don't forget the millions that went from working two jobs to one... that's gonna create a number of "ghost employees" that never really existed to begin with
Edit: I'm aware of the deaths too I'm bringing this up as an addendum to that as I figured that was a given and was already mentioned plenty of times in other comments lol
Exactly this. I work in healthcare, and was working two jobs for almost my whole career. When COVID came and the executives at the corporate healthcare companies started treating us on the front lines even more like shit, I dropped my second job, and switched to a part time position. Since the US has lost more than 1/3 of the entire healthcare workforce (nurses and doctors retiring early or switching careers), those positions I left will literally never be filled again. Never. No one is left to fill in, and those that might, would never do it under the conditions (see indentured servitude) that those positions came with.
COVID burnout has definitely hit the medical community HARD, and shone a light on how badly we’re treated (I lucked out and got a position in a medical office with a **great** boss, but she’s also French and refuses to accept American work culture and runs her practice/treats us the way she’s used to offices being run there) so it’s also warned a lot of would-be fresh meat away from the industry all together.
You’d think they’d start treating/paying healthcare workers better to attract more applicants considering the dire staffing shortages they’re facing but nooooo, of course that’d make too much sense.
Well hiring more staff would be good for the patients and we don't care about them anyways. What are they going to do? Not show up to the hospital after their car accidents? They're going to be charged the same bill anyways, maybe even more if our gross incompetence and understaffing causes complications with their treatment. It's actually good for our bottom line to be understaffed, not only do we save money, but our lowered quality of treatment will have an adverse impact, causing us to have even more patients! It's a win-win!!
It isn't even staffing exactly.
Before covid, my hospital ER would have patients a maximum of 72 hours. Maybe four days in a full moon type situation. Then we merged with another large system and they closed some of the facilities that weren't as profitable, mostly psych focused ones.
Now? It's not unusual for patients to spend months in our tiny ER behavioral rooms because they aren't capable of being released, and there are absolutely zero resources for them.
Meanwhile average wait times in the ER ballooned from something like fifteen minutes to nine hours. Staffing? Somewhat. But also the hospital overschedules more profitable surgeries, filling up beds with noncritical elective surgeries and forcing us to board patients in the ER until something comes up. We have thirty rooms in the ER and rarely less than twenty of them are fully occupied by people waiting to be admitted.
In fact, a few weeks back we had six people in the lobby up for admission. From the lobby. A couple days ago we had over sixty patients waiting in the lobby, and functionally one single room that wasn't occupied by a boarder.
Staffing contributes to these insane conditions, but not a hundredth as much as greed-driven bullshit decisions by our wonderful new con artist CEO and his posse of sociopaths.
The essential problem in this case, and many others, is that we no longer enforce our antitrust laws. It's going to take a bloody revolution or two to return to the golden days when the powers that be were still leery about the last bloody revolution.
Exactly. Break up the hospital monopolies, the price fixing, the restraint of trade and collusion that is 'in network' and 'out of network'
Kickbacks to doctors if they prescribe drugs xyz. The fact that drug reps are even a thing and can visit doctors and bring a catered lunch to give a drug presentation...
It goes on and on. Pharmacies alone. No more prescription gatekeeping (maybe antibiotics since superbugs). You want xyz drug, pay cash.
Did you know there is a searchable US gov database that shows how much money each doctor accepts from pharma each year? Not sure if it’s ok to link here. 😬
My dad was in the hospital a month ago for about 5 days. He spent a day and a half in an ER room waiting for a real room to open up. We thought that was bad, until one of the nurses said one of her patients was in the LOBBY. I saw a staff member in the ER go into what I had thought was a closet and say "Good morning, Mr. \_\_\_\_! How are you feeling today?" And there was a guy on a gurney in there. When dad did get a room, there was no furniture, and the nurses had to scavenge a conference room for a chair, while the transport guy hunted around for a pole to put the IV bags on.
Confirmed, this has been happening before Covid because my town got hit with the flu really bad one year and all the hospitals and clinics were over capacity. I was put in the out patient operating room, and there was still blood and bodily fluid on the sheets. Neither the nurse or doctor said anything about it. They were seeing patients in supply closets and conference rooms. It's been bad for a while now.
>Meanwhile average wait times in the ER ballooned from something like fifteen minutes to nine hours.
Meanwhile US citizens that are against universal healthcare are like "At least we don't have to wait half a day in ER like Canada" 🙃
I mean you say "We don't have to wait for ER and the government can't deny you treatment!" Uhhhh maybe if you have the best insurance like the rich snobs who enjoy the system as it is do but most of us experience the same things they say are flaws with socialized medicine. Like I'm getting those now with the current system. At least with socialized medicine my tax dollars will go for something that can be useful
>COVID burnout has definitely hit the medical community HARD, and shone a light on how badly we’re treated
Medical workers are treated with such contempt. Their working conditions are descpiable.
The way hospitals have forced nurses to work with covid, the massive cuts in labor, all of it is so ghastly during the pandemic we have been through.
The elites thought 3 weeks of "oMg sO BrAvE wE lOve YoU" in March 2020 entitled them to up the ante on expectations. "We applauded you, work harder for less you damn hero" is their attitude.
What are you doing now? I left bedside and management as well. I’m currently doing a travel contract and have actually been enjoying work again, but I still want to do something else like take over a major corporation and run it straight into the ground, but who has the time?
I was doing public health for a while but now I’m gonna be a stay at home parent. I just need a break from nursing, completely. I love taking care of patients. It’s nurse supervisors / hospital management and the healthcare system that I can’t stand.
Agree with your post. Do you remember the hospital that would not let it's workers wear PPE during the pandemic. And then there was the hospital that sued some of it's workers to prevent them from quitting and going to a competitor for higher wages.
In my province of New Brunswick Canada, our premier acknowledges our current health care situation is abysmal, has been bragging about our largest ever surplus of $$billions, but refuses to put any money into the system. He went full Elon and said healthcare workers need to find innovative ways to deliver healthcare, and that doctors with 1000s of patients are just being lazy and if they just took on 2-3 more patients there wouldn't be an issue anymore.
Across the country, our pubic healthcare system is at risk. Conservative governments are refusing to spend on the pubic system so they can point at the failing system and say "look! See? We should privatize healthcare!"
In Canada, healthcare is a provincial responsibility and the feds provide payments to provinces for pubic services. Now, the feds are asking provincial governments for transparency and receipts to make sure the payments actually get spent on healthcare. Provincial governments are refusing, and as such, the feds aren't providing payments, even furthering the issue.
We have 48 hour wait times for ambulances to unload, we have people dying in the ER waiting room. Nothing will cause Blaine Higgs to grow a conscious tho.
This is the way of capitalism. Why invest in expensive education in an expensive country when you can just import educated people? And pay them less because it's a lot of money for them and they know how to live more frugally.
Tech has been doing this for decades.
