It's definitely not just you or a local thing. I've very much experienced the same thing in southern Canada.
COVID accelerated this phenomenon, but it's been a slow "frog boil" for years (or decades).
My theory is that workers will naturally try to step up to meet whatever challenges their being asked to deal with. Customers were pretty understanding during COVID, and organizations learned just how well they could still operate profitably even while being severely understaffed. Which, to them, is great news! They can pay far less to workers and pocket the difference.
I can't imagine this ever returning back to "normal" (which, is actually not really normal because this was happening before COVID already, just slower). Why would it? The companies have no incentive to return to full staffing, customers don't have any real alternatives in a lot of industries (doctors, schools, etc.) and when they do 9 times out of 10 they'll opt for cheaper, slower, poor working conditions over pricier, faster, good working conditions.
It would be really nice if I'm wrong - I hope I am.
I always say to my coworkers "Sometimes the mission has to fail." That's the only way that corporate leadership hears anything. Problem being, they put mission failure on the management team so the management team has to answer for those failures... And, not all of them, management is spineless and would rather work you to death before admitting weakness.
But, yeah, I've always seen places as understaffed and after a bunch of workers died during COVID plus their teams burned on all cylinders corporate just decided to raise prices and not hire anyone for a better bottom line.
I tend to look at places that are understaffed as either a management problem or a pay problem or both. My work actually grew in employees during the pandemic and after since we offered competitive wages and had a decent work culture.
Part of the understaffing was the sudden exodus of older people either retiring or passing and the younger generations, god bless them, are less tolerant of bad bosses and bad pay.
It's been the norm in medical for a long time, Hospital administrations are notorious for only staffing enough people to keep from being shut down by regulators or sued by patients.
It does seem to be a problem that's getting bigger since investors insist on profits increasing constantly and cutting employees is one way of saving money.
It really does seem like we're nearing the end of modern corporations ability to continuously extract more money though, I kinda expect to see big changes within my lifetime since it feels like workers are starting to reach their breaking point.
Someone will come along to say "why don't they just raise wages?" Some can, but businesses vary widely. For some, labor's a big percentage of their costs and they already have low profit margins, so they either raise prices or figure out how to go without, and customers are price-sensitive. Some businesses are better at dealing with this than others, by the nature of the business or varying management skill.
It should hopefully be good for labor, and for businesses that are better at labor relations.
I'm sorry, but I gotta say it ... this is late stage Capitalism. More and more companies trying to make more profits off of less and less infrastructure and human resources ... and the companies that even think about trying to buck the trend are quickly bought out or driven out of business.
This is not even close to being a new thing, nor a local one. I think a strong argument can be made for seeing the beginnings of this starting at least a century ago, probably further.
Not just America, either -- I'm American, living in the EU the past six years (3 different countries) and variations of this same problem can be found all over the place here, too (particularly healthcare and assorted govt services), definitely predating Covid.
I am in IT, and the signs of this go back decades, at least -- the outsourcing of customer support to India, and then the actual IT work started going there, as well ... the continued downsizing of IT departments and years-long build-up of "technical debt" (which basically means putting band-aids on IT problems instead of taking the time to fix them properly, over and over again, until the entire tech infrastructure is teetering upon collapse).
IT companies have, for years if not decades, been crying about a "lack of skilled workers" when what they actually mean is a "lack of skilled workers willing to work at the pay level we offer".
More and more, it is becoming quite common for IT companies to post positions they never intend to fill, just to give the illusion of trying to replace lost workers ... the IT department that used to have 7 workers is down to 2 workers due to attrition and, somehow, those 2 workers are managing to do the job of 7 people "temporarily, until they hire replacements" ... for years, and why would the companies actually hire those replacements when, apparently, 2 people are good enough?
There are so many variations of sagas and stories like this nowadays, it is ridiculous.
I think we're dealing with a few problems at once. My mom is in the medical field and part of the aging cohort that called it quits during Covid. Anecdotally, a huge number of doctors retired during the pandemic. As part of an at risk population they didn't want to risk their health. On top of that we entered a much nastier time period where political opinions became highly visible and reactions much more aggressive. My own mom works at a Physical Therapist, the daily discussions/arguments she found herself in to have her conservative patients wear a mask - even when it was legally required - was astonishing. In some cases patients because verbally, and in one case physically, abusive. My mom was trying to maximize her social security and being only 2 years out when the pandemic hit she decided to stay through the most trying times. As soon as she could she closed her office.
