Help Wanted

Wherever you go there seems to be "help wanted" signs. Restaurants especially seem to be struggling to fill all necessary positions. A popular explanation for this is that people "just don't want to work", mainly due to the belief that unemployment benefits are so lucrative that people would rather stay home than get a job. But what's really happening? 

Unemployment rates had been steadily decreasing since around 2010 when we hit a peak rate of around 10%, getting as low as 3%. As someone who was a retail manager during those years, I saw how it became increasingly difficult to fill entry-level positions as the unemployment rate fell. It wasn't that people didn't want to work, it was that there were more choices. When there is high, or even moderate, unemployment, most people will stick with a job that they don't like. Part of the reason for this is fear. "What if I quit and can't find another job?" is an understandable question that unhappy employees might ask themselves. Among employees who aren't making entry-level wages, there is the uncertainty about whether a different job would pay the same as the one they are leaving. For a lot of people, it takes something almost catastrophic to get them to leave their job and look for something else. For me, I had been unhappy for several years, but it took getting fired to get me to look for something else. In 2020 that catastrophic event was the pandemic. 

In Spring 2020 many restaurant workers, unable to work remotely, found themselves out of a job. While it's possible, even likely, that some of these folks attempted to ride it out by living on unemployment benefits, many more simply found other jobs. Once restaurants started opening back up and managers realized they couldn't fully staff their business, former restaurant workers fell into several categories:

• People who, before the pandemic, hated their jobs, but were afraid to leave. They found other work and never looked back
• People who, before the pandemic, had no issue with their job, but found other work, and didn't want to change jobs again
• People who, after working in a different industry for a year, realized how hard restaurant work is and realized they could make a living without working so hard and that other businesses were offering competitive wages

And it's not just the restaurant business that's scrambling. A local grocery store director told me recently that last year he had no problem filling positions, but that this year it has been very difficult. It doesn't take an economic genius to figure out that when most people are already working, few people are going to be desperate for jobs. It's a worker's market, business owners aren't calling the shots.