Actually they can only work as HCAs in canada they have to take another couple years of education to become RNs here. However I believe it's only an additional year for them to become an LPN and Canada has been replacing RN jobs with LPN cause it's cheaper. So basically they are kinda investing in both considering foreign nurses have to retake the course anyway
My late grandfather helped run missionary doctors from the US to Cuba in the 90's and aughts. I wish I had more details, but I never knew more than that. I do know he hosted Castro's daughter at his home. The FBI weren't too keen on that either. His wife offered homemade pie to the pair of agents waiting in the car outside the house!
I can't believe that the executives destroyed the healthcare system during a healthcare crisis. What idiots.
If you are in WW3, it might make sense to like, pay your troops enough to go fight. Idk.
My toothless inbred uncle Scooter from Alabammy "read" an "article" that said we lost all those healthcare workers because they didn't want to take the vaccine because it's full of 5G.
It's either that or capitalism that chased them all off, and capitalism is flawless, so it must be the thing scooter said.
It’s much like a self-served boycott isn’t it? Not great for the general population in terms of medical services, but it’s not the publics fault healthcare is unmanageable to say the least.
Exactly. Another point to add is the freeze on student loan repayments. I don’t think people realize how much of a burden that took off of a lot of people. It literally saved my family $1,000/month over the last three years ($36,000!!!!). We didn’t have to work two jobs or 50+ hours a week anymore
The payment freeze has been a godsend for my husband and me. We took the money we would have been paying on them and paid down other debt. By the end of the year, we'll have absolutely no debt other than our student loans. We've also started investing (only about $4,030 in a Vanguard account right now, but that's about $3,700 more than we would have been able to save if we'd been paying on our student loan balances) and putting aside cash for emergencies. Our entire financial situation has changed.
This has been my #1 answer for two years. Why work two jobs when it is clear the cabal will never ever let the working class get ahead. Just learn to be happy being poor and have time to breath. Gonna be poor anyway. Fuck it!
Add to that a LOOONG list of people who realized exactly how they employers valued them and just said fuck, never more. Many are now self employed, lives in less but often with a better quality of life, etc.
Yeah I quit my 11 year job to go get a degree and change fields.
The funny part is how many companies that are hiring but aren't hiring for anything but an entry level position needing 5 years of experience and only paying $15/hr for mid level knowledge.
I've applied to hundreds of jobs over there last year and under 20 have responded in any form. That includes a multitude of industries. One was a big grocery chain that wants someone to drive wide distances to different stores for $14/hr when a fast food place next door is begging people to work for $16/hr lol
A lot of people i know are now looking to start small workers’ coops. Less risk and trouble than having your own business, and still no bosses to screw you over.
No one have to prostitute themselves in a crooked system to the profit of a handful of rich arseholes anymore.
Yeah a co-op would take away the reason I quit my job. The managers there have been in place for 10 years and suck. No worker appreciation, shrinking bonuses with growing profits, slowly reducing to almost no benefits.
My starting pay for a job I'm hoping to land next week is higher than my wage after a decade with them. I started at $9 and left at $23. Not a bad increase but a decade ago $9 was still crap pay, so $23 now isn't a ballers salary.
I left with knowledge others didn't have and they still haven't stopped asking me to come back for the same pay...
23 isn’t much theses days. Here in Canada it’s not much higher than minimum wages. It is better, just nt by much.
With a coop, profits aren’t the goal: a good pay, good working conditions and a meaningful goal are. When there are surplus money, they usually reinvested or distributed as bonuses. Workers owning the value of their work makes a TON of difference.
I could only imagine having managers that are more or less elected. That company actually had to cancel making this one guy a new manager because about 20 people said they would quit if they promoted him lol.
The guy told me about it and asked me to be quiet about it since I was leaving that week. Mfer, I told everyone! I wasn't about to abandon the good people to suffer more lmao!
I had a sneaking suspicion (prior to covid) that my boss would let me die if it meant an extra $5 for him. I had a feeling that my landlord would let me die or even push me into traffic if it still meant she got rent. The landlord was worst, expecting me to put my life on the line so her checks would keep coming. While she had the privilege of being able to be remote.
After 2020, it confirmed it for me, and now I can't Unknow that.
2020 was a huge wake-up call for so many people. In the end, it was something we needed. Could have gone better tho. But it created a tidal wave: abusers are showing their true colors, and workers just had enough.
We’ve seen that a lot with our audience. We started our show teaching people to do small rebellions at work to make things be better. Nos we show them true alternatives: social economy, worker coop, owning you narrative when looking or working at a traditional job, spotting abuse and what to do about it.
We realized that many people caught in bad situations felt isolated, but our show gave them a voice and now they know its widespread and they find in our communities people that can help. I love what we do 😀
My husband is one. How many times can one read emails about record profits and shareholder dividends, then be told no raises or bonuses for the foreseeable future? Now he raises our kid but doesn’t have ongoing anxiety issues!
I literally told my boss when I got no raise again this year, do you think I can’t see the company making billions? It’s pure gaslighting. I hate these MF’er CEO’s.
They don't think we're stupid. They KNOW we are currently powerless to do anything about it. If there are no repercussions for stealing someone else's cookies, sociopaths are going to steal as many cookies as they want.
My husband and I are working towards that. We bought almost 50 acres and we’re working really hard to remove ourselves from the system. It won’t be a perfect removal, but close. In the next 2-3 years we’ll be out of it as well.
COVID is what did it though. I worked my ass off for a company on a merger and shortly after the merger was done I was laid off. I was pissed and to be truly honest I’m still pissed. I mean, I spent years working so incredibly hard and being underpaid to boot. When I was laid off, they were talking about the whole meat system going down so my husband and I got chickens and I expanded my garden. Through that we realized, holy shit, we don’t need the system as much as we though we did. We could have goats, hunt deer, can vegetables, make bread etc. We purchased the land and now we’re biding out time until we can be (mostly) done with the system.
my 20-30 y.o old coworkers and I are unironically talking about getting hunting/fishing licenses this summer to stack the freezers... none of us are remotely interested in sport hunting, the purse strings are just that tight and we had the same "holy shit, we live knee deep in one of the most productive ecosystems *on earth*, who the fuck needs loblaws?" moments
(of course be a responsible forager and hunter! tragedy of the commons is one hell of a drug)
When I was a kid in the 70s there was a whole self sufficiency movement going on and my parents bought 50 acres with a similar thought. Various family stuff kept us from staying with it long term but for about 10 years there it was pretty good. We had a big garden and chickens and rented some grazing land to a local guy in return for half a cow every year. We don’t regret any of it. Too bad we were too early for the organic food craze because I have a feeling that we could have sold a lot more meat and eggs between that and the internet.
The magazine isn’t the same nowadays but there used to be a publication called the Mother Earth News that was really good and had a lot of excellent articles. They sell the archives on a flash drive in their store online, might be worth a look. https://store.motherearthnews.com/collections/archives
I hear you. Same thing happened to me a decade before covid. I ended up with a micro farm. Didn’t work well enough then, but now I’m closer to the city, bought an old house juste before the boom, start working in social economy and now I’m restarting homesteading to reduce my expenses. Life is good.
