20 sats \ 1 reply \ @zuspotirko 25 Jul 2023 \ on: Where are the people who used to work? tech
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
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.
reply