Over at New York, Kevin Dugan tells us not to be fooled by a low unemployment rate. In reality, the job market sucks:
It used to be that when the economy was humming and jobs were plentiful, it was a pretty reliable indicator that people were happy with who was nominally leading the country.
....What’s changed since then...the quality of those jobs have been eroding....disaffected Midwesterners who’d seen their manufacturing jobs outsourced....And these unemployment rates are all based on a shrinking workforce, largely because of the number of Boomers aging out of their jobs, though that’s accelerated during the pandemic as people stayed home to do childcare or protect their health. When you factor in those people, and those who’d like to work even more than they are now, it makes for a wide cross-section of discontent.
This is a very widespread sentiment, but where does it come from? The Midwestern manufacturing thing was real during the aughts, but not a lot anymore. And wage growth for white workers (the supposedly most disaffected ones) in the Midwest has been about average over the past 20 years.
As for Boomers retiring, I'm not sure what that has to do with job satisfaction. And the number of people who want to work more is at nearly historic lows—and still dropping. And of course there's this:
There's a bit of a drop in job satisfaction during the pandemic, which is hardly surprising, but on a longer term basis it looks like job satisfaction is moderately up, not down.
I understand that it's frustrating for widely held views to be constantly answered with a bunch of dispassionate charts and data points. And maybe the data is wrong. Maybe it just doesn't reach deeply enough to get at the real dissatisfactions with working life in the United States.
But on the other hand . . . maybe it's all the anecdotal stuff that's wrong. Maybe the narrative is wrong. There are, of course, people who are dissatisfied with their jobs. There always are. And maybe that's concentrated in the kind of people (young, smart, verbal) who write a lot about this.
But no matter how I look, it never shows up in the data. Overall, among Black and white, men and women, Midwest and Northeast, blue collar and white collar, high school and college grads—in fact, among nearly every demographic segment you can think of, there's little evidence of either widespread job unhappiness or growing job unhappiness.
So maybe the narrative is wrong? Maybe both liberals and conservatives, each for different reasons, want it to be true that people are unhappy with their jobs and their lives. So we all keep saying it. Maybe we should all stop.
Why shouldn't the job market suck? Everything else does, right?
Seriously, there is such a thing as the halo effect in reverse: things that seem lousy in one way are generally assumed to lousy in most other ways. Bad guys LOOK like bad guys; people who are dumb are supposed to look dumb, too.
So if things generally look lousy to young media types, why shouldn't the job market look lousy, too? This also helps explain Biden's low approval numbers. He might be doing a splendid job dealing with a series of catastrophes, but everyone remains focused on the catastrophes, not the responses.
If all I had access to was a McDonald’s for all my meals, I might be “satisfied” in my confidence that I’ll stay alive years from now. Still doesn’t mean I’ll always be “satisfied” with the range of my diet though.
Kevin, you're a typical liberal: trying to confuse the issue with facts.
If you don’t know how it works elsewhere….
The contrast between the stories and the data is spot on …. except for one possible complication. Response rates in surveys have been dropping fast. And the ones who don’t respond are disproportionally disaffected, disconnected people. It is possible that—-without robust correction—the surveys are increasingly missing the cases of bad news.
There are still a lot of areas in the US in decline. Farm communities losing people because farms employ a lot of automation, so don't need as many workers or large families. Coal towns also lost many jobs to automation a while ago, and more now as mines close down. People can be satisfied with their jobs, but be upset because they don't see those jobs as being available for their kids.
Overall, by the numbers, people shouldn't really be disaffected--but many clearly are. Look at population loss, esp. white population loss, to correlate to anger.
Farm and coal mining jobs make up a microscopic percentage of overall jobs in this country. I'm pretty tired of such a tiny minority of workers getting all the attention in discussions like this.
Why oh why don't Biden and the Democratic congress do something about this tiny minority of all workers getting all the attention? Looking pretty ineffectual, if you ask me.
You don't expect job satisfaction to go up and down all that much. Most people work for the money, so when they make enough and the job isn't too horrible, they are more or less satisfied. People can be dissatisfied by their jobs when times are bad and they are stuck or worried about losing their job and doing more work due to layoffs. They can also be dissatisfied with their job when times are good and there are better jobs around. You'd expect dissatisfaction to rise during good times and bad times. Since people can quit their jobs or get fired, you'd expect a change in conditions to trigger dissatisfaction. i.e. It's about the derivatives, not the values.
That chart is in percentages, not numbers, so let's consider the numbers. There are about 160M people working in the US. A drop of 1% satisfaction means 1.6M more people are less satisfied than they were. If we assume 2M people quit every month and that they put with up a lousy job for an average of 3 months before quitting, that's 6M unsatisfied workers . If the quit rate goes up to 4M, that's 12M. If the quit rate went from the usual 2M to 4M, we'd expect a downward change in satisfaction of 6M/160M of 3.75%. Satisfied workers are less likely to quit.
That's a back of the envelope calculation.
Am I missing something but the values plotted don't seem correct. I looked at https://news.gallup.com/poll/1720/Work-Work-Place.aspx and the 2021 Completely satisfied value is 48% and not around 85% as plotted.
The trend is the same as plotted but the values seem off.
In Kevin's chart Total Satisfied is the sum of Somewhat and Completely.
Kevin Dugan is right. The job market DOES suck . . . for hiring managers. For job seekers in most industries it has probably never been better in my lifetime. But it is very very difficult to fill open positions right now.
+1
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Agreed. I was skeptical of Dugan's take when the piece argues white-collar professionals also have it bad b/c of non-competes. I philosophically disagree with non-competes, but they can't possibly affect most sundry corporate professional jobs. The Dugan piece is thinly sourced and lacking in substance.
And if they were common among most sundry corporate professional jobs, they's be unenforceable. Non-compete agreements are allowed only in very limited circumstances.
More likely it is because journalists are trained to tell stories about people, not data. Anecdote comes first.
Another explanation: People don't necessarily expect a job to be "satisfying"; they work in order to get money which they then spend to be satisfied. The whole idea of "job satisfaction" is likely an elite phenomenon. So people who feel they are paid reasonably well (which likely would mean about equal with their peers) will report satisfaction.