Is understaffing a new norm?
I'm asking this as a genuine question, not as a hot take.
Where I'm coming from:
My husband and I went to dinner the other night -- apologies from the waitress on being shortstaffed. A sign on a local store asks for patience with the lack of staff. The people staffing order pickup at a nearby department store aren't enough to keep up with orders. At my most recent doctor's appointment I spent almost 45 minutes in the exam room waiting to be seen (for an appointment I had to make over a year ago). A few hours after the appointment I went to pick up a prescription, and it hadn't even begun to be processed yet. There was only one cashier working, and she was having to jump between the in-person line and the drive-thru lane. At my job we don't have enough substitute teachers, so we're dependent on regular teachers covering classes during their "prep" periods.
This is merely a recent snapshot from my own life that I'm using as a sort of representative sample, but it feels like something that's been building for a while -- like something that was going to be temporary due to COVID but has stuck around and is now just what we're supposed to get used to. I remember that I used to keep thinking that understaffing would eventually go away over time, but it seems like it's just standard practice now?
Is this something specific to my experiences or my local area (I'm in the US, for context)? Are other people seeing the same thing?
Assuming it isn't just me, is there anything out there besides anecdotes that addresses this phenomenon? I don't want to lean solely on gut reactions, but I also can't deny that nearly every business I go to seems visibly short-staffed all of the time.
It's definitely not just you or a local thing. I've very much experienced the same thing in southern Canada.
COVID accelerated this phenomenon, but it's been a slow "frog boil" for years (or decades).
My theory is that workers will naturally try to step up to meet whatever challenges their being asked to deal with. Customers were pretty understanding during COVID, and organizations learned just how well they could still operate profitably even while being severely understaffed. Which, to them, is great news! They can pay far less to workers and pocket the difference.
I can't imagine this ever returning back to "normal" (which, is actually not really normal because this was happening before COVID already, just slower). Why would it? The companies have no incentive to return to full staffing, customers don't have any real alternatives in a lot of industries (doctors, schools, etc.) and when they do 9 times out of 10 they'll opt for cheaper, slower, poor working conditions over pricier, faster, good working conditions.
It would be really nice if I'm wrong - I hope I am.
I definitely agree that COVID sped up what has been happening in the healthcare, hospitality, and retail sectors for a long time now: keep slashing costs until you hit the point that you're just good enough to keep customers from going someplace else.
These were already pretty thankless industries to have a customer-facing role in and were some of the most difficult jobs during the pandemic. I don't quite agree that customers were pretty understanding of longer waits and reduced service. Sure, they kept shopping and dining out, but they'd be more likely to take their frustrations out on the poor kid doing three people's jobs for one minimum wage than they would be to bring their concerns up with someone who could actually do something about it. Like you said though, as long as the company is still getting your money, why would they change anything?
In addition to your point about customers being more likely to take their frustrations out on the person working far harder than the pay is worth is the perpetuated slogan or talking point of "no one wants to work anymore". I think this is a huge piece that circulates on Facebook or whatever and is a subliminal, if not more surface level for some, thought process so that people are placing blame on the lowest workers on the totem pole at the store, or restaurant, etc..
I found a post a little while ago, don't know where, can't find it easily, that just went back through newspapers over the last 120 years or so and found instances of "no one wants to work anymore".
I dont want to get too political here, but shows that capitalists will always blame the poor worker for a situation that is not their making.
Looks like it started as a meme, but Snopes went back and found the source articles to verify it's veracity.
As a humorous post I saw said, "No one wants to work" is just "No one wants to date nice guys" but for employers.
Oh, from someone who now regularly deals with a slowly collapsing health care system, "just good enough" is generous - there is no bottom, even when you're dealing with literal life and death. Many people are absolutely fine with letting people die in an ER waiting room while frantic and exhausted nurses work double duty if it results in more money for them and their friends.
