I stated an alternative approach to compensation. Employee self worth has changed, gotta deal with it.
I'm an independent Corp to Corp IBM product consultant. My whole other career was wires & iron, now everything I do that pays the bills is in the virtual & process world and its mostly done remotely.
Taker or Producer? In the end. I'm a just another whore for Corp. dollars.

I give up. What is that supposed to tell us? That people in service jobs “resign” when they get those corporate VP positions? Or just that there is less than a percentage point difference and some places have more older workers retiring?

My new favorite podcast suggests rising min wage and pain in the ass don't wanna work pothead punks are directly stimulating creation of robots that will fully staff fast food joints in the very near future. IOW the discussion as relates to fast food jobs is pointless cause there aren't gonna be any.

Small business owner here dealing with the same issues as many....Ive been advertising to fill positions for months now with zero inquires.... competitive wages and greater benefits than most in the industry (Automotive Repair).
I've been asking this question for the past year & no one seems to have a definitive answer. One of my theories is that many individuals who were laid off or simply lost their jobs during the pandemic utilized our social unemployment system for the first time in their lives. After being enrolled maybe they are choosing to ride out this wave as long as they possibly can?

Funny how your "alternative approach" was to call (accuse) me of being unwilling to share in the profits (not true) and having an "narrow minded entrenched approach to employees and their worth".

I'm a big supporter of "self-worth" BUT it has to be backed up by results. Entry level pay team members aren't "worth more" just because they say so. However, in today's climate I am "paying more" but certainly not "getting more". As long as I can still produce a profit, albeit a smaller one in the current climate, I'll play the game. Afterall, profit is the point. Profits supply the options, not only for me but all those work for me.

So, good for you, being an Indy consultant takes risk.

What I do, and have done for the past 42 years, takes a fair amount of risk too. The calculation is that that risk can lead to rewards, which it has the last several years. It wasn't always the case though. There were times of having to mortgage the house to pay the bills and close calls with BK. There is no guarantee that I won't be faced with any of that again. Still, I wouldn't have it any other way.

It makes sense - but I've seen ZERO data to support this. If it were the case you'd see higher labor force participation, but we're not.

...how did you come to this firm conclusion?

There is a large macro issue with labor force participation related to an aging population.

i.e. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/why-did-labor-force-participation-rate-decline-when-economy-was-good.html

Lots of anecdotal comments here and references to people somehow 'working the system' and not working. I haven't seen hard evidence of that.

Aging population... note big % increase for 55+
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1663796364.JPG

and its the 55+ with the biggest drop in participation
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1663796364.JPG

data source from www.bls.gov

Some businesses changed their model post covid. My oldest daughter owns a long established restaurant that previously was opened lunch/dinner, 7 days/week, every day but Christmas and New Years. COVID caused them to re evaluate their priorities. They were killing themselves working all the time. They now are only open for dinner, 6 days per week and close to take time off occasionally. They won't go back to the old schedule having figured out their gross is down but their net hasn't fallen that much. The other issue is that downtown is a ghost town now. The workers who used to fill offices all day are gone. Lunch service would make no sense. They still can't hire enough workers though and are a bit puzzled by it all. The changes caused by remote work and the economy shifting to on line shopping, etc. are not settled and won't be for a while.

There are lots of early retirees who decided to hang it up due to organizational changes, much of which were driven by covid, or just because covid caused them to reevaluate priorities.

And I am one of them.

In my department alone, almost 40% (including me) decided to retire within a 6 month period. Another almost 30% decided to move to what they felt were better opportunities at other companies (i.e. greener pastures).

Most females i meet sell content.... feet & OF.

Those wanting to be "influencers" don't realize the amount of work involved.

When i contracted at a Mormon HS. I would ask what the graduating seniors are going to do. The females all stated they wanted to be sugar babies or a sister wife. Most went to uni for BSN and flunked...

I have a family member just graduate from HS this summer and he was fully sipping the koolaide that he can afford an apartment in Phoenix just working doordash..... Doordash! Lol

Talk about a lost generation.

Somebody put these ideas in their heads…they didn’t develop this from No cloth.

My eldest does on line roll playing. I asked him why he doesn’t do the subscription thing. He started and just met some level and now gets a check in the mail every quarter. It’s not big, but it’s ‘free’ money for doing something he was already doing.

Kinda like a dividend stock.

If you can have cash flow for near zero work, certainly not digging ditches or over a hot fryer, why wouldn’t you?

