Where are the people who used to work? \ stacker news ~tech

pull down to refresh

2414 sats \ 26 comments \ @elvismercury 24 Jul 2023 tech

I'm scared to ask this bc it seems like I'm trying to own the libs or something, but seriously, we just had another week where they didn't pick the garbage up on the assigned day because they don't have enough staff to make all the pickups. I would like to know what happened to all the people who used to have jobs, but now don't want those jobs because they suck, or don't pay enough, or some combo of the two.

I don't think the broad strokes of getting unemployment have changed, this far out of COVID? This isn't Sweden. So how are people surviving without jobs? Did 25% of the nation move back in with their parents?

I know it sounds like I'm being snarky but I seriously don't understand how a giant swath of the country is surviving now, since they apparently are not working. Surely there is a mountain of writing on this topic -- can someone point me in the right direction? Or drop some knowledge? (I'm putting this in tech because it's the closest relevant thing -- is some kind of work-from-home thing responsible for the lack of garbagemen?)

view all related items

139 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 25 Jul 2023

I've talked about this with several other economists a few times over the past couple years. It's not something we have a total handle on, but here are some thoughts on what's going on:

Many people retired during the pandemic.
Those retirements opened positions which pulled people out of the lower tiers of the economy.
Many immigrants returned home during the lock downs, which greatly increased low wage openings.
Many women had to drop out of the labor force to take care of their kids during school closures and some number persisted with homeschooling.
The Quiet Quitting phenomenon has people using more of their leave, so even filled positions are less reliable than normal.

The big yet unanswered question is why wages haven't adjusted to fill so many of these positions, but it might just be that a lot of these jobs don't make sense at the wages required to fill them.

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 25 Jul 2023

These are great insights, thank you. I hadn't heard about the immigrant one before -- that would seem to have a lot of explanatory power wrt the more high-profile things (e.g., restaurants, certain service industries.)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 25 Jul 2023

That was pointed out by a colleague who works closely with the agriculture community. Apparently, it's been a huge problem for them.

96 sats \ 3 replies \ @021da48107 24 Jul 2023

I don't know of any data on these topics but it would be nice to see. Here are my opinions/thoughts:

Is the garage service provided by a government, if so, I'm not surprised they don't operator well.
This whole "people don't want to work" issue is really a "people don't want to work for what the job is paying" issue. Any time I hear a company wine about "no one wants to work", what I hear is "I'm not willing to pay people more for this job, so I'll just complain about it and blame an external force".
I think being able to work from home during covid (and still) really changed things. Why would you take a job getting paid $15 at a local store where you have to go in if you could get a job getting paid $15 working from home? Hell, I'd take a pay cut to work from home.
From what I hear a lot of younger folks are living at home longer, but idk if that's actually true.

Again these are just my opinions/thoughts, take them with a grain of salt.

55 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury OP 24 Jul 2023

In this case, the garbage company is private.

Wrt "not wanting to work at the stipulated wages" that's for sure true. I think a lot of companies are in a Mexican standoff with their competitors over raising prices, which is keeping them from raising wages. Presumably they will eventually cave, but there's probably a stretch where it's existential: whoever raises first loses customers to the others who don't.

I hadn't thought that maybe some people are rotating away from being garbagemen to ... something they can do online. That must be happening somewhat -- so one pie shrinks, another grows. Can that really explain so much of it, though?

33 sats \ 1 reply \ @felipehere 25 Jul 2023

I do believe it explains considerably. Even though computers, mobile phones, Amazon, YouTube, Etsy, etc are around for quite a while, it looks like they achieved true mainstream status more recently (to all economic classes and geographies worldwide), especially after COVID.

Workers now have more options than ever:

Marketplaces (such as Amazon) allow anyone to buy & sell to niches;
YouTube / Instagram allow anyone to become some sort of celebrity and monetize content;
Anyone can switch careers more easily as knowledge is widely available for free (less reliant on schools & diplomas).

We may be in the middle of a huge labour market shift and prices / wages should gradually adjust to reflect new preferences.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Storyteller 25 Jul 2023

I think you are right that we are in a main labour market shift!! Due to information being free everywhere information jobs can be created.

I think stacker.news is an example of this next new economy. You could get paid in sats by only having a wallet.

Wherever you are in the world. You can be paid micro payments for your service, your knowledge, delivering value.

When people have a website and integrate it with lightning, web wallets like mutinywallet they can just join the economy. They have alternatives for the crappy dirty jobs.