I work in health care. Recently spent a day shadowing in an ambulance with my buddy who’s a paramedic. The folks who interact with patients do a damn good job considering what they’re up against. Burn it is real, and compassion fatigue is a major issue, even with the ambulatory demographic i work with.
And I’ve both seen and experienced what it’s like to be expected to do far more than is actually possible for a single individual.
What you said is pretty much spot on for how the admins treat healthcare. I’ll refrain from saying anything too extremist or violent, but the longer i spend in this field the more radicalized i become in how i feel towards the insurance companies, middlemen, and non-clinical management.
If you don’t know first hand what the fuck we’re dealing with, you have ZERO business telling us how to do it.
I'm so sorry to hear it. While I'm not a health care worker myself, my mother is a nurse (non-ER) and I am legitimately concerned for her health at this point. Every year she seems to take on more responsibility, more nurses and patients and tasks overall... she is retirement age and just can't seem to let go because of how critically low the staffing levels are and how many people would be left up the creek without her. Her knees are giving out from being constantly on her feet. She's arthritic in her hands and in pain.
It makes me so angry to think about the position she is in, put there because people without concern for human wellbeing take advantage of her for having it. The people who don't get care, their families, and the workers who are being asked to do the impossible are suffering in place of those who are actually ultimately culpable for the failure. Accountability without culpability is sick.
I just don’t understand why people are still putting up with it. The insane prices restaurants charge coupled with the routine poor service and long waits have led us to drastically reduce the amount we eat out and when we do, we opt for the extreme high end where they are able to have good service still.
I shop almost exclusively online now because having to wait in line to give someone money is an insulting waste of my time. That also includes getting pharmacy orders delivered, because pharmacy customer service is terrible. Ok you don’t have adhd meds right now, and you can’t even tell me what other location of your national chain might have them? You want me to personally call 50 different locations to see which one has them instead of just doing your job and finding one for me? What’s the point of being a National chain if you don’t have unified supply chain management to solve this problem? GTFOH I’ll just pay an online pharmacy to ship it out tomorrow.
I switched to using OneMedical because just being able to text my doctor in an app or talk to them on zoom is way easier than taking multiple hours off for the inevitable round trip and waiting around a doctors office when 90% of the needs can be met in a 15 minute zoom or text chat anyway.
At least for service industries I think you are wrong. There are alternatives that have their shit together. I've gone to a couple restaurants recently and had a pretty bad experience, and I'd chalk it up to staffing shortages -- employees being overloaded, or probably being new hires who have no idea what they're doing, or possibly both. And I'm not going back to those restaurants. There's others that, even if they too are facing staffing shortages, are doing just fine. Or maybe in some cases may be less popular so they're less overloaded (although the last bad restaurant visit I had wasn't particularly busy).
So to me there does seem to be a reason to improve, because these places have lost my business and it'll be hard to get it back. Might be different if you live in a small town and there's only so many joints but I don't.
Restaurants may be the exception in the service industry, but have you considered things like helpdesks?
If you've called insert any random company here, then without fail you've probably heard the tape say that they're busier than you'd normally expect. This seems to be an endless problem that stems from cost cutting measures resulting in slashing headcount and never recovering. Employees feel surprisingly responsible and pick up the extra work without question, but at some point it starts to give.
You're missing one of the very few upsided to capitalism. When all services suck, someone will come along and staff normally and corner the market, theoretically forcing all the other business to increase hiring.
If everything is slow and that's the new norm, there is no incentive to make things better but it leaves you very vulnerable to competition.
So how long do we have to wait for this to happen? I've yet to see any of these trend bucking businesses show up
This is nice in theory, but I don't see it actually working. It requires too many things to come together.
Maybe if we had many numerous small companies, and a middle class actually capable of raising a significant amount of capital then competition like this could occur. But considering the size of most companies, lack of competition and the capital required to compete in most sectors I don't see Kroger's pharmacy trading lower margins to be more competitive.
