3 years ago

Our response to Covid was disastrous.

Temporary closures to flatten the curve became permanent closures of many businesses. People asked to stay home decided not to come back. Inflation destroyed working class wages. We spent more on Covid by any measure than we spent on WWII. And we had mortality rates similar to countries that did next to nothing. Even China, which is the only major economy that could stay locked down forever, decided to finally accept reality and move on.

Next time let’s be more clear eyed and protect the vulnerable with targeted interventions, encourage people to pay attention to their general health, and not just think we can hit pause on the global economy without messing everything up.

mindslight• 3 years ago

"Pause" ? More like money printer go brrr, so the government and Wall Street could pretend everything was fine. Reduced economic activity would have been entirely appropriate for a pandemic, but the feds forced the exact opposite.

refurb• 3 years ago

With government support and 2 years people just found other work or decided to retire early.

I mean, they didn't expect that people would just stay home for 2 years, then pick right up where they left off, did they?

I know people who had service jobs who found remote work, switched careers, went back to school.

Overtonwindow• 3 years ago

I'm more interested to know where the money is coming from for these workers who are not working. Are they just living off of welfare, savings, family, or what?

Economics would dictate that at some point they have to reenter the job market, even if they don't like the price point.

Am I missing something?

flandish2• 3 years ago

When profits and shareholder benefits fall because corps are paying higher wages, that’s when workers will return.

Where have all America’s workers gone?

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