However leading up to the point she got a really interesting look at the other doctors within her network that normally referred to her. These referral sources ranged from doctors in their late 50s to their 80s, and of those doctors about 80% retired during Covid. Her referral base nearly dried up and was only kept sustained from previous patients returning for new issues. It's a small, anecdotal window but I think it reflects what happened during the pandemic pretty well. Doctors aged 60-80+ were overrepresented in the workforce and a mass retiring event has left us with at a deficit. But I think that's pretty unique to the medical field.
Service industry staffing seems to have similar flavors - particularly in the case where political opinions became highly visible and reactions much more aggressive - but I think there is a second force at work. Cost of living went through the roof, rent in particular. Our largest ski area in California, Lake Tahoe, is probably the easiest example to understand. With people working remotely and AirBnb exploding, rents more than doubled in the area. As a result ski resorts near us are having a difficult time finding staff to run the lifts and staff the restaurants. But it's easy to understand why, even with the marginal increase in salaries - moving from $10 per hour to $15 - the liftees would still need to spend 50-75% of each pay check just to live there. It doesn't make financial sense.
I live in an area that has very little industry and most stable work is found in marine science, agriculture, and the service industry - for us specifically around golf. In our small town rents pre-Covid for a 1 bedroom apartment averaged about $1600, today they are more than $3000. Again, if you aren't making substantially more money it just isn't a feasible way to live. While those working in marine science and even agriculture have been able to make it work, and even in those cases folks are struggling, the service industry has been gutted. The low wage workers just can't make ends meet.
I think my big question is, where are all the low wage workers going? Did the mass retiring of the baby boomers open up enough new opportunities? Does the gig economy provide enough job and pay increase for service industry folks to make the switch? What sectors have absorbed the additional labor?
There have been a number of articles about this from the federal reserve banks.
Last year, Barkin from the Richmond Fed wrote that service employees quit during COVID, found better jobs, and didn't come back in spite of pay going up 10%, because they found better opportunities and working conditions. He recently wrote that low immigration, population aging, and an array of factors are suppressing labor force growth. He also noted that credentialed employment such as teachers has a problem, in that even if wages goes up tomorrow to attract new employees, it takes years for people to get trained up.
And wages have been going up. You can see this in data from the Dallas Fed. Slides 9-15 show wages are up, employment is up, unemployment is down.
The problem is there are more job openings than there are workers available in the USA.
The fed is busy engineering a recession, as they worry about wage driven inflation, but that is just a temporary fix.
Another short term fix is that folks under 25 or over 54 just stopped participating in the labor force as much as they used to (slide 11.) So Republicans want to allow younger folks to work, and want to raise the age of retirement.
Another short term fix is to encourage more babies. Which Republicans also seem fond of.
IMHO, if the US population growth remains low and the US job openings remains high, no amount of high wages or high prices is going to solve staff shortages in the long term. There is only so much technology you can throw at child care or the food service industry to improve productivity.
I think this is where two major ideology clashes are happening... and it's on the employee's side.
On one hand, you've got people realizing since Covid became a Thing that life is short, and if you have to make money... well, you're damned well going to be paid what you're worth. Now, what a person is worth is an entirely different discussion, but I think many of the jobs are that people are saying "Go take a hike" to are ones where you can barely even afford rent working full-time. Side note: I also feel like many of the people online saying "Screw this company, I can make more elsewhere" are also your software engineers and techbros; they have a set of skills that are VERY high in demand and so can be almost instantly employed if they leave a job. Unfortunately, there's also a lot of people who do NOT have in-demand skills and can't just job-hop with ease.
But I digress. The thing that this is clashing with is "Someone's gotta do this job; I guess that will be me." Yes, people are willing to put up with horrid conditions just to stay employed sometimes. Or as I like to look at it: yes, in general restaurants pay shit. But, people are always going to want to go out to eat at some point... and they'll ultimately take their money to a place that is open. It's very much the same for other services: people online will say "Businesses that can't treat their employees well should go under!", and while this is a good theory... there are those of the mindset like this: "People want this service, so despite anything terrible on my end, I should give the people what they want." Of course, this is the part where the owners can take extreme advantage of the situation.... and again, some people will stay with a horrid job just because sometimes, there are no other options for them.