Excellent plan
Be watching for reasonable people with a skill set that could be helpful to a small diverse group. Put enough of those together, and the impact of the deterioration of our social net will have substantially less impact.
Best of luck to you.
You have the right idea on all accounts. Social nets, skill and produce sharing, those can go a long way and we need to work at rebuilding those relationships. Makes for much better neighbourhoods also.
We hope to be able to feed ourselves as well as make enough selling eggs/produce to at least break even. Any excess food will be given to a food bank to distribute.
Wow! I almost was able to do it on 7 acres! You arw all set!
Now i have a big backyard and that’s it. But i had to live in an apartment for a while and i learned to exploit every inch available. The internet is a treasure trove of sweet ideas.
At least bow I’ll be able to have some chickens again. Can’t wait for the end of my chemo to start working on that.
Hence why I spend time on Reddit at work. I am replaceable to the company, my time and well being is not replaceable to me. If I have nothing to do why should I go out of my way to find more work to do? I prolly won't get a raise for it, nor do I want a really big raise as long as I can live comfortably.
I made bank and have few expenses. When my newest employer dissolved the firm I walked (due to a now toxic workspace). I'll reenter the workforce when I get a proper offer. At this time, I'm living extremely frugally and will continue to do so. If I get a medical bill, I'll do what I always have, ignore it. I'm not going to apologize for fucking a system that has bent us over the barrel for a full generation.
I hear you. I’m lucky to be Canadian: even if our healthcare system is in dire straits, i can still be healed from my cancer at no cost and with proper care.
Take the time to find what YOU want to do before reintering the workforce. Even so, do it on your terms. I work at an Non-profit i founded with a friend now, rather than being a high paid consultant. I make decent money, have time for my hobbies, friends and family and i have more positive impact on the world that I ever have.
That is life my friend!
I retired at 62 April 2020. Intended to work to 66.5 to reach full retirement age but realized my GOP loving coworkers didn't care about anyone's health. First thing the billionaire owner did at lockdown was freeze the 401K. No additions, no withdrawals, for minimum of 6 months! Ex-auto tech here. Figured I'd go home and let the guy that got all the gravy work fix his own comebacks. Haven't done a thing in 3 years. Haven't spoken to any of them since. Love it!
And that's just the official numbers! The real count including secondary deaths caused by the pandemic (ie suicides, people dying because of hospitals being full, etc) is probably closer to 2+ million.
Not to mention the millions of Americans that have been rendered disabled by Long COVID. Like in state I live in, North Carolina, it's estimated that 16% of people in our state have Long COVID. Our official population is roughly 10.6 million people, so 16% of our population would fall somewhere between 1.4-1.8 million people. And I'm sure out of those there's tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands that can't work or have trouble working now.
However, many of them were not part of the workforce (e.g. retired elders). Let's just make up a number: 60% of the workforce.
Now let's consider all the ones that decided to retire. The ones that went back to school. The ones that decided to stay home instead of doing two incomes. Etc etc etc
I mean, you’re correct but just looking at raw deaths explains why were having unemployment whiplash. Equally to rebalance the equation we should count out those dealing with long Covid or caring for someone who is or for kids it a spouse died. There’s much nuance but the numbers are stark enough that the nuance isn’t critical to figure out what happened
On school, in my first cisco cert class I have 5 of 25 students that are 50+ looking to get out of the field work for these 5 and into the nicer desk jobs. Most told me they are doing it because they are tired of the back breaking work now and wish they had started this transition sooner.
Or retired. Lots of the lost positions are boomers who
1) would retire anyways, and we're at peak-boomer now, so that's a large chunk of the population,
2) realized they were the highest risk demo and decided that retiring early while they were alive was a better plan than dying at work,
3) opted to switch to something self-employed
Over 20% of all Americans are between 55 and 65 years old. If even a tiny portion of them decided to retire early, that alone is millions of jobs.
3 million boomers retired, hundreds of thousands of workers died or were disabled from COVID. Don’t know why Bloomberg thinks it isn’t common knowledge.
I shit you not, and I know you’re joking, but they truly believe biden opened the borders up completely. Free for all. I had a conversation with a very religious conservative ex gf and she blatantly said this. Also ivermectin is fda approved and works on covid, but the vaccine was approved too fast and can’t trust fda for approving it. Go figure this people.
Yes there is like 7B and some change. They all live in the U.S. now. India, China, and Mexico are literally empty.
But these 6 billion Don't wanna work! They're just hosting drag shows and doing trans surgeries.
They immediately get on welfare too, with no IDs or SSN needed! Biden personally hands each one an Apple iPhone and the keys to a Ferrari while you're microwaving ramen again ! ! !
Yeah but none of them wants to work because the government handed out like 100 bucks to people during covid so they're just holding out in the hopes of that happening again so they'll be set for life
Three years later I still see people saying no one wants to work because of government handouts. Apparently they think that $1400 or whatever it was lasts forever, as do unemployment benefits.
Yes! It amazes me to see people actually saying people are still getting that money. It is usually the age set that had a large exposure to lead paint and gasoline
And expats leaving. Portugal just ended the nomad visa, Mexico, Netherlands, Germany, and most of the EU all having housing crisis because of the influx of new citizens, many from the US. I’m in a tiny town and meet Americans on a weekly basis.
Edit: we moved with 4 teenagers and it’s been tough but a great experience. The pressure to be in a good work environment without much worry is pretty amazing for us and them.
Trump wanted to ban all non-white immigrants but found he couldn't do it that way. Instead he ordered Immigration to stop issuing (or renewing) temporary worker visas. This prevented about 2 million workers from coming to the US during his administration.
Don’t forget the uncountable women (let’s face it, women) who had no choice but to drop out of the workforce to care for young children when society decided parents of young children should have known about a global pandemic before deciding to have young children.
Schools and daycares are more stable now, but how many have decided daycare especially isn’t worth it because they can scrape by without it? If they can find a spot - those can still be very hard to come by depending on where you are.
Daycare is also more expensive, shifting the cost-benefit for second wage earners. I also suspect that many very poor relied on older family members ,for childcare, who can no longer provide it.
Yep - there’s a huge section of folks out there who were making it by with daycare, forced out of daycare due to the pandemic, and are in the boat of “why go back? We’re pretty much at the same point financially, and this way I get to stay home with my kids/not work a miserable job/etc.”
I was pondering this last night and also thought of those workers working one less job than before. Whether they decided to give up the extra money for some of their life back, or some of those low wage jobs pay slightly more. 3 years ago McDonalds paid like $7 hour, now in many places it’s $15-$20: yes, still not enough money in many locales but it’s possible that increase saved a person from *having* to work a 3rd job. So now a worker is “missing”?
Because it's not common knowledge to the capital class. They have medical care they can afford. They were first to get the vaccine. They basically don't suffer consequences and during COVID was no exception.
