It’s a common refrain, wherever you go seeking service people will tell you “sorry we’re short staffed, nobody wants to work”. But is that really true?
The following graph is the non-farms employment number for the past 5 years.
So I think it’s pretty easy to see where the pandemic had its impact on employment, but the peak employment number just prior to the pandemic was 152,504. The July 2022 number was 152,536. So give or take a few we have more people employed now than were employed before the pandemic (which was the peak of the last 5 years, actually the peak since 1939).
So if the same number of people working now is pretty much the same as the number of people working at the peak in 2019, where are all these people who don’t want to work?
The answer – I believe – is that the real measurement is not the number of people who are working, but the number of hours those people are working, especially at the low end of the market. Prior to the pandemic we were having a contentious discussion about raising the minimum wage, which was (and still is) $7.25 an hour. Now, in what we’ll call the post-pandemic world, the de facto minimum wage is closer to $15 an hour. So if you are a minimum wage worker who was previously working multiple jobs and contributing between 60-80 hours a week you now find that you can work 40 hours a week and make the same (possibly more) money. People weren’t working 60-80 hours a week for fun – they did it to meet their needs. If they are meeting their needs at 40 hours a week, well that’s good enough.
Bottom line – everybody who wants to work is working. They are working fewer hours, and if you can’t find people to work then you’re not making your job attractive enough.
How does that get fixed? Well either the Federal Reserve forces the country into a recession, driving up unemployment, reducing wages and driving more people to work additional hours. Absent that then some businesses, who have existed for years on the backs of cheap labor, have to go out of business. That’s no bad thing, if you won’t pay a living wage for 40 hours of work you’re not running a business, you’re a charity case, and you’re forcing the people (your employees) least able to contribute to support your charity,
So when somebody tells you “nobody wants to work” feel free to correct them, “no, nobody wants to work HERE.”