During Covid they already stayed at home, they used zoom, the internet, netflix, amazon like you said.

But there is one more trend:AI. Artificial intelligence. Chatgpt, Dalle,.

These AI tools let you create content, automated your job, create images, video, more and more.

This will disrupt the job market at the top or middle sections. Not the low skilled manual jobs. Everything that can be done through and with a computer that can be automated will be automated.

And next you will see many office jobs disappear or change. And those high paid jobs like accountant, graphic designer, programmer will change and people will loose their jobs. While others that master AI (the people who can prompt the AI and let it do what is needed) will see their salaries increase.

So wait and see and within 2-3 years you see banks, pension funds, insurance companies etc announce massive job cuts in USA and some developped countries in Europe.

73 sats \ 4 replies \ @pakovm 25 Jul 2023

In my case, I left my job as a restaurant manager after many years to go back to IT, it took 7 months to pick up where I left since I studied Computer Science but didn't work at anything related for almost 6 years, took a few curses to go keep me updated and add them to the CV and now I'm working as a Telecom Technician.

Looks like many people did the same, I don't know in the particular case of the US where if you don't work you go homeless and die of hunger, but in Europe many people did the same that I did.

30 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undergotten 25 Jul 2023

I don't know in the particular case of the US where if you don't work you go homeless and die of hunger,

Is that not how it works in Europe, as well? Also, I don't think hunger is what kills the homeless here. Food stamps are pretty easy to get. People are much more likely to die of alcohol poisoning or some other drug overdose, due to the depression and shame of homelessness. Suicide, too, for the same reason.

5 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 25 Jul 2023

In my city, and a number of others I've been to recently, there are giant permanent homeless encampments -- tent cities under bridges, on sidewalks, etc. People are milling around, blasted out of their minds on whatever drug. Some are probably pretty normal and relatively intact, but the ones who catch the eye are so far gone it breaks your heart.

Have no idea what can be done about this once it gets so far gone. It breaks your heart to see, I don't even care how or why they got there, it shows that society is not right if people are washing out of it in this way. The fact that there's record low unemployment, as remarked elsewhere, just makes it more poignant and baffling.

5 sats \ 1 reply \ @pakovm 25 Jul 2023

Depends on the country, I talk for Spain, here we have something called "Paro", it's paid from a state fund that's of course, paid with taxes, I've worked for six years straight so I had up to 2 years of this help, also I had my savings.

It's not sustainable in the way its done today, but hey, it's better than nothing and it actually help to have government sponsored courses and a leave that you pay beforehand while you work, I don't know how it works in other European countries, but at least here you can take a time and not lose your life working as they do in America.

3 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undergotten 25 Jul 2023

America has paro, too. It's called "unemployment benefits". Same thing as what you described, though.

48 sats \ 3 replies \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 24 Jul 2023

I’ve wondered the same thing. It’s not like living has gotten cheaper. In fact it’s the opposite, so people must be working. I fully agree that people got sick of working shitty jobs for insufficient pay, so I understand leaving those jobs. But I guess I find it hard to believe that enough new, not shitty jobs opened up for all these current jobs to be vacant.

38 sats \ 2 replies \ @briguy 25 Jul 2023 freebie

i think in some places, people actually make more "money" living off of welfare than they do working jobs in the area.

54 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 25 Jul 2023

I know that's the standard story, and certainly a comforting one. But I don't believe it, certainly not in the current economy.

More plausible is that in some cases welfare, even though it sucks, sucks less, on net, than the lives they'd be able to live working full-time at Chipotle or whatever.

41 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undergotten 25 Jul 2023

Very unlikely. Also, you can only take from that system a fraction of what you can prove you put into it. So if you worked for 10 years making ten dollars an hour, you can collect for ten years, but an amount akin to 5 dollars an hour. Unless you were self employed, in which case the government gives you nothing at all because they hate you.

38 sats \ 0 replies \ @faithandcredit 25 Jul 2023

I think it's quiet quitting thing. Same amount of people working, same or less workload, but productivity is none existent because of quiet quitting which has deeper root causes

20 sats \ 1 reply \ @zuspotirko 25 Jul 2023

I bet that during 2020 a lot of people had time to reflect their lives.

Especially things like you mentioned garbage man etc they just pivoted to something that doesn't suck. If they want to stay in business they have to pay better wages because picking up trash in never not going to suck. Robotics is still years away from solving this big scale. Low-level white collar jobs like pushing round mails and excels or verifying buraucracy can absorb much much more jobs than garbage industry has to loose. So these people aren't necessarily gone or jobless.