As others have said this has been going on for quite some time in other fields.
My mom was a department head for Department of Transportation in Florida in the accounting deparment. When she was hired her department had 10 people and 2 bosses. When she retired roughly 10 years ago her department was down to 4 people and 1 boss. The same workload needed to be done with significatly less staff. They were repeatedly told it wasn't in the budget to replace people as they left, which led to more people leaving. Mind you, this is a group of people responsible for $billion+ contracts and payments.
This wave is finally hitting critical mass in the service industry. Before COVID bosses would just cut someone early if it was an unexpectedly slow night. Now they're just not scheduling them at all. Some places fully expect employees to sit at home and be on call (off the clock, of course).
I think it always important when companies say that they face a "labour shortage" or a "hiring crisis" to remember that what they have is a labour shortage at the given price point they are paying. If they want to fix their labour shortage, they should stop pressing central banks to intervene and pay more!
It's definitely not just you. This was happening in my area before covid, but the pandemic accelerated it. I come from working in nonprofits, so maybe I'm biased, but the NPs I worked for were constantly running on skeleton crews and we were underpaid and overworked.
My current company, I'm the only one in my position, when it would be more reasonable to have at least 2 people in my position. I'm not overworked, but because of the nature of the clients we work with, more than one person in my role to deal with them is a much better idea. There used to be two people in my role, but my boss decided that one person is better cost-wise. I'm not being paid double what two of me would, but I'm definitely higher paid that I would be if there were two of us. That's rare.
It's just not reasonable to expect that people will be able to live/sustain themselves and society if we keep intentionally under staffing things to cut costs (I'm hoping this trend will die soon).
From everywhere I've seen, consulted for, contracted for, and heard about, the answer atleast in the US, is yes, absolutely.
It's definitely not just you or a local thing. I've very much experienced the same thing in southern Canada.
COVID accelerated this phenomenon, but it's been a slow "frog boil" for years (or decades).
My theory is that workers will naturally try to step up to meet whatever challenges their being asked to deal with. Customers were pretty understanding during COVID, and organizations learned just how well they could still operate profitably even while being severely understaffed. Which, to them, is great news! They can pay far less to workers and pocket the difference.
I can't imagine this ever returning back to "normal" (which, is actually not really normal because this was happening before COVID already, just slower). Why would it? The companies have no incentive to return to full staffing, customers don't have any real alternatives in a lot of industries (doctors, schools, etc.) and when they do 9 times out of 10 they'll opt for cheaper, slower, poor working conditions over pricier, faster, good working conditions.
It would be really nice if I'm wrong - I hope I am.
I always say to my coworkers "Sometimes the mission has to fail." That's the only way that corporate leadership hears anything. Problem being, they put mission failure on the management team so the management team has to answer for those failures... And, not all of them, management is spineless and would rather work you to death before admitting weakness.
But, yeah, I've always seen places as understaffed and after a bunch of workers died during COVID plus their teams burned on all cylinders corporate just decided to raise prices and not hire anyone for a better bottom line.
I tend to look at places that are understaffed as either a management problem or a pay problem or both. My work actually grew in employees during the pandemic and after since we offered competitive wages and had a decent work culture.
Part of the understaffing was the sudden exodus of older people either retiring or passing and the younger generations, god bless them, are less tolerant of bad bosses and bad pay.
It's been the norm in medical for a long time, Hospital administrations are notorious for only staffing enough people to keep from being shut down by regulators or sued by patients.
It does seem to be a problem that's getting bigger since investors insist on profits increasing constantly and cutting employees is one way of saving money.
It really does seem like we're nearing the end of modern corporations ability to continuously extract more money though, I kinda expect to see big changes within my lifetime since it feels like workers are starting to reach their breaking point.
Yep, for the US, here's an article about it, and here are unemployment rates by state. Search Tildes for shortages for more articles.
