Lost and found…

Have you seen my employees? 

So, where are the workers??  That’s a great question and there are all sorts of ideas circulating.  But first, where did the pollution control people find 1500 workers to help clean the beaches the past two weeks?  How about we get those people in the warehouses. 

• It appears that many people just dropped out of the work force when covid hit.

  • 5,000,000 million jobs were lost, but of those 5 million, 3,000,000 of those workers have chosen NOT to go back to work – they are deemed to not be participating.

  • The participation rate went from 63.3% down to 61.6% which effectively also lowered unemployment, because if you are not participating, you can’t be unemployed.

• What is causing people to drop out of the workforce? A number of little things that add up to big numbers.

  • Covid. It doesn’t matter that there is a vaccine, covid has just scared them to the point that going to work is frightening.

  • Parents staying home and making it work with a single income instead of double income family households. Why?

    • The day care workforce is down 10%

    • Daycare operators either do not have the capacity and are turning parents away or raising the cost for the child

    • The decision for child daycare has always been a thin line between the cost and the benefit and some parents are choosing to stay home.

  • Many workers, having been forced to try their own gig, found success and are not going back.

  • Other workers transferred into other industries; this has impacted food and hospitality the most. Their workers have simply left the industry.

    • The restaurant workforce is down 7.6%, or 930,500 jobs

    • Hourly pay for restaurant workers is up 12.7%

    • Meals are 7.3% more expensive

  • Some workers, flushed with unemployment cash, speculated on crypto, GameStop and AMC – and it worked. They are living off the proceeds and will now discover something called a “capital gains tax”.

• The fact of the matter is that the number of job openings is adding to the supply chain issues. It’s just taking longer to get stuff manufactured, shipped and delivered. 

The Good News? – Productivity is up 5%.  In other words, the current workforce is more productive than they were pre-pandemic.  Not a big shocker there.  Regardless, this is not going away so you will see American businesses doing what they do best – innovating around the problem. 

And, never letting an opportunity go to waste, the National Labor Relations Board has issued an “advisory opinion” that  football and men’s basketball college athletes should be considered employees of the schools they are attending, giving them protections and… wait for it… allowing them to unionize.  So, are they participants in the workforce?  Stay tuned as this rolls through the courts. 

That’s it for this week; it is a dry subject but one that impacts everyone reading this. 

Next week I talk about interest rates and the Post Office getting into the banking business.  What could go wrong??!!