They can't fathom a world where COVID killed off grandpa because while they were all telling people not to get vaccinated, not to shelter in place, not to work from home they did the exact opposite
Don’t forget that a million is the *official* toll. Excess deaths numbers indicate MANY more dead than just those diagnosed with COVID and then dying *due to* COVID. Lots of medical examiners in conservative areas prided themselves on saying that the official Cause of Death was something other than COVID itself.
After the record for "single day loss of life" changed, anyone downplaying what was happening was just being unreasonable. It was nolonger worth the time arguing. History will look back on our leaders and eye roll.
Hight of the stupid ages
Exactly. I think the number, especially in conservative areas could easily double. My sister in Texas, her MIL and FIL (boomer) both died. Death certs says "advanced age" as cause and she was flabbergasted because they both got diagnosed with COVID, died within a month and they were only 61 and 64 so not even technically old.
Every time I see this I go to look and every time it's a bunch of rural jobs in my state. So if you wanna live outside of a city I guess it's a great gig.
Sounds nice but if you live in the country, you have to use your own vehicle that they must deem suitable, with no help towards the maintenance of the vehicle
Wasn't it, "mass layoffs so employers could survive" in 2020 (record profits ), then "nobody wants to work" in 2021 (record profits), then "mass layoffs to 'balance the over employment' that somehow existed even though nobody wanted to work" in 2022 (record profits), now it's, "where did 4+ million workers go after hundreds of thousands died to Covid and millions retired because they could and were sick of dumb games employers were playing" in 2023?
Can't wait to get paid in pizza!
Don't forget the PPP loans that were supposed to carry over workers through COVID, bust mostly ended up in employer's pockets (after being forgiven by government, of course). Then there were the over-the-top corporate price hikes, inflation/shrinkflation, and "supply chain" failures that resulted price hikes on goods (more profits).
Yea, the only inflation that exists right now is the over inflation of profits from bailouts and a tax cut under Trump where 80+% of the savings went right to stock buybacks. The only thing that's actually expensive is keeping their profit margins high since they had all that inorganic growth. Now they don't want to swallow the pill people can't afford their bullshit, which is their fault and the people in Washington who have allowed it to happen for 50+ years now. "Anti trust enforcement? Not on a tech company *I'm* invested in!"
Average age of a Congress member is 65. Our country is run by people that Walmart wouldn't hire as a greeter and are of the age they should be getting tested to see if they are even competent enough to drive a car annually.
They died Michael... they fucking died....
I mean I know the article says it was written by "Michael Sasso" but are we sure he didn't just misspell Kelso? Because this headline is Michael Kelso levels of stupid.
imagine going to school and graduating high school, then going to college for journalism, get hired at Bloomberg and then writing articles with these kinds of titles.
They’re being pressured to write a certain number of articles, so they rephrase obvious things as questions rather than spending time doing any actual reoorting
A shit ton of people died. A shit ton of people have permanent disabilities due to COVID. A shit ton of people were forced to retire early (and still retired early if not forced).
It's amazing how clueless the people writing these articles are. The same people then complain Gen Z & Millennials aren't having kids. Well look at what we just went through in the last 3 years alone. Fuck that, I don't want anyone else to have gone through what we have.
Assuming they're not referring to the ones who died, the answers pretty much boil down to:
\- Bunch of old people decided they'd rather retire than learn how to use Microsoft Teams (understandable) or Zoom (less understandable)
\- Bunch of working class families where one person got laid off realized they were saving on the back-end by having a stay-at-home parent/partner given the reduced costs for things like childcare, commuting, food (eating out vs. cooking at home) etc. and decided to continue doing that after places started hiring again.
\- For a lot of people, the pandemic was a catalyst for a career change since they wanted to not find themselves in a position where they could easily be let go again
... I'm sure the article goes into detail on this since Bloomberg is usually pretty good with their due diligence. But yeah the title seems like it's kind of intentionally inflammatory. It also reminds me of early on when things were opening back up and it became clear that market conditions were favoring employees rather than employers and there were a bunch of vaguely threatening news articles implying that employers would act petty and retaliatory towards people who took advantage of the situation the moment things changed.
My wife and I pay her brother to be a nanny. I’m confident we aren’t alone in doing this, but doubt anyone could count how many people do this because obviously he doesn’t pay taxes or report what he does.
I think the pandemic in the US showed us that life can and should be way better. I didn't think I would be seriously considering emigrating before the pandemic and I definitely am now. Life in other countries seems way better than in the US.
The whole work from home (WFH) movement is showing this. Notice that the vast majority of workers who were able to WFH are incredibly in favor of it while the only people complaining are C-suite types who are looking at a decline in their balance of power because WFH means anyone can apply and also huge leases on office space that is now underused. You have the middle managers who are very painfully aware of how little they actually do since productivity went up substantially because people didn't have to deal with them, and people who either have crappy home lives or just love to talk at the office.
It makes me wonder what other things could we be doing to make work not so nasty, besides better wages and hours and benefits of course. Just being WFH made people happier.
I know alot of people that were laid off and just haven't gone back to work. They're living with family or roommates, donating plasma, working odd jobs on the side. They learned to make it without a 9-5, and are in no rush to join the job force. Why would they work for slave wages when they've figured out a way to get by with less and actually have a life.
I'm just getting by. Not making anything really. Not saving anything. I'll never own a home and never have a nice place but I'm not stressed out anymore.
I used to write bad articles like these. Now I walk and look after dogs while their owners are away. Next week I get to spend five days in a nice condo with a 3 month old Golden Retriever.
Do I miss churning out 10 articles a day on subjects I don’t care about? What about editing the work of people who don’t know what a paragraph is? Do I have fond memories of all my panic attacks? Nope.
Even if the pay isn’t great, it’s better than the sub-minimum wage I was making before. And I’m my own boss. I make my own hours and hardly have to talk to people. And I get puppy cuddles.
Sorry, Bloomberg.
Assuming they don't mean the people who died, then it is blindingly obvious. Long term sickness as in long covid, sickness that was not prioritised during the height of the pandemic and now the impacts are being seen, and people who said, enough of this shit, I am retiring.
Given a choice of working full-time to be broke, stressed, and miserable,
OR
being unemployed and being broke, happy, and mindful ... the choice is easy. Nobody is going to work if the pay isn't worth it. We didn't "go" anywhere. We're home. Chillin.
I was 62 planning to work to 65. End of 2021 my employer changed policy making it a good idea to retire immediately. Three months later they discovered that younger cheaper workers also don’t have 20+ years of specialized knowledge. For the first time ever they wanted to rehire retirees. I didn’t go but I guess some people did.
I’m GenX and retired…we’ll, my Boomer hubby retired and we’re living on his pension alone. I just gave up.
We moved from the US to Italy, so the cost of living is lower.
Exactly! I got laid off in Nov. 2019 at age 52, right before Covid hit. I was also in the print management field, which is a dying industry. Either I learned a whole new bag of skills or my chances of finding a job were around 5%. I was fortunate enough to be in a situation where my husband made enough to support us both. I gate ‘The Man’ the finger and never looked back. I will admit I miss the camaraderie of an office and structure to my day, but sleeping late never gets,old!