Someone will come along to say "why don't they just raise wages?" Some can, but businesses vary widely. For some, labor's a big percentage of their costs and they already have low profit margins, so they either raise prices or figure out how to go without, and customers are price-sensitive. Some businesses are better at dealing with this than others, by the nature of the business or varying management skill.
It should hopefully be good for labor, and for businesses that are better at labor relations.
This is interesting. My tech company is definitely understaffed. I hate it and keep begging them to hire more devs.
I'm sorry, but I gotta say it ... this is late stage Capitalism. More and more companies trying to make more profits off of less and less infrastructure and human resources ... and the companies that even think about trying to buck the trend are quickly bought out or driven out of business.
This is not even close to being a new thing, nor a local one. I think a strong argument can be made for seeing the beginnings of this starting at least a century ago, probably further.
Not just America, either -- I'm American, living in the EU the past six years (3 different countries) and variations of this same problem can be found all over the place here, too (particularly healthcare and assorted govt services), definitely predating Covid.
I am in IT, and the signs of this go back decades, at least -- the outsourcing of customer support to India, and then the actual IT work started going there, as well ... the continued downsizing of IT departments and years-long build-up of "technical debt" (which basically means putting band-aids on IT problems instead of taking the time to fix them properly, over and over again, until the entire tech infrastructure is teetering upon collapse).
IT companies have, for years if not decades, been crying about a "lack of skilled workers" when what they actually mean is a "lack of skilled workers willing to work at the pay level we offer".
More and more, it is becoming quite common for IT companies to post positions they never intend to fill, just to give the illusion of trying to replace lost workers ... the IT department that used to have 7 workers is down to 2 workers due to attrition and, somehow, those 2 workers are managing to do the job of 7 people "temporarily, until they hire replacements" ... for years, and why would the companies actually hire those replacements when, apparently, 2 people are good enough?
There are so many variations of sagas and stories like this nowadays, it is ridiculous.
Personal observations and opinions inbound:
I think we're dealing with a few problems at once. My mom is in the medical field and part of the aging cohort that called it quits during Covid. Anecdotally, a huge number of doctors retired during the pandemic. As part of an at risk population they didn't want to risk their health. On top of that we entered a much nastier time period where political opinions became highly visible and reactions much more aggressive. My own mom works at a Physical Therapist, the daily discussions/arguments she found herself in to have her conservative patients wear a mask - even when it was legally required - was astonishing. In some cases patients because verbally, and in one case physically, abusive. My mom was trying to maximize her social security and being only 2 years out when the pandemic hit she decided to stay through the most trying times. As soon as she could she closed her office.
However leading up to the point she got a really interesting look at the other doctors within her network that normally referred to her. These referral sources ranged from doctors in their late 50s to their 80s, and of those doctors about 80% retired during Covid. Her referral base nearly dried up and was only kept sustained from previous patients returning for new issues. It's a small, anecdotal window but I think it reflects what happened during the pandemic pretty well. Doctors aged 60-80+ were overrepresented in the workforce and a mass retiring event has left us with at a deficit. But I think that's pretty unique to the medical field.
Service industry staffing seems to have similar flavors - particularly in the case where political opinions became highly visible and reactions much more aggressive - but I think there is a second force at work. Cost of living went through the roof, rent in particular. Our largest ski area in California, Lake Tahoe, is probably the easiest example to understand. With people working remotely and AirBnb exploding, rents more than doubled in the area. As a result ski resorts near us are having a difficult time finding staff to run the lifts and staff the restaurants. But it's easy to understand why, even with the marginal increase in salaries - moving from $10 per hour to $15 - the liftees would still need to spend 50-75% of each pay check just to live there. It doesn't make financial sense.
I live in an area that has very little industry and most stable work is found in marine science, agriculture, and the service industry - for us specifically around golf. In our small town rents pre-Covid for a 1 bedroom apartment averaged about $1600, today they are more than $3000. Again, if you aren't making substantially more money it just isn't a feasible way to live. While those working in marine science and even agriculture have been able to make it work, and even in those cases folks are struggling, the service industry has been gutted. The low wage workers just can't make ends meet.
I think my big question is, where are all the low wage workers going? Did the mass retiring of the baby boomers open up enough new opportunities? Does the gig economy provide enough job and pay increase for service industry folks to make the switch? What sectors have absorbed the additional labor?
