18 Oct THERE IS NO LABOR SHORTAGE.

Photo by Creaslim on Unsplash

“The labor shortage is here for one reason—and it’s quiet quitting”

–https://finance.yahoo.com/news/labor-shortage-one-reason-quiet-110000582.html

😕😕😕

WHAT?

Man, these MSM outlets can’t even get their stories straight.

I’m gonna shout this from the rooftop:

THERE IS NO LABOR SHORTAGE.

IMO, this is a narrative we get to shame workers into acting like slave labor. It’s also done to paper over the massive cracks in the economy. See what I mean:

One question has hovered over the post-pandemic economy for the better part of three years: Where are all the workers? Businesses’ difficulty hiring has been blamed on a gamut of ills: Too-generous unemployment benefits; too many stimulus checks; not enough immigration; too many workers with long COVID, and, finally, simple laziness.

Now, a recent study suggests a different answer: Workers are still there—they’re just not working as hard.

-Yahoo Finance, Ibid.

A gamut of ills, all of which seem to blame the peons, as per usual. They got too much stimmy money. (Remember Mitch the turtle McConnell telling us we were flush with cash?) Unemployment benefits were just too darn good. (Never mind that UI benefits don’t help most people make ends meet.) We’re not exploiting enough immigrants. (This includes child labor: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html) Peons got sick with the long ‘rona and couldn’t go back to work fast enough. (As someone with two residual heart conditions after having C*v!d and strep at the same time, I assure you, these conditions are not a damn joke.) Ah yes, and simple laziness. (Which is often used to describe someone who simply doesn’t want to sell their soul to a company à la Faust and Mephistopheles.)

But fear not, we have another theory to present: the workers are there, but it seems like they’re not because they are quiet quitting.

Oy vey. This mess again? I thought we were done talking about quiet quitting. I published a podcast episode about said topic on May 19, 2022. Seems like the whole QQ trend is old news. But no, I guess not.

“It’s not that fewer people are willing to work—if anything, more people are willing to work than before the pandemic,” co-author Yongseok Shin, a Washington University professor, told Fortune. “But it’s that some people are cutting back their hours.”

Shin and his co-authors, PhD candidates Dain Lee and Jinhyeok Park, found that 55% of the drop in labor supply since the pandemic was due to a decline in hours, while the rest came from people dropping out of the labor force. And it’s not early retirees who are cutting back, either: Most of the reduction came from highly educated men working intensive jobs of 50 hours a week or more, Shin said.

-Yahoo Finance, Ibid.

OK, wait a minute. Is cutting back on hours if you’re already working 50+ hours per week really quiet quitting? Something is not adding up for me here.

The data helps explain why, even with the labor participation rate near its pre-pandemic level, job openings remain near record highs and hundreds of thousands more jobs are created every month. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate is at a mere 3.8%, a rate that was considered unbelievably low a few short years ago.

-Yahoo Finance, Ibid.

No, seriously, what the f**k? Job openings near record highs? Where? Is this the job market on Neptune? Hundreds of thousands of new jobs created every month, unemployment rate under 4%…

ARE THEY CRAZY?

No, but they expect you to be. That’s the kicker. That’s the rub. They expect you to believe this insanity.

Shin believes the pandemic, which pushed millions of Americans to reevaluate what was important to them in life, also set off an epidemic of “quiet quitting,” perhaps better described as salaried workers declining to work excessive hours or hustle quite so much.

“Everyone reevaluated their work-life balance, and maybe they said, ‘I don’t have to work 55 hours, I’d like to spend more time with family,’” Shin said.

In other words, “quiet quitting,” which has previously been blamed for costing the global economy billions, has also successfully supported the tightest job market in a generation and an increasingly emboldened workforce.

-Yahoo Finance, Ibid.

Where do you think this is going? I can see it a mile down the road and I’ve already warned you more than once. This is all “justification” for bringing the serfs to heel. Wait and see. “Y’all peons got too uppity and didn’t want to put in 55 hour work weeks. So you stepped down to 40, we labeled that as ‘quiet quitting’ even though it’s not, and now we gotta crash the job market to get you in line.” Sound impossible? It isn’t.

Even Janet Yellen, the current secretary of the Treasury and former chair of the Fed during the Obama administration, wrote this in a 1996 memo: “Unemployment serves as a worker-discipline device because the prospect of a costly unemployment spell produces sufficient fear of job loss.”

–https://theintercept.com/2023/09/23/tim-gurner-speech-unemployment/

Unemployment serves as a worker-discipline device because if you get scared you’re gonna lose your job, you can’t find another one fast, and you halfway starve to death, you’ll get back in your place real freakin’ fast.

Plenty of corporations are now trying to claw back some of their workers’ newfound free time, whether it’s mandating three days a week in the office, rewarding workers who put in more face time, or simply telling adamant remote workers they can go elsewhere, as Amazon CEO Andy Jassy memorably did this summer.

-Yahoo Finance, Ibid.

A few observations in freeform:

+ I don’t believe we have a labor shortage and didn’t believe it when the MSM was spewing it at you every 10 seconds.

+ I don’t believe no one wants to work, all of ____ (insert a younger generation) is lazy and can’t hold down a job, etc.

+ I don’t believe all men between 25 and 55 are unemployed, smoking dope, and living on a girlfriend’s couch or in Gran’s basement.

+ I don’t believe all Baby Boomers are swimming in money and will completely retire with a golden parachute.

+ I knew The Great Resignation was dead long before you heard anything on the MSM. I also knew it was not a permanent change that would last forever. Corpo America was not gonna allow the serfs to job hop across the market for more and more money in perpetuity.

–https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2023/10/16/yet-again-you-heard-it-here-first/