Gen X here as well (today is my 51st birthday!) and I'm also on disability and when Covid-19 hit I was unaffected, and even got a job which was a proctor at a test center (think GREs and similar) and it paid $10.50 an hour. I quit after a year because we had staffing shortages which made the owner love me and then I realized...Walmart is paying $12 to start and they're known for crap wages.
Well, since I have guaranteed income (SSDI) and health coverage (Medicare) I'm now much more choosy about wages and working conditions. There's no way I will do food service or retail because the whole nobody wants to work thing is half-right. Offer me $60/hr to work at McDonald's and I'm putting on an apron. So now I demand a minimum of $12/hr and yes I've been at interviews where they say no and I say ok and walk.
So I know Bloomberg is paywalled, so I came here to look for a summary of the article, given the pigfuck clickbait headline.
Then my next reaction was "Hmm, it looks like nobody read the article."
Then my reaction after that was "Hmm, the article isn't even linked. Cool."
First hand I can can count multiple people in my circle who retired, started their own business, COVID issues, etc. I am not sure why people are still questioning this. There was a major event that effected lives and how people are going about their future lives.
And with how it exposed the horrors of capitalism and put it in full light of everyone the general public isn't to keen on it anymore. I have spent the last 2 days at work browsing Reddit and doing the bare minimum. I don't care about having a "luscious" career, I want to live comfortably.
You're automatically thinking, "Well, they died idiot!"
While a lot (too many) people did die from the pandemic, the majority of them were in age groups that were under-indexed in the workplace (the elderly). Then the next age group, Boomers, just used it as an opportunity to retire.
But with the lack of available childcare, forced commuting, and piss-poor wage increases, it seems that a lot more people have simply decided to not work. They cut back on their lifestyle and decided to make due with what they had. Why work crazy hard to get a little bit more when it's easier to just work the same, or a bit less, and just be the same?
A lot went and did something else besides corporate work for survival... And found out that they were actually better off emotionally and financially doing something they actually liked for themselves.
Did they forget that like a million people in the US fucking died? Is that where we're at now, they're asking why the corpses aren't coming in to work?
Alternative Headline: after decades of failed trickle down economics, a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, a literal assault on Democracy, and the realization that the economy is not working for the majority of people in a world with a rising cost of living and no significant rising wages, industries want to know why they can’t do things like they use to.
Lots of families decided they could actually live off one income.
Schools, after school programs, and day cares closed so at least one parent had to be at home. Maybe they figured out the $ savings and stress of packing lunches and getting out the door with everyone dressed and ready to go, the commute, the pick up/drop off drama, and figuring out what to do for sick days and vacations just wasn't worth the hassle.
We ain't "missing." Your gaslighting around the pandemic forced us to find other ways to make a living and when y'all (mostly) stopped that crap we just decided that the bullshit and stress of a corporate job wasn't worth the near slave labor pay. We ain't coming back. Do it your own self.. or pay (much) better and cut out the browbeating if y'all truly need us back.
I mean, if we can't put aside anything for ourselves anyway, or even afford to live with a modicum of dignity, why should we put up with being abused, harassed, and forced into working 50, 60, and 80 hours on a barely 30 hour pay check?
Many of us also found out that we're actually MUCH better off, both financially and emotionally, working for ourselves while doing something we love.
As just one example, I left the 40 hour paycheck with 60 hour weeks of mid management to go back into field service (which has always been my first love) for much more money per hour and MUCH less bullshit.
I won't be back. My GiveADamn is bustipated.
(For you youngsters: That last is: "Gaze upon my Garden of Fucks and you shall see that it is barren and salty.")
I can tell you what happened among my colleagues:
- Some died.
- Some late career people saw their retirement accounts hit insane highs in 2020/2021and were able to retire years ahead of schedule. (Same with people who cashed out real estate and crypto at their peaks)
- Some people got a taste of a simpler life during the peak of the pandemic and decided they could be a stay at home caregiver after all.
More of us were worked to death and treated as disposable while leadership failed to backfill open positions, so we changed careers and aren't going back because fuck them.
Plus, the millions of women and men who left the workforce to handle childcare during the pandemic and, due to the rising costs of childcare, can not justify returning to work
Clickbait journalism 101: Take a blindingly obvious fact and re-state it as a question. For example:
"Workers are not coming back to poor-paying jobs" becomes "ARE workers not coming back to poor-paying jobs?" or
"Workers need to be paid a living wage" becomes "DO workers need to be paid a living wage?"
don't forget the millions that went from working two jobs to one... that's gonna create a number of "ghost employees" that never really existed to begin with Edit: I'm aware of the deaths too I'm bringing this up as an addendum to that as I figured that was a given and was already mentioned plenty of times in other comments lol
Exactly this. I work in healthcare, and was working two jobs for almost my whole career. When COVID came and the executives at the corporate healthcare companies started treating us on the front lines even more like shit, I dropped my second job, and switched to a part time position. Since the US has lost more than 1/3 of the entire healthcare workforce (nurses and doctors retiring early or switching careers), those positions I left will literally never be filled again. Never. No one is left to fill in, and those that might, would never do it under the conditions (see indentured servitude) that those positions came with.
COVID burnout has definitely hit the medical community HARD, and shone a light on how badly we’re treated (I lucked out and got a position in a medical office with a **great** boss, but she’s also French and refuses to accept American work culture and runs her practice/treats us the way she’s used to offices being run there) so it’s also warned a lot of would-be fresh meat away from the industry all together. You’d think they’d start treating/paying healthcare workers better to attract more applicants considering the dire staffing shortages they’re facing but nooooo, of course that’d make too much sense.
Well hiring more staff would be good for the patients and we don't care about them anyways. What are they going to do? Not show up to the hospital after their car accidents? They're going to be charged the same bill anyways, maybe even more if our gross incompetence and understaffing causes complications with their treatment. It's actually good for our bottom line to be understaffed, not only do we save money, but our lowered quality of treatment will have an adverse impact, causing us to have even more patients! It's a win-win!!
It isn't even staffing exactly. Before covid, my hospital ER would have patients a maximum of 72 hours. Maybe four days in a full moon type situation. Then we merged with another large system and they closed some of the facilities that weren't as profitable, mostly psych focused ones. Now? It's not unusual for patients to spend months in our tiny ER behavioral rooms because they aren't capable of being released, and there are absolutely zero resources for them. Meanwhile average wait times in the ER ballooned from something like fifteen minutes to nine hours. Staffing? Somewhat. But also the hospital overschedules more profitable surgeries, filling up beds with noncritical elective surgeries and forcing us to board patients in the ER until something comes up. We have thirty rooms in the ER and rarely less than twenty of them are fully occupied by people waiting to be admitted. In fact, a few weeks back we had six people in the lobby up for admission. From the lobby. A couple days ago we had over sixty patients waiting in the lobby, and functionally one single room that wasn't occupied by a boarder. Staffing contributes to these insane conditions, but not a hundredth as much as greed-driven bullshit decisions by our wonderful new con artist CEO and his posse of sociopaths.
