Here's a typical tweet about the job market:
BOOM.
Hotel And Restaurant Workers Are Quitting Their Jobs At The Fastest Pace On Record https://t.co/MsX2PVUV1M
— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) June 8, 2021
The barely concealed point here is that workers are being treated like shit by hotel and restaurant owners who are too hidebound to change their ways, so they're quitting in record numbers now that other jobs are available. There's obviously something to this, given that job openings are up 30% since the beginning of the year. If something better is out there, why not take it?
But take a look at this:
In the most recent month, the number of people quitting their jobs was only 43% of the number of job openings. That's a record low aside from a single month at the height of the pandemic last year. What this suggests is that workers are actually being more cautious than usual about quitting their jobs. Given the huge number of job openings, the normal response in April would have been something like 4.6 million quits instead of the 3.9 million it actually saw.
In other words, take the "everyone is quitting lousy jobs" narrative with a grain of salt. It's not necessarily wrong, but I'm not sure it's necessarily right either. My bet is that when everything shakes out later in the year, we'll end up with roughly the same set of workers, the same set of jobs, and a little bit higher pay compared to pre-pandemic days. And low-income workers, unfortunately, will be treated about the same as they've always been.
It could be true of Restaurant and Hotel Workers, but much less true in other sectors - possibly even with reductions in quits in other sectors offsetting it.
I was just going to observe the same thing. Overall job-quitting may be going down, but how does it look by sector? Maybe tech workers aren't quitting in higher numbers, but dishwashers and busboys are.
Yep. I think it is really sector-driven. Hospitality has got to be extra awful right now because of understaffing. You are paid poorly AND massively overworked.
Don’t forget the customers getting more surly over the last year. I mean, even pre-covid, customers could be downright awful to wait staff… but nowadays, you have them going out of their way to berate or assault you for enforcing government/employer imposed safety mandates. So many more “adults” are acting like children (or animals) in public spaces these days… I don’t miss my college days of delivering pizza or working retail at all.
Apparently the pandemic meant that all the nice customers stayed at home, from what I've heard.
Count me in on objecting to the level of aggregation shown in the chart; if nothing else because it leads with a tweet about hotel and restaurant workers. Always a good rule of thumb to check out what things look like one level of aggregation down (if possible) as part of your analysis. If there aren't any lumps, proceed with the program. If not ...
"...hotel and restaurant owners who are too hidebound to change their ways..."
Having worked in a couple of restaurants when I was young, I know that most of them operate on razor thin profit margins. Changing that will cost them money is only viable if they are able to pass on the costs to diners. But dining took a real nosedive during the pandemic, and it isn't clear when or even if it will rebound to earlier levels, so this is a risky time to be raising prices in the dining sector.
The situation may be different in chain restaurants, and I know nothing about how hotels operate, but I can understand the difficulties faced by independent restaurant owners. I'm not optimistic about the future of the restaurant sector: many have already gone under as a result of the pandemic, and many others are barely hanging on. None of that, of course, justifies mistreatment of their workers. It may be that the whole dining process needs some major redesign to make it both humane and viable. But just looking at the current mess, it's hard to be optimistic. The best hope for the sector is that there is enormous pent-up demand for the restaurant dining experience that will come roaring back now that the epidemic here appears to be in retreat.
They may operate on razor thin margins, but restaurateurs always seem to have a golden parachute.
I don't think that's fair. Executives at big chains have golden parachutes. The people who actually work in restaurants, even the managers, especially in independent restaurants, don't. Starting your own restaurant is traditionally a good way to lose every penny you own, plus a few.
I suspect very strongly that many people who used to work in hotels and restaurants before the pandemic are not looking for jobs in that sector now. There are plenty of jobs doing other things, that pay better and have less awful working conditions. These folks wouldn't show up as "quits," but they do represent churn in the labor force.
Being a tweet notwithstanding, Wiesenthal should have provided a reference. And you Kevin have generalized from hotel and restaurant workers to “everyone” …
I made a similar argument some years back arguing with a libertarian who was saying if we raised the minimum wage then restaurants would just replace workers with robots. I told him from my years of working in the food industry I was certain the industry is unique in that it required lots of people that can be treated like shit. Almost everyone that works in food gets treated like crap.
Why let data get in the way of the preferred click-bait headline?
Seriously, another factor might be that people who are still concerned about COVID don't want to go back to jobs that put them in close proximity, indoors, for long periods of time, to crowds of maskless, unvaccinated, and potentially infected people.
I thought the point of most policies, whether liberal or conservative, were to pull people out of poverty, whether from rising wages or helping people to move up to better paying jobs, no?
I know my sister (who worked at a nationally renowned restaurant) is waiting to get back into the game. The money guys fired the management and the headline chef, and slowly stopped taking the staff's safety concerns. Remote management was added, and what kind of management is that? It's not a manager that has your back for health and safety and definitely doesn't have your back against abusive customers.
So she's a preschool teacher and working the gig economy until things swing back around.