On a macro scale this was always going to happen sometime

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Storyteller 25 Jul 2023

I also think that during Covid there were massive helicopter money (means money dropping for free from government) comming down from the sky. The USA government create massive stimulus checks. Check the website of the FED at how much money (M2) was created and you will see.

If people receive maasive stimulus checks for just staying home, they will get used to it.

Why would they come back to work and do the crappy, shitty, dirty jobs.

They will maybe come back but now they want clean jobs. And as the economy is still not in a deep recession they think I’m only going back if you pay me more.

Starbucks employees for instance are trying to get unionized. Before Covid they would not maybe dare to ask for a union. Now they want a union and the union will ask for a raise of wages that at least is equal to last year’s inflation.

So the low unemployment rate of say 5% means that people can start demanding higher wages or unions and they won’t just work for any jobs. And they got used to helicopter money.

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @maths 25 Jul 2023

https://streamable.com/kxmhny

15 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 25 Jul 2023

Wtf was that?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @mudbloodvonfrei 25 Jul 2023

I think that's AI-generated

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @OriginalSize 24 Jul 2023

I believe they are still working, but have moved on. Though you say elsewhere that the garbage co is private, might the rates they may charge be constrained by the city? In such a case, price controls can bring a market to a standstill.

Not sure if it was posted here but many home insurers are reportedly pulling out writing riskier coverage because states have regulated prices and the premiums don't cover the payouts.

As for what to do, writing letters and protesting is probably the play unless you prefer mobility i.e. exit. It's all rather sad.

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @llamabyte 25 Jul 2023

The Age of Making Money is Over. The middle-class is done :

https://inv.zzls.xyz/watch?v=rJJBnmDkEwI

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Storyteller 25 Jul 2023

Your best chance to know this is to look at the website of labour statistics for the USA. Look at the unemployment data. You want to look at the indicators: Total employed Total unemployed Total lanour force (this is total employed plus total unemployed) Unemployment ratio (this is total unemployed /labour force).

Check these numbers for the past 10 years or even past 5 years to include Covid.

This will give you a view of what is happening at country level.

And then you can get also the picture of the states.

From country level when the unemployed decrease, this could simply mean people gave up. They abandon the labour market. They are not counted as unemployed any more.

But the still have to eat. They could be working in the informal sector. Not registered. Below minimum wage.

They could have migrated back home. For this you need to look at migration data.

To understand how they make money still you need to look at the figures about the economy. The gross domestic product will tell you if the nation is earning more or less.

Some people could have savings. Remember the USA government has given many people free paychecks. This could have been saved.

The questions you are asking are called macro economic questions. They deal with the state of the total economy.

If you are interested look at investopedia.com in the section about labour market to see how it works and about the macro economy.

40 sats \ 0 replies \ @Storyteller 25 Jul 2023

Here I have looked at the statistics page of the Bureau of Labour Statistics for you for the USA government: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

On this site each month you can get an update about the labour market (the indicators I mentioned above) and also indicators like wages.

If you look for “monthly data or monthly statistics labour market USA” on that site you should be able to download Excel spreadsheets with all the data of past months since Covid or beyond Covid. You will then see the pattern.

This data is available for most countries in the world but you have to go to the statistics sites of say Spain, Portugal etc to find the data. For Europe you need to go to the European Central Bank’s statistics site or the European Statistics bureau.

USA You will see that unemployment in USA is ridiculously low. Compared to other nations in the world. Many people are working two jobs. These could be crappy jobs that pay low. But below 5% unemployment is great.

It means that only 5 out of the people that wanted to work (labour force) is not working. The other 95 are.

But the participation rate tells another story. This says who is leaving the labour market completely. If you see participation rate dropping it means people are leaving the labour market completely.

Macro economy is awesome. Global macro economy is more awesome.

The more you understand Macro economy and global Macro economy (what is happening in regions, in countries), not only labour market, the more you will understand about why you need to stack sats!!!!

Just one example: the USA economy debt ratio (debt divided by income) is close to 129%.

And this figure will influence the unemployment rate for sure during next 10 years. You have to pay the debt back. And when you can’t pay, it will impact your economy which will go down. And that will lead unemployment rate to increase.

Sats will grow in value on the long term. That single figure deb ratio of 129% tells us that on the long run the USA economy has some bigger risks.

But that is another discussion. For another time.

So don’t be scared!!! Educate yourself on what is happening. Understand what money is and keep stacking sats and you will be good. Whatever happens on the labour market you will be good.