There have been a number of articles about this from the federal reserve banks.
Last year, Barkin from the Richmond Fed wrote that service employees quit during COVID, found better jobs, and didn't come back in spite of pay going up 10%, because they found better opportunities and working conditions. He recently wrote that low immigration, population aging, and an array of factors are suppressing labor force growth. He also noted that credentialed employment such as teachers has a problem, in that even if wages goes up tomorrow to attract new employees, it takes years for people to get trained up.
And wages have been going up. You can see this in data from the Dallas Fed. Slides 9-15 show wages are up, employment is up, unemployment is down.
The problem is there are more job openings than there are workers available in the USA.
The fed is busy engineering a recession, as they worry about wage driven inflation, but that is just a temporary fix.
Another short term fix is that folks under 25 or over 54 just stopped participating in the labor force as much as they used to (slide 11.) So Republicans want to allow younger folks to work, and want to raise the age of retirement.
Another short term fix is to encourage more babies. Which Republicans also seem fond of.
I think the only long term fix is more immigration. But opinion is divided on that.
IMHO, if the US population growth remains low and the US job openings remains high, no amount of high wages or high prices is going to solve staff shortages in the long term. There is only so much technology you can throw at child care or the food service industry to improve productivity.
I think this is where two major ideology clashes are happening... and it's on the employee's side.
On one hand, you've got people realizing since Covid became a Thing that life is short, and if you have to make money... well, you're damned well going to be paid what you're worth. Now, what a person is worth is an entirely different discussion, but I think many of the jobs are that people are saying "Go take a hike" to are ones where you can barely even afford rent working full-time. Side note: I also feel like many of the people online saying "Screw this company, I can make more elsewhere" are also your software engineers and techbros; they have a set of skills that are VERY high in demand and so can be almost instantly employed if they leave a job. Unfortunately, there's also a lot of people who do NOT have in-demand skills and can't just job-hop with ease.
But I digress. The thing that this is clashing with is "Someone's gotta do this job; I guess that will be me." Yes, people are willing to put up with horrid conditions just to stay employed sometimes. Or as I like to look at it: yes, in general restaurants pay shit. But, people are always going to want to go out to eat at some point... and they'll ultimately take their money to a place that is open. It's very much the same for other services: people online will say "Businesses that can't treat their employees well should go under!", and while this is a good theory... there are those of the mindset like this: "People want this service, so despite anything terrible on my end, I should give the people what they want." Of course, this is the part where the owners can take extreme advantage of the situation.... and again, some people will stay with a horrid job just because sometimes, there are no other options for them.
As others have said this has been going on for quite some time in other fields.
My mom was a department head for Department of Transportation in Florida in the accounting deparment. When she was hired her department had 10 people and 2 bosses. When she retired roughly 10 years ago her department was down to 4 people and 1 boss. The same workload needed to be done with significatly less staff. They were repeatedly told it wasn't in the budget to replace people as they left, which led to more people leaving. Mind you, this is a group of people responsible for $billion+ contracts and payments.
This wave is finally hitting critical mass in the service industry. Before COVID bosses would just cut someone early if it was an unexpectedly slow night. Now they're just not scheduling them at all. Some places fully expect employees to sit at home and be on call (off the clock, of course).
I think it always important when companies say that they face a "labour shortage" or a "hiring crisis" to remember that what they have is a labour shortage at the given price point they are paying. If they want to fix their labour shortage, they should stop pressing central banks to intervene and pay more!
It's definitely not just you. This was happening in my area before covid, but the pandemic accelerated it. I come from working in nonprofits, so maybe I'm biased, but the NPs I worked for were constantly running on skeleton crews and we were underpaid and overworked.
My current company, I'm the only one in my position, when it would be more reasonable to have at least 2 people in my position. I'm not overworked, but because of the nature of the clients we work with, more than one person in my role to deal with them is a much better idea. There used to be two people in my role, but my boss decided that one person is better cost-wise. I'm not being paid double what two of me would, but I'm definitely higher paid that I would be if there were two of us. That's rare.
It's just not reasonable to expect that people will be able to live/sustain themselves and society if we keep intentionally under staffing things to cut costs (I'm hoping this trend will die soon).