Yeah this is the theoretical "free market" that capitalists always fall back on. But the not-so-secret secret is that this free market doesn't exist due to monopolies/duopolies/*opolis and political lobbying. There is no "free market" correction coming unless the system changes to allow it to happen.
The lack of varied small businesses and the shrinking/shrunk/nonexistent middle class is a symptom of the larger problem.
I would argue this is the end result of the phenomenon sociologist George Ritzer identified in the mid-'90s as McDonaldization: in which labor is rationalized and simplified to an extreme, while some labor is offset to the customers themselves (bus your own table in fast food; pour your own soda, vs. a soda jerk making your soda for you). This seems to be the natural end result of our minimal-regulation capitalism.
More reading: https://simplysociology.com/mcdonaldization-of-society.html
I'm sorry, but I gotta say it ... this is late stage Capitalism. More and more companies trying to make more profits off of less and less infrastructure and human resources ... and the companies that even think about trying to buck the trend are quickly bought out or driven out of business.
This is not even close to being a new thing, nor a local one. I think a strong argument can be made for seeing the beginnings of this starting at least a century ago, probably further.
Not just America, either -- I'm American, living in the EU the past six years (3 different countries) and variations of this same problem can be found all over the place here, too (particularly healthcare and assorted govt services), definitely predating Covid.
I am in IT, and the signs of this go back decades, at least -- the outsourcing of customer support to India, and then the actual IT work started going there, as well ... the continued downsizing of IT departments and years-long build-up of "technical debt" (which basically means putting band-aids on IT problems instead of taking the time to fix them properly, over and over again, until the entire tech infrastructure is teetering upon collapse).
IT companies have, for years if not decades, been crying about a "lack of skilled workers" when what they actually mean is a "lack of skilled workers willing to work at the pay level we offer".
More and more, it is becoming quite common for IT companies to post positions they never intend to fill, just to give the illusion of trying to replace lost workers ... the IT department that used to have 7 workers is down to 2 workers due to attrition and, somehow, those 2 workers are managing to do the job of 7 people "temporarily, until they hire replacements" ... for years, and why would the companies actually hire those replacements when, apparently, 2 people are good enough?
There are so many variations of sagas and stories like this nowadays, it is ridiculous.
Yup. I'm senior leadership in data and leaving my current role in a few weeks.
There's no plan to backfill me. My responsibilities are just going to my already overworked and stretched technical leads and seniors. My director can then continue to talk the good talk to the top dogs about saving cash on salaries.
There's just nothing good about stakeholder driven enterprise anymore. My new place is employee and customer owned and I can't wait to actually move over to something determined to have a social good, not just the bank accounts of the already wealthy.
Just a lark ... I'm actually in the market right now. Y'all looking for anyone else? Historically, I'm a mostly-Microsoft developer (C#, T-SQL, ASP.NET) with ~20 years experience, but interested in getting away from programming, into pretty much any other branch of IT, but aiming for something SysAdmin / DevOps -related, been retraining myself on Linux and SysAdmin-y stuff for several years now ... also willing to take a big pay-cut (from what my resume implies I'm worth) for the chance to work someplace I actually respect.
PS: I'm an American in Germany, so most likely we'd be talking about a remote position.
Alas, not in my area and those aren't generally what I'd expect from a Data Engineer type!
I'm not even sure what the wider IT environment looks like these days! Sorry buddy.
I work for a company contracted to one of the big 3 US Auto manufacturers. This company just went through a round of 'buy outs', essentially offering to pay senior employees large sums to retire early. They have cut tons of employees, and fill non of their positions, instead just redistributing the work among the remaining employees.
It's pretty awful to watch. We're currently dealing with a lot of billing issues. There was one person who handled our billing, and she complained that it was too much work for her to do on her own. She took the buy out, and now they've dumped her work load, which was already too much, onto some other poor schmuck who already had an existing workload of their own.
That's something the monsters who run corporations have been doing for so long there's a name for it: the Great Speed-Up (here's just one article about it).