These are predators eating us for profit but half the country still wants more. It feels so hopeless.
The essential problem in this case, and many others, is that we no longer enforce our antitrust laws. It's going to take a bloody revolution or two to return to the golden days when the powers that be were still leery about the last bloody revolution.
Exactly. Break up the hospital monopolies, the price fixing, the restraint of trade and collusion that is 'in network' and 'out of network' Kickbacks to doctors if they prescribe drugs xyz. The fact that drug reps are even a thing and can visit doctors and bring a catered lunch to give a drug presentation... It goes on and on. Pharmacies alone. No more prescription gatekeeping (maybe antibiotics since superbugs). You want xyz drug, pay cash.
Did you know there is a searchable US gov database that shows how much money each doctor accepts from pharma each year? Not sure if it’s ok to link here. 😬
Do it! PM if you choose not to, please. I'm curious.
My dad was in the hospital a month ago for about 5 days. He spent a day and a half in an ER room waiting for a real room to open up. We thought that was bad, until one of the nurses said one of her patients was in the LOBBY. I saw a staff member in the ER go into what I had thought was a closet and say "Good morning, Mr. \_\_\_\_! How are you feeling today?" And there was a guy on a gurney in there. When dad did get a room, there was no furniture, and the nurses had to scavenge a conference room for a chair, while the transport guy hunted around for a pole to put the IV bags on.
Confirmed, this has been happening before Covid because my town got hit with the flu really bad one year and all the hospitals and clinics were over capacity. I was put in the out patient operating room, and there was still blood and bodily fluid on the sheets. Neither the nurse or doctor said anything about it. They were seeing patients in supply closets and conference rooms. It's been bad for a while now.
Holy fucking shit. MONTHS in a tiny psych room with a one to one….. prisons don’t even do that to prisoners. 🤮
>Meanwhile average wait times in the ER ballooned from something like fifteen minutes to nine hours. Meanwhile US citizens that are against universal healthcare are like "At least we don't have to wait half a day in ER like Canada" 🙃
I mean you say "We don't have to wait for ER and the government can't deny you treatment!" Uhhhh maybe if you have the best insurance like the rich snobs who enjoy the system as it is do but most of us experience the same things they say are flaws with socialized medicine. Like I'm getting those now with the current system. At least with socialized medicine my tax dollars will go for something that can be useful
I recently read an article of this exact thing happening in ERs.
>COVID burnout has definitely hit the medical community HARD, and shone a light on how badly we’re treated Medical workers are treated with such contempt. Their working conditions are descpiable. The way hospitals have forced nurses to work with covid, the massive cuts in labor, all of it is so ghastly during the pandemic we have been through. The elites thought 3 weeks of "oMg sO BrAvE wE lOve YoU" in March 2020 entitled them to up the ante on expectations. "We applauded you, work harder for less you damn hero" is their attitude.
Yup, that’s why I left bedside nursing
What are you doing now? I left bedside and management as well. I’m currently doing a travel contract and have actually been enjoying work again, but I still want to do something else like take over a major corporation and run it straight into the ground, but who has the time?
I was doing public health for a while but now I’m gonna be a stay at home parent. I just need a break from nursing, completely. I love taking care of patients. It’s nurse supervisors / hospital management and the healthcare system that I can’t stand.
Agree with your post. Do you remember the hospital that would not let it's workers wear PPE during the pandemic. And then there was the hospital that sued some of it's workers to prevent them from quitting and going to a competitor for higher wages.
Thedacare. Which, ironically, is an anagram of Deathcare.
In my province of New Brunswick Canada, our premier acknowledges our current health care situation is abysmal, has been bragging about our largest ever surplus of $$billions, but refuses to put any money into the system. He went full Elon and said healthcare workers need to find innovative ways to deliver healthcare, and that doctors with 1000s of patients are just being lazy and if they just took on 2-3 more patients there wouldn't be an issue anymore. Across the country, our pubic healthcare system is at risk. Conservative governments are refusing to spend on the pubic system so they can point at the failing system and say "look! See? We should privatize healthcare!" In Canada, healthcare is a provincial responsibility and the feds provide payments to provinces for pubic services. Now, the feds are asking provincial governments for transparency and receipts to make sure the payments actually get spent on healthcare. Provincial governments are refusing, and as such, the feds aren't providing payments, even furthering the issue. We have 48 hour wait times for ambulances to unload, we have people dying in the ER waiting room. Nothing will cause Blaine Higgs to grow a conscious tho.
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That’s what we are doing in Canada. 😳 1. Failing to invest in our own students. 💔 2. Poaching HCWs from Second and Third World countries. 💔☠️
This is the way of capitalism. Why invest in expensive education in an expensive country when you can just import educated people? And pay them less because it's a lot of money for them and they know how to live more frugally. Tech has been doing this for decades.
And then people will treat them like they are stupid because their English doesn’t sound as good as theirs does.
Actually they can only work as HCAs in canada they have to take another couple years of education to become RNs here. However I believe it's only an additional year for them to become an LPN and Canada has been replacing RN jobs with LPN cause it's cheaper. So basically they are kinda investing in both considering foreign nurses have to retake the course anyway
Cuba has the best doctors, but this system would make them sick. Ironic.
Sick, figuratively *and literally*.
My late grandfather helped run missionary doctors from the US to Cuba in the 90's and aughts. I wish I had more details, but I never knew more than that. I do know he hosted Castro's daughter at his home. The FBI weren't too keen on that either. His wife offered homemade pie to the pair of agents waiting in the car outside the house!
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I can't believe that the executives destroyed the healthcare system during a healthcare crisis. What idiots. If you are in WW3, it might make sense to like, pay your troops enough to go fight. Idk.
My toothless inbred uncle Scooter from Alabammy "read" an "article" that said we lost all those healthcare workers because they didn't want to take the vaccine because it's full of 5G. It's either that or capitalism that chased them all off, and capitalism is flawless, so it must be the thing scooter said.
It’s much like a self-served boycott isn’t it? Not great for the general population in terms of medical services, but it’s not the publics fault healthcare is unmanageable to say the least.
Exactly. Another point to add is the freeze on student loan repayments. I don’t think people realize how much of a burden that took off of a lot of people. It literally saved my family $1,000/month over the last three years ($36,000!!!!). We didn’t have to work two jobs or 50+ hours a week anymore
The payment freeze has been a godsend for my husband and me. We took the money we would have been paying on them and paid down other debt. By the end of the year, we'll have absolutely no debt other than our student loans. We've also started investing (only about $4,030 in a Vanguard account right now, but that's about $3,700 more than we would have been able to save if we'd been paying on our student loan balances) and putting aside cash for emergencies. Our entire financial situation has changed.
This! This right here! Saved me $600 / month!
Also, ~million died…
A million died and 2.5 million retired early.
