Part of the problem is immigration crackdown (at least in the us). Partly it’s a lot of people died during covid. Part (a lot) is capitalist shenanigans. We live in interesting times, alas.
I have nothing for you aside from anecdotes.
But labor continues to be a major, if not primary, expense of many businesses.
It makes a lot of sense to pay employees 1.5x wages to do 3x the work. They won't leave because they can't make more elsewhere, and they have no way to improve their situation.
That's just in labor markets with balanced supply and demand. In markets with more labor than demand, employees are doing well to have a job at all so they will stay even if the workload/staffing is painful.
Here in Australia, experts have been saying that unemployment is unusually low and job vacancies are unusually high, since the pandemic. We stopped all international travel for a while, including international students and people with working visas - who formed a significant portion of our workers. With them gone, Aussies have been stretched to fill all the jobs that need doing.
Even now, with international travel back, it's taking a while for the impact to be felt in employment.
We're short of workers all across Australia, in a wide range of industries.
Labor force participation is down about 4 percentage points from its high in the late 90's. There are fewer people working, so you can't expect the same level of staffing and services as before.
I worked retail for a very long time. IN my experience (this is just personal anectdote) the store already understaffed before Covid. But by just enough that we could still manage to get by but it did make it tougher. But it also mean there was no one to cover if something went wrong cause they were pretty much pushing it to the limit. In comes covid and all the sudden that broke the system that already was pushing it. Not only cause of covid but now things feel really stressed, customers are even more assholes, company is expecting us to magically be able to do it all cause we were before, and we're expected to take customer abuse with a smile (that was actually the day I decided to quit when some asshole customer tried to start a fight with another customer and then went rampaging back and the manager finally threw him out way after he should have <- and he was a known problem regular! And I'm betting manager didn't want to throw him out cause corporate has been known to be very likely to take customer's side if they complain). Then you start seeing people decide that retail isn't worth it and quitting unless they just cannot go elsewhere. That's what I did. I had coworkers stuck there who wished they could do (including managers,one who was a hard worker but her and her husband both worked retail and they could not afford for either to be even temporarily out of a job). Hell.. my head manager apparently randomly quit with practically no notice a year after i did (and he was having to try to sell to us that everything was fine... I know he didn't believe it cause other managers would mention he was fed up with it).
The pandemic stressed systems that already were stressed to the limit and made things break entirely.
And in general that seems to be the regular retail story (don't know about other sectors). I call it hte walmart philosophy of hiring (the initial setup where they were hiring and giving hours as little as possible).
Not just you.
Part of the problem is immigration crackdown (at least in the us). Partly it’s a lot of people died during covid. Part (a lot) is capitalist shenanigans. We live in interesting times, alas.
I have nothing for you aside from anecdotes.
But labor continues to be a major, if not primary, expense of many businesses.
It makes a lot of sense to pay employees 1.5x wages to do 3x the work. They won't leave because they can't make more elsewhere, and they have no way to improve their situation.
That's just in labor markets with balanced supply and demand. In markets with more labor than demand, employees are doing well to have a job at all so they will stay even if the workload/staffing is painful.
Here in Australia, experts have been saying that unemployment is unusually low and job vacancies are unusually high, since the pandemic. We stopped all international travel for a while, including international students and people with working visas - who formed a significant portion of our workers. With them gone, Aussies have been stretched to fill all the jobs that need doing.
Even now, with international travel back, it's taking a while for the impact to be felt in employment.
We're short of workers all across Australia, in a wide range of industries.
Yeah, pretty much.
Labor force participation is down about 4 percentage points from its high in the late 90's. There are fewer people working, so you can't expect the same level of staffing and services as before.
Employment-population ratio is down from the late 90's, while employment-population ratio for ages 25-54 is close to the historic high. Basically, there are/were a lot of boomers, and they're mostly not working anymore.
I worked retail for a very long time. IN my experience (this is just personal anectdote) the store already understaffed before Covid. But by just enough that we could still manage to get by but it did make it tougher. But it also mean there was no one to cover if something went wrong cause they were pretty much pushing it to the limit. In comes covid and all the sudden that broke the system that already was pushing it. Not only cause of covid but now things feel really stressed, customers are even more assholes, company is expecting us to magically be able to do it all cause we were before, and we're expected to take customer abuse with a smile (that was actually the day I decided to quit when some asshole customer tried to start a fight with another customer and then went rampaging back and the manager finally threw him out way after he should have <- and he was a known problem regular! And I'm betting manager didn't want to throw him out cause corporate has been known to be very likely to take customer's side if they complain). Then you start seeing people decide that retail isn't worth it and quitting unless they just cannot go elsewhere. That's what I did. I had coworkers stuck there who wished they could do (including managers,one who was a hard worker but her and her husband both worked retail and they could not afford for either to be even temporarily out of a job). Hell.. my head manager apparently randomly quit with practically no notice a year after i did (and he was having to try to sell to us that everything was fine... I know he didn't believe it cause other managers would mention he was fed up with it).
The pandemic stressed systems that already were stressed to the limit and made things break entirely.
And in general that seems to be the regular retail story (don't know about other sectors). I call it hte walmart philosophy of hiring (the initial setup where they were hiring and giving hours as little as possible).