I always say to my coworkers "Sometimes the mission has to fail." That's the only way that corporate leadership hears anything. Problem being, they put mission failure on the management team so the management team has to answer for those failures... And, not all of them, management is spineless and would rather work you to death before admitting weakness.
But, yeah, I've always seen places as understaffed and after a bunch of workers died during COVID plus their teams burned on all cylinders corporate just decided to raise prices and not hire anyone for a better bottom line.
There's also the fact that many people would rather overexert themselves to avoid failure. To many people, work issues is something they take personally and feel responsible for, but then leadership reaps the benefits of transferring that load to them with no negative consequences.
I try to be vocal with more junior coworkers about the fact that if they can't get their job done in their allotted time, it can be signs of a management issue rather than an issue on them (Granted I only speak this way to the ones I know are good workers). So management should solve it by hiring more people.
I tend to look at places that are understaffed as either a management problem or a pay problem or both. My work actually grew in employees during the pandemic and after since we offered competitive wages and had a decent work culture.
Part of the understaffing was the sudden exodus of older people either retiring or passing and the younger generations, god bless them, are less tolerant of bad bosses and bad pay.
It's easier to be less tolerant of bad bosses and bad pay when you've been priced out of having a mortgage or raising a family. If there are no major responsibilities tying you to any particular location, there is no reason to stay at any specific job if it no longer satisfies you.
From everywhere I've seen, consulted for, contracted for, and heard about, the answer atleast in the US, is yes, absolutely.
Personal observations and opinions inbound:
I think we're dealing with a few problems at once. My mom is in the medical field and part of the aging cohort that called it quits during Covid. Anecdotally, a huge number of doctors retired during the pandemic. As part of an at risk population they didn't want to risk their health. On top of that we entered a much nastier time period where political opinions became highly visible and reactions much more aggressive. My own mom works at a Physical Therapist, the daily discussions/arguments she found herself in to have her conservative patients wear a mask - even when it was legally required - was astonishing. In some cases patients because verbally, and in one case physically, abusive. My mom was trying to maximize her social security and being only 2 years out when the pandemic hit she decided to stay through the most trying times. As soon as she could she closed her office.
However leading up to the point she got a really interesting look at the other doctors within her network that normally referred to her. These referral sources ranged from doctors in their late 50s to their 80s, and of those doctors about 80% retired during Covid. Her referral base nearly dried up and was only kept sustained from previous patients returning for new issues. It's a small, anecdotal window but I think it reflects what happened during the pandemic pretty well. Doctors aged 60-80+ were overrepresented in the workforce and a mass retiring event has left us with at a deficit. But I think that's pretty unique to the medical field.
Service industry staffing seems to have similar flavors - particularly in the case where political opinions became highly visible and reactions much more aggressive - but I think there is a second force at work. Cost of living went through the roof, rent in particular. Our largest ski area in California, Lake Tahoe, is probably the easiest example to understand. With people working remotely and AirBnb exploding, rents more than doubled in the area. As a result ski resorts near us are having a difficult time finding staff to run the lifts and staff the restaurants. But it's easy to understand why, even with the marginal increase in salaries - moving from $10 per hour to $15 - the liftees would still need to spend 50-75% of each pay check just to live there. It doesn't make financial sense.
I live in an area that has very little industry and most stable work is found in marine science, agriculture, and the service industry - for us specifically around golf. In our small town rents pre-Covid for a 1 bedroom apartment averaged about $1600, today they are more than $3000. Again, if you aren't making substantially more money it just isn't a feasible way to live. While those working in marine science and even agriculture have been able to make it work, and even in those cases folks are struggling, the service industry has been gutted. The low wage workers just can't make ends meet.
I think my big question is, where are all the low wage workers going? Did the mass retiring of the baby boomers open up enough new opportunities? Does the gig economy provide enough job and pay increase for service industry folks to make the switch? What sectors have absorbed the additional labor?
My guess is that more people are commuting from further away? I'm not around that much, but I'm under the impression there is rush hour traffic going towards Seaside at the end of the work day and housing being built there, since there's more land and less of a water issue.