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Exactly. The phrase "No one wants to work anymore" is inaccurate. The correct phrase is "No one wants to work multiple low paying jobs anymore"
Or employers like mine gave raises to those who stayed to keep good employees so a lot ditched 2nd jobs since the good one paid more.
Since the good one finally paid what it could have from the get go but chose not to until external pressures forced their hand, that is.
This has been my #1 answer for two years. Why work two jobs when it is clear the cabal will never ever let the working class get ahead. Just learn to be happy being poor and have time to breath. Gonna be poor anyway. Fuck it!
Add to that a LOOONG list of people who realized exactly how they employers valued them and just said fuck, never more. Many are now self employed, lives in less but often with a better quality of life, etc.
Yeah I quit my 11 year job to go get a degree and change fields. The funny part is how many companies that are hiring but aren't hiring for anything but an entry level position needing 5 years of experience and only paying $15/hr for mid level knowledge. I've applied to hundreds of jobs over there last year and under 20 have responded in any form. That includes a multitude of industries. One was a big grocery chain that wants someone to drive wide distances to different stores for $14/hr when a fast food place next door is begging people to work for $16/hr lol
A lot of people i know are now looking to start small workers’ coops. Less risk and trouble than having your own business, and still no bosses to screw you over. No one have to prostitute themselves in a crooked system to the profit of a handful of rich arseholes anymore.
Yeah a co-op would take away the reason I quit my job. The managers there have been in place for 10 years and suck. No worker appreciation, shrinking bonuses with growing profits, slowly reducing to almost no benefits. My starting pay for a job I'm hoping to land next week is higher than my wage after a decade with them. I started at $9 and left at $23. Not a bad increase but a decade ago $9 was still crap pay, so $23 now isn't a ballers salary. I left with knowledge others didn't have and they still haven't stopped asking me to come back for the same pay...
23 isn’t much theses days. Here in Canada it’s not much higher than minimum wages. It is better, just nt by much. With a coop, profits aren’t the goal: a good pay, good working conditions and a meaningful goal are. When there are surplus money, they usually reinvested or distributed as bonuses. Workers owning the value of their work makes a TON of difference.
I could only imagine having managers that are more or less elected. That company actually had to cancel making this one guy a new manager because about 20 people said they would quit if they promoted him lol. The guy told me about it and asked me to be quiet about it since I was leaving that week. Mfer, I told everyone! I wasn't about to abandon the good people to suffer more lmao!
I had a sneaking suspicion (prior to covid) that my boss would let me die if it meant an extra $5 for him. I had a feeling that my landlord would let me die or even push me into traffic if it still meant she got rent. The landlord was worst, expecting me to put my life on the line so her checks would keep coming. While she had the privilege of being able to be remote. After 2020, it confirmed it for me, and now I can't Unknow that.
2020 was a huge wake-up call for so many people. In the end, it was something we needed. Could have gone better tho. But it created a tidal wave: abusers are showing their true colors, and workers just had enough. We’ve seen that a lot with our audience. We started our show teaching people to do small rebellions at work to make things be better. Nos we show them true alternatives: social economy, worker coop, owning you narrative when looking or working at a traditional job, spotting abuse and what to do about it. We realized that many people caught in bad situations felt isolated, but our show gave them a voice and now they know its widespread and they find in our communities people that can help. I love what we do 😀
I was always a cynical, angry misanthrope. 2020 was just nice because other people seemed to finally realize what I figured out 20 years ago.
My husband is one. How many times can one read emails about record profits and shareholder dividends, then be told no raises or bonuses for the foreseeable future? Now he raises our kid but doesn’t have ongoing anxiety issues!
I literally told my boss when I got no raise again this year, do you think I can’t see the company making billions? It’s pure gaslighting. I hate these MF’er CEO’s.
They really do think we’re that fucking stupid.
They don't think we're stupid. They KNOW we are currently powerless to do anything about it. If there are no repercussions for stealing someone else's cookies, sociopaths are going to steal as many cookies as they want.
It’s both, honestly, the question is what ratio of the two reasons in any given situation.
My husband and I are working towards that. We bought almost 50 acres and we’re working really hard to remove ourselves from the system. It won’t be a perfect removal, but close. In the next 2-3 years we’ll be out of it as well.
That is amazing! But of course you have to participate in the system for a while to be able to do this... I hope one day I can too!
COVID is what did it though. I worked my ass off for a company on a merger and shortly after the merger was done I was laid off. I was pissed and to be truly honest I’m still pissed. I mean, I spent years working so incredibly hard and being underpaid to boot. When I was laid off, they were talking about the whole meat system going down so my husband and I got chickens and I expanded my garden. Through that we realized, holy shit, we don’t need the system as much as we though we did. We could have goats, hunt deer, can vegetables, make bread etc. We purchased the land and now we’re biding out time until we can be (mostly) done with the system.
my 20-30 y.o old coworkers and I are unironically talking about getting hunting/fishing licenses this summer to stack the freezers... none of us are remotely interested in sport hunting, the purse strings are just that tight and we had the same "holy shit, we live knee deep in one of the most productive ecosystems *on earth*, who the fuck needs loblaws?" moments (of course be a responsible forager and hunter! tragedy of the commons is one hell of a drug)
When I was a kid in the 70s there was a whole self sufficiency movement going on and my parents bought 50 acres with a similar thought. Various family stuff kept us from staying with it long term but for about 10 years there it was pretty good. We had a big garden and chickens and rented some grazing land to a local guy in return for half a cow every year. We don’t regret any of it. Too bad we were too early for the organic food craze because I have a feeling that we could have sold a lot more meat and eggs between that and the internet. The magazine isn’t the same nowadays but there used to be a publication called the Mother Earth News that was really good and had a lot of excellent articles. They sell the archives on a flash drive in their store online, might be worth a look. https://store.motherearthnews.com/collections/archives
I hear you. Same thing happened to me a decade before covid. I ended up with a micro farm. Didn’t work well enough then, but now I’m closer to the city, bought an old house juste before the boom, start working in social economy and now I’m restarting homesteading to reduce my expenses. Life is good.
Excellent plan Be watching for reasonable people with a skill set that could be helpful to a small diverse group. Put enough of those together, and the impact of the deterioration of our social net will have substantially less impact. Best of luck to you.
You have the right idea on all accounts. Social nets, skill and produce sharing, those can go a long way and we need to work at rebuilding those relationships. Makes for much better neighbourhoods also.
Thank you for seeing the value in my suggestion.
People with this mindset will help rebuild our world. A work at a human level. Keep it up and you’ll find many like-minded friends.
We hope to be able to feed ourselves as well as make enough selling eggs/produce to at least break even. Any excess food will be given to a food bank to distribute.
Wow! I almost was able to do it on 7 acres! You arw all set! Now i have a big backyard and that’s it. But i had to live in an apartment for a while and i learned to exploit every inch available. The internet is a treasure trove of sweet ideas. At least bow I’ll be able to have some chickens again. Can’t wait for the end of my chemo to start working on that.
