re: Seeing a lot of restaurants are having trouble hiring workers

Well, restaurants could start offering wages that beat the unemployment amounts and they’d likely start getting employees back.

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Well, restaurants could start offering wages that beat the unemployment amounts and they’d likely start getting employees back.

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Wait staff can make double unemployment fairly easily. Double. So next suggestion?

The problem is that many of these people on unemployment aren’t not working. They are working cash jobs or 1099 jobs they think are cash and don’t affect their unemployment today. You collect your unemployment then go make $50-100 day under the table with flexible hours and a job you don’t care about...or you go wait tables and have to show up for a shift? It’s an easy decision.

Guy I know owns a farm with chicken houses, cattle and stuff in North La.

He had 7-8 legal Mexicans working for him until they all figured out they could make more off the government than working, they all quit in a three week span.

Now he's up shite creek with no help

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It’s worse in blue areas than red though.

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Not really

Even in red areas a lot of the people that work those jobs have blue voting mentality

I've seen very red rural areas have the same struggles with hiring people

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Well, restaurants could start offering wages that beat the unemployment amounts and they’d likely start getting employees back.

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2 things:

1. What if their skill doesn’t justify close to $20/hr
2. Are you willing to pay 1.5-2 times what your restaurant meals used to cost?

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I think min wage is $16.50 or so here and I haven’t noticed any restaurant troubles like I read on this site. My neighborhood grocery starts the high school bag boys at $20/hr and haven’t had any trouble keeping applicants willing to work.

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What do they pay you once they find out you're a junkie?

I get this might feel apocalyptic to some but it feels like things are turning from an employers job market into an employees job market. Meaning that things are shifting into potential employees favor. And not just in the service industry. I personally find it very exciting.

It’s just going to cause prices to go up with labor cost

I have an opening for a low voltage cabling apprentice. I pay a couple dollars an hour above normal along with a whole host of benefits. I've received less than 10 applications in the last week, where I usually have 50+ by now.
The government has its foot on the neck of small businesses and "We can't breathe"

I think everyone has pretty well covered the economic incentives at play here, so I’ll skip over those just to avoid beating a dead horse. But I’d also like to add one more possible contributing factor: a psychological one.


I don’t think we can underplay the impact of having someone sit at home for 12 months straight. Whatever we want to say about perverse government incentives and wages vs work effort certainly holds water.

But at the same time, we can’t dismiss that there has been a huge paradigm shift in the daily lives of a huge number of people. And most people are creatures of habit. We do the same basic things day in and day out because patterns are comfortable and deviating from those patterns takes effort. Add to that reality that for the last year people have been bombarded with messaging to avoid deviating from the pattern of staying home, and that shite eventually seeps into your brain. It will literally rewire the neurological structures of your brain and the way you process information.

To the point that I suspect many of these folks who are able to work are now avoiding work not only because of the elevated funds they receive from staying home, but because the idea of redeveloping discipline, follow through, and a basic productive skill set just sounds too difficult for them to bother with. So that the sad truth is, it may not really matter what you offer to pay them.

Psychological problems rarely have rational solutions. It might just be a case of where they need to exhaust all of their other, easier options before life kicks them in the arse, forces them off the couch, and makes them get back to an at least semi-productive life if they don’t want to starve. Unfortunately, this is what a mental health crisis looks like.