I've read there is bad traffic in Hawaii between the nice places for tourists and where workers actually live.
Definitely a big factor. Beyond that I'm wondering in the cases of understaffing where the folks who used to work those positions are now. If it's pretty consistent across the country I don't just seeing it being a migration issue.
This is just speculation, but maybe they decided they needed more money and/or less stress and found better jobs, maybe in a different location or a different industry?
It seems plausible that when the labor market is tight, lower-paid jobs could get outbid, particularly in high cost-of-living places, and that's where you'd see persistent staffing issues accumulating.
There have been a number of articles about this from the federal reserve banks.
Last year, Barkin from the Richmond Fed wrote that service employees quit during COVID, found better jobs, and didn't come back in spite of pay going up 10%, because they found better opportunities and working conditions. He recently wrote that low immigration, population aging, and an array of factors are suppressing labor force growth. He also noted that credentialed employment such as teachers has a problem, in that even if wages goes up tomorrow to attract new employees, it takes years for people to get trained up.
And wages have been going up. You can see this in data from the Dallas Fed. Slides 9-15 show wages are up, employment is up, unemployment is down.
The problem is there are more job openings than there are workers available in the USA.
The fed is busy engineering a recession, as they worry about wage driven inflation, but that is just a temporary fix.
Another short term fix is that folks under 25 or over 54 just stopped participating in the labor force as much as they used to (slide 11.) So Republicans want to allow younger folks to work, and want to raise the age of retirement.
Another short term fix is to encourage more babies. Which Republicans also seem fond of.
I think the only long term fix is more immigration. But opinion is divided on that.
IMHO, if the US population growth remains low and the US job openings remains high, no amount of high wages or high prices is going to solve staff shortages in the long term. There is only so much technology you can throw at child care or the food service industry to improve productivity.
Is this a short-term fix? In my personal observation of people in my social sphere, babies take the mother out of the workforce for 6-12 months. If one of the parents is a low income earner (or even a moderate income earner these days, due to the childcare shortage), that parent will then leave the workforce until all children are old enough to attend school. Once the kids are in school, the parent may return to work, but often only on a part-time basis. The children themselves, of course, do not contribute to the workforce for 15-20 years.
Also, a lot of families only have 1-2 kids these days, which is not a very efficient conversion. One non-working parent can raise one child or a whole gaggle of children—but people are reluctant to have many children unless all three of these are met:
These three features rarely coincide in the same job anymore.
Yeah, good point. It's not a short term fix. I was trying to say that it is not a long term fix.
In fifty years or so, increasing the retirement age or encouraging more babies is really not going to help, if trends continue.
It will mitigate slightly, but not enough, so the only long term sustainable fix for countries like Japan, Europe and America is technological automation or immigration.
I think the delay of more than 20 years for children to grow up makes having children a rather long-term fix? Increasing immigration is "just" a policy change, which could be done quicker in theory.
Another example of the credentials problem is airline pilots. Pilot shortages have been a problem for years. Congress is considering increasing the mandatory retirement age from 65 to 67. In Europe there is apparently a push from French manufacturers to allow having only one pilot, though it doesn't seem likely.
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.
Yep, for the US, here's an article about it, and here are unemployment rates by state. Search Tildes for shortages for more articles.
Someone will come along to say "why don't they just raise wages?" Some can, but businesses vary widely. For some, labor's a big percentage of their costs and they already have low profit margins, so they either raise prices or figure out how to go without, and customers are price-sensitive. Some businesses are better at dealing with this than others, by the nature of the business or varying management skill.
It should hopefully be good for labor, and for businesses that are better at labor relations.
Just an anecdotal reminder that, like so many other things, the unemployment rates are extremely misleading, calculated in a way to exclude many legitimately unemployed people who want to work.
