Why are so many employers not able to get or keep employees?

Brandon

The most basic explanation IMO is that never before in history have people been as lazy and unmotivated as they are now.

I saw an interesting argument today.

The author argued that employees are moving into better jobs, they’re leaving the corner store because they can make more doing something else, in this tight market.

Because nobody wants to pay good money to stupid people

Everyone with an ounce of work ethic and skill has used the last 2 years to move up into higher paying jobs. Even filming TikTok videos is a better paying gig than manning the drive thru or bussing tables. This leaves traditional entry level service industry work to the absolute dregs.

Think about it, personally I’d rather mow yards for $50 a pop, 30 min each than man the grill at McDonalds for 3-4 hours for the same pay. One takes hustle though.

Easy. Covid hit and we paid the service industry workers to sit at home and live off the government. And they did. And now, after over a year of sitting at home, they didn’t want to go back to work. Because they’d rather sit at home and live off the government. And so long as we continue to subsidize that, they will continue to do so.

Basically the entire bottom third of the labor market has given up trying and is content just fricking around in perpetuity. They see no path toward the middle or upper class so don't even bother. The top two thirds are still working as intended.

There used to be an obligation to work well. Even the shite employees at food service jobs felt the need to be professional and try to deliver positive service to customers. This obligation meant some people did better than others, and through that there was a path toward upward mobility. This path takes time to develop.

In the last few years a complete "frick the customer" has overtaken a lot of lower class employees and they never have to bother to try because they know even if they do get fired they could get a random job somewhere else for a few days.

It seems that the average age of the workforce has been increasing and more people retiring. People from working families may also be having less kids leaving less domestic born working people available requiring incentives to bring foreigner born people to fill the gaps. I honestly do not see the work ethic to be much different among generations. There are both lazy people and people with good work ethic (old and young) in my experience.

Another dynamic is that things often move towards the complicated, not towards the simple. Some of this seems to be caused by having to "fix" problems that have occurred, perhaps because someone along the way has screwed something up (or maybe because someone new came along and thought a certain way was better). Either way, more administrative controls seem to get put in place all the time (some good, some bad), but often increasing the work load (not decreasing) for fewer people available. Although the original intent may be good, over time, the administrative controls lose their original intent and get (mis)interpreted and sometimes leads to people doing more things to CYA rather than doing what make sense for a certain situation, leaving more and more work to do for an originally simpler task that at one time was also done in a sufficient manner without the same administrative controls.

You create an incentive for people not to work by paying them.

If we have to pay people we should at least be getting something in return.

It is absolutely ridiculous this labor shortage.

We’ve been trying to find help for over a year at almost every position and can’t get it.

I don’t know where all these people are but if they’re just sitting at home that desperately needs to be addressed.

We need to bring manufacturing back to this country.

We don’t produce anymore. We just consume. That’s not sustainable. We’re a cancerous locust farm right now not a self sustaining organism.