> All of this stuff about workers disappearing and people reconsidering their lives is pretty much a sideshow of projected narrative that is detached from what is really going on.
Well said. We’ve been bombarded with news articles and thought pieces about how COVID has forever changed the workforce, how people are refusing to work jobs they don’t like, how people are quitting en masse because their employers won’t allow remote work, and how companies are abandoning office spaces in favor of full remote for months now.
Yet every time I dig for the actual numbers it turns out little has changed on the whole. It’s usually journalists taking isolated stories or small changes in certain statistics and re-casting them as society-wide social movements.
Many of these articles are simple clickbait so the reader can think “Duh, pay more!” But it doesn’t make sense that people would choose no job at all over a job that doesn’t pay the wage they want. People are obviously either getting other jobs somewhere, waiting for enhanced unemployment to end, or waiting for other life circumstances to allow them to return to work.
And like you said, many of these situations are the result of parents having to leave the workforce to care for children while their schools and daycares were closed down. People without kids may not realize how disruptive that was to families that had planned routines and jobs around kids attending schools and daycares. I suspect we’ll see sharper increases in employment when school is back in session and enhanced unemployment ends this fall.
There isn’t some large movement of low-wage people simply refusing to work because without other sources of income. The logic in that narrative just doesn’t make any sense.
This problem is temporary while the economy, market, and extended unemployment benefits transition back to normalcy. Journalists are seizing on the narrow window of change to try to insert more dramatic narratives, but those too will fade.