As I recall, currently the US definition of "unemployed" is "someone currently receiving unemployment benefits and proving to the unemployment office that they are looking for jobs every week" ... everyone else -- not eligible for unemployment benefits for any reason -- is not counted.
Receiving benefits doesn't factor into the definition. Actively looking for a job does though. There's problems with this definition but, well, we've been using it for so long that it's impossible to change at this point (and, largely, no one cares if you aren't in the workforce if you aren't trying to be in the workforce)
Edit: Also, there's lots of really interesting information in the monthly reports, most of the numbers just don't get reported because there's a lot of nuance behind them.
I think whether it's misleading is going to depend on what you're using it for. Which question are you asking?
I agree that a low employment rate doesn't say much about the people who are out of work. There are people who aren't looking for a variety of reasons, sometimes because they've given up.
However, from the point of view of employers who are short-staffed, and people actively looking, I think it might give a reasonable (though vague) impression of how the job market looks to them? The people who aren't looking probably aren't applying, either, and they aren't competition for other people looking for work. They might want a job, but they're not in the game.
But I'll add a caveat: even a state-level unemployment rate is a very zoomed-out view because there isn't one job market, there are many. Local conditions will differ depending on what kind of job it is and who qualifies.
I think it always important when companies say that they face a "labour shortage" or a "hiring crisis" to remember that what they have is a labour shortage at the given price point they are paying. If they want to fix their labour shortage, they should stop pressing central banks to intervene and pay more!
This is interesting. My tech company is definitely understaffed. I hate it and keep begging them to hire more devs.
Not sure where you are located, but hirings devs is hard almost everywhere. Best you can do is fight the amount of pressure you (and your team) gets, and hope you get more devs.
As others have said this has been going on for quite some time in other fields.
My mom was a department head for Department of Transportation in Florida in the accounting deparment. When she was hired her department had 10 people and 2 bosses. When she retired roughly 10 years ago her department was down to 4 people and 1 boss. The same workload needed to be done with significatly less staff. They were repeatedly told it wasn't in the budget to replace people as they left, which led to more people leaving. Mind you, this is a group of people responsible for $billion+ contracts and payments.
This wave is finally hitting critical mass in the service industry. Before COVID bosses would just cut someone early if it was an unexpectedly slow night. Now they're just not scheduling them at all. Some places fully expect employees to sit at home and be on call (off the clock, of course).
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 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.
It's definitely not just you. This was happening in my area before covid, but the pandemic accelerated it. I come from working in nonprofits, so maybe I'm biased, but the NPs I worked for were constantly running on skeleton crews and we were underpaid and overworked.
My current company, I'm the only one in my position, when it would be more reasonable to have at least 2 people in my position. I'm not overworked, but because of the nature of the clients we work with, more than one person in my role to deal with them is a much better idea. There used to be two people in my role, but my boss decided that one person is better cost-wise. I'm not being paid double what two of me would, but I'm definitely higher paid that I would be if there were two of us. That's rare.
It's just not reasonable to expect that people will be able to live/sustain themselves and society if we keep intentionally under staffing things to cut costs (I'm hoping this trend will die soon).
I mean, isn't that just the non-profit business model?
Yeah... It just has started to bleed over into the for profit world.
I also worked at a preschool, where you have to have ratios of adults to kids based on their age. The younger the age, the more adults had to be in the room. It was also a nonprofit, and it felt like we were always just barely at the legal minimum if not scrambling to figure out how to get more adults in the room.
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.
Some industries have had a shortage for a lot longer than just the pandemic.
I worked in the Australian agricultural industry for eight years, and they have been aching for more employees for a very long time. Where I worked, the pay was very good (on par with a Melbourne office job, but with rural cost of living—many of our sub-25-year-old employees were buying three-bedroom houses before the pandemic drove rural homes up to Melbourne prices) and the working conditions were very good, but they still struggled because the population density is just too low.
Most of our hiring success came from attracting ag students—but most of these students were international and were bound to be kicked out of Australia upon earning their degrees. Many of them pursued PhDs to buy themselves more time and increase the odds of getting a work visa, but the visa never eventuated.