Web says 38 million on EBT. USA is 380M.

A full 60% of those 38M on SNAP are kids and elderly by this link.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-snap/charts/snap-participants-by-age/

So that leaves 15M of working age on SNAP. That seems like a pretty small number to the 157M employees in the US.

This is a solid point.
As time goes on where the gaps in services are will change as well.
A shortage of end of life care is in the cards for those in generations that didn't do a good job of populating.

The grocery store we like, is a Homeland. We prefer to shop on Sunday mornings when the crowds are very minimal. They can't hire a regular cashier at all. The job opening just goes unfilled. The store has gone to self check out. So I am the check out person for us.

We we do shop at Sam's we walk in, pick out what we need, I whip out my phone, and run the Sam's app. Poke a button to scan now, scan the items, count the total number of items and if that is what we scanned, slide a button, and pay the amount with my credit card on file. We then walk out, and the person at the door scans a QT code on my phone, and two items in the cart, and we walk out. No check out people needed for us, never a line to wait in.

They have a riding vacuum cleaner that mops the floor and vacuums it. In the past there was a man on it. Now it is just a robot, it just stops in place if you get within a 10 feet of it. It just cruises on past all by itself.

We will for sure see robots and automation replace a lot of jobs. It is all because of the lazy employees that will not show up, and want 30 bucks an hour to do little as possible when they do show up.

We are a long way off from a robot that will replace a decent waitress or waiter at a regular restaurant. Fast food places already have automated ordering, and the customer goes and picks up the food.

As far back as 2010 I visited friends in Germany who had large backyards with robot lawn mowers. They were pretty much a large Roomba. When the battery got low, it went back to its charging station, which looked like a doghouse in a corner of the yard. Then it came back out and mowed some more. Very cool to watch for the first time. I wonder why that's not more common in the US.

Automation was coming anyways. Robots are only capital costs and depreciate with time. Labor just gets more expensive… No health care, time off, etc for the robot.

Lack of labor will only accelerate that natural trend.

Maybe folks ‘know this’ and are like WTF, why even play the game.

The old expression is work smarter, not harder. Perhaps that is all people are doing?

Bot mowers are in use within bicycle distance of me.
I'm curious how things go with less than polished landscaping.
Places with uneven ground, rocks, etc...

May 1989. I'm sitting in the final lecture of a required sociology class. Prior to this class, we had been asked to consider what we thought might be the greatest threat facing our population. Of course a bunch of college kids had some simple ideas like war, disease, race conflict, partisan politics, etc. Then the prof gave his opinion - which to me seemed to be even more simple and pretty narrow. It was:

Automation of the American Workforce.

Assuming he's still with us, he's probably celebrating the prescience we all laughed at.

The one job most managers or business owners hate the most is hiring and firing employees.

All my life, I worked for a family owned businesses. Just one boss, the owner. I saw him deal with many employees over the many years I worked at my second ever job. I worked for 4 different bosses at four companies. Now I work for myself.

Oklahoma is a hire and fire at will state. If a lousy employee needs to go, he would always wait until Friday, payday, and take them in his office. Tell them straight up, why they are no longer needed, and give them the check they had earned, and if they had worked there for over a year, another two weeks of pay as a goodby, and that was just out of the goodness of the boss's heart.

He kept trying to pawn that part of the business off on me as the manager. I told him that will require a raise on my salary if I have to be the heavy and fire people. It is really hard to fire a incompetent or just plain stupid person that really needs a job. We were not a charity, and needed employees to do the task.

That entire industry is gone now, digital photography killed traditional professional photo labs dead. I can do everything we did with 12 employees, a 5,000 square foot custom built building, and a million bucks worth of equipment, in my little office by myself, with a service bureau to print any prints for a small fee and zero overhead.

That is the toughest part of any business, adapting to change. Not many buggy whip makers or wheelwrights today. Commercial professional photography was a great career but it is almost gone now. Very few are still in business.

So far hasn't been a threat.
Increased productivity of many basic living items allowing invention and production of new lines of things previously not possible.

In that time, how many people did he know that could afford a mobile telephone?
Now even the poor have them.

Prior to the factory the normal working week was 16hrs for 6 days.
With the rise of the factory, it quickly dropped to 12hrs 6 days with pay raises.
And as factory manufacture got better the standard of living and hours work both went in favor of the population.

Next shoe to drop, a good number of white color jobs are going to be replaced by ai.

Is going to be easy to replace mouth breathers with programs that can solve and adapt better and faster.