These were really excellent employees who badly wanted to stay at our company, and our company was desperate to keep them (hiring immigration lawyers for them, etc.), but their visa applications were always, always, always rejected in the end, so matter what we did or they did.
I’m seeing something similar in northern Europe. Students were the ones working in restaurants and bars before COVID. They found different jobs, like package/food delivery, and didn’t return to restaurants for a long time. Restaurants were understaffed, but it’s slowly transitioning back.
Other areas, like IT, have always been difficult and I don’t think being understaffed is anything new there. I don’t mind it as it’s making it much easier to find jobs. Companies I’ve worked for also didn’t expect us to do more than we could, so no extra pressure to make up for unmanned seats.
I'm going to disagree with some of this. When you look at large profitable retailers like Coles and Bunnings, they are deliberately lowering the number of staff they have. People want to work for these companies but getting is very difficult.
I think this is where two major ideology clashes are happening... and it's on the employee's side.
On one hand, you've got people realizing since Covid became a Thing that life is short, and if you have to make money... well, you're damned well going to be paid what you're worth. Now, what a person is worth is an entirely different discussion, but I think many of the jobs are that people are saying "Go take a hike" to are ones where you can barely even afford rent working full-time. Side note: I also feel like many of the people online saying "Screw this company, I can make more elsewhere" are also your software engineers and techbros; they have a set of skills that are VERY high in demand and so can be almost instantly employed if they leave a job. Unfortunately, there's also a lot of people who do NOT have in-demand skills and can't just job-hop with ease.
But I digress. The thing that this is clashing with is "Someone's gotta do this job; I guess that will be me." Yes, people are willing to put up with horrid conditions just to stay employed sometimes. Or as I like to look at it: yes, in general restaurants pay shit. But, people are always going to want to go out to eat at some point... and they'll ultimately take their money to a place that is open. It's very much the same for other services: people online will say "Businesses that can't treat their employees well should go under!", and while this is a good theory... there are those of the mindset like this: "People want this service, so despite anything terrible on my end, I should give the people what they want." Of course, this is the part where the owners can take extreme advantage of the situation.... and again, some people will stay with a horrid job just because sometimes, there are no other options for them.
There is a saying that I heard when I worked at the YMCA: "You have to move out to move up."
Every director there touted that philosophy and it certainly worked for them. I used to absoultely HATE that saying since I'm old enough to have been raised on the "if you take care of the company, the company will take care of you" job loyalty mantra. I don't hate it because I don't agree with it, I hate it because it's true.
Outside of a mom and pop place or single owner business (where growth is often pretty limited to start with), most medium+ size organizations simply don't promote from within. How often have we either seen it or read message threads about people leaving a job to do the same work somewhere else for massive increases in pay? Staying shows management a complacency they'll take advantage of while applying for a job shows that you're a "go-getter".
All of the under-40 crowd that I hang out with do this and only a few of them are techbros. Every 2 to 3 years they update their resume, start send it out and give their two weeks after getting hired somewhere else with a decent pay bump. Most of them are office type jobs but even the manual laborers (mechanic, roofer) do it.
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).
And those people who left? Don't want to come back. Some probably found a better option so they don't have to. Some will have to. Companies finally are increasing paying prices but that doesn't help much when really tehy are just finally getting close to matching inflation (before it was a very underpaid job... and don't give me stuff like paramedics are paid the same. I think it's BS paramedics are paid the same and they are obviously very underpaid as well and should be paid more). And they haven't resoloved the "customer is always right" bullshit. yes, workers should treat the customers with respect. But customers should not be allowed to abuse employees either (and in general retail expects you to take abuse with a smile, at least in the U.S.).
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).
Yeah, I either feel like automation will have to step in to take the ever decreasing workforces place (which is maybe telehealth in medical) or the system will collapse. You cannot just be more profitable every year. Growth for the sake of growth is the mindset of the cancer cell.