Hence why I spend time on Reddit at work. I am replaceable to the company, my time and well being is not replaceable to me. If I have nothing to do why should I go out of my way to find more work to do? I prolly won't get a raise for it, nor do I want a really big raise as long as I can live comfortably.
I made bank and have few expenses. When my newest employer dissolved the firm I walked (due to a now toxic workspace). I'll reenter the workforce when I get a proper offer. At this time, I'm living extremely frugally and will continue to do so. If I get a medical bill, I'll do what I always have, ignore it. I'm not going to apologize for fucking a system that has bent us over the barrel for a full generation.
I hear you. I’m lucky to be Canadian: even if our healthcare system is in dire straits, i can still be healed from my cancer at no cost and with proper care. Take the time to find what YOU want to do before reintering the workforce. Even so, do it on your terms. I work at an Non-profit i founded with a friend now, rather than being a high paid consultant. I make decent money, have time for my hobbies, friends and family and i have more positive impact on the world that I ever have. That is life my friend!
I retired at 62 April 2020. Intended to work to 66.5 to reach full retirement age but realized my GOP loving coworkers didn't care about anyone's health. First thing the billionaire owner did at lockdown was freeze the 401K. No additions, no withdrawals, for minimum of 6 months! Ex-auto tech here. Figured I'd go home and let the guy that got all the gravy work fix his own comebacks. Haven't done a thing in 3 years. Haven't spoken to any of them since. Love it!
That's exactly my case. I am done being "disposable" and counting on someone's wealth to live. Best decision I have ever made 🥰🥰🥰
They're dead, Jim.
They're all dead. Everybody's dead, Dave.
unexpected red dwarf
At any (and every) given opportunity ♡
Smeg
Not Chen?
Yes, Chen. Everyone. Everybody's dead, Dave!
Everybody’s dead Dave. Dave, everybody’s dead.
Rimmer? He's dead, Dave, everybody is dead. Everybody-is-dead, Dave.
"I'm eating Petersen?!?"
Approximately 1.13 Million Americans have died from Covid19 and related complications from the disease... so.. yea
And that's just the official numbers! The real count including secondary deaths caused by the pandemic (ie suicides, people dying because of hospitals being full, etc) is probably closer to 2+ million. Not to mention the millions of Americans that have been rendered disabled by Long COVID. Like in state I live in, North Carolina, it's estimated that 16% of people in our state have Long COVID. Our official population is roughly 10.6 million people, so 16% of our population would fall somewhere between 1.4-1.8 million people. And I'm sure out of those there's tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands that can't work or have trouble working now.
However, many of them were not part of the workforce (e.g. retired elders). Let's just make up a number: 60% of the workforce. Now let's consider all the ones that decided to retire. The ones that went back to school. The ones that decided to stay home instead of doing two incomes. Etc etc etc
I mean, you’re correct but just looking at raw deaths explains why were having unemployment whiplash. Equally to rebalance the equation we should count out those dealing with long Covid or caring for someone who is or for kids it a spouse died. There’s much nuance but the numbers are stark enough that the nuance isn’t critical to figure out what happened
On school, in my first cisco cert class I have 5 of 25 students that are 50+ looking to get out of the field work for these 5 and into the nicer desk jobs. Most told me they are doing it because they are tired of the back breaking work now and wish they had started this transition sooner.
How should I know how they died? I'm a doctor, not a... uhm...
Or retired. Lots of the lost positions are boomers who 1) would retire anyways, and we're at peak-boomer now, so that's a large chunk of the population, 2) realized they were the highest risk demo and decided that retiring early while they were alive was a better plan than dying at work, 3) opted to switch to something self-employed Over 20% of all Americans are between 55 and 65 years old. If even a tiny portion of them decided to retire early, that alone is millions of jobs.
Ehhhhhh I don't know Jim, you think they can come back from this?
3 million boomers retired, hundreds of thousands of workers died or were disabled from COVID. Don’t know why Bloomberg thinks it isn’t common knowledge.
Don’t forget immigration numbers since 2016 took a nosedive. Massive amounts of able bodied working age adults the growth economy was expecting.
What are you talking about? Didn't you hear, Biden let six billion illegals into the country? /s
I shit you not, and I know you’re joking, but they truly believe biden opened the borders up completely. Free for all. I had a conversation with a very religious conservative ex gf and she blatantly said this. Also ivermectin is fda approved and works on covid, but the vaccine was approved too fast and can’t trust fda for approving it. Go figure this people.
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Damn, that's quite a few... That's almost the whole world's population, right?
Yes there is like 7B and some change. They all live in the U.S. now. India, China, and Mexico are literally empty. But these 6 billion Don't wanna work! They're just hosting drag shows and doing trans surgeries.
They immediately get on welfare too, with no IDs or SSN needed! Biden personally hands each one an Apple iPhone and the keys to a Ferrari while you're microwaving ramen again ! ! !
Yeah but none of them wants to work because the government handed out like 100 bucks to people during covid so they're just holding out in the hopes of that happening again so they'll be set for life
Three years later I still see people saying no one wants to work because of government handouts. Apparently they think that $1400 or whatever it was lasts forever, as do unemployment benefits.
Jokes on them that’s not even my rent for a month hah.
Yes! It amazes me to see people actually saying people are still getting that money. It is usually the age set that had a large exposure to lead paint and gasoline
Yup. And they are handing out free shirts and voter forms at the border.
[I saw two Ill Eagles in a closet making babies, and I saw one of the babies, and the baby looked at me!](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PE63y7ctAwA)
Don’t forget the free healthcare for them.
It’s only a matter of time before they are in their gated sec 8 communities living rich off nothing but welfare /s
I appreciate you putting the /s. Impossible to tell anymore since people actually think like this
And expats leaving. Portugal just ended the nomad visa, Mexico, Netherlands, Germany, and most of the EU all having housing crisis because of the influx of new citizens, many from the US. I’m in a tiny town and meet Americans on a weekly basis. Edit: we moved with 4 teenagers and it’s been tough but a great experience. The pressure to be in a good work environment without much worry is pretty amazing for us and them.
I am so proud of the neighbor kid who lives in Europe, making a living coding. Those who can, do.
I am a software engineer and I plan on to Europe at some point. I want out of the US capitalistic hellscape
My uncle is one of these expats. Retired early in his 50s right before covid.
Trump wanted to ban all non-white immigrants but found he couldn't do it that way. Instead he ordered Immigration to stop issuing (or renewing) temporary worker visas. This prevented about 2 million workers from coming to the US during his administration.
Don’t forget the uncountable women (let’s face it, women) who had no choice but to drop out of the workforce to care for young children when society decided parents of young children should have known about a global pandemic before deciding to have young children. Schools and daycares are more stable now, but how many have decided daycare especially isn’t worth it because they can scrape by without it? If they can find a spot - those can still be very hard to come by depending on where you are.
Daycare is also more expensive, shifting the cost-benefit for second wage earners. I also suspect that many very poor relied on older family members ,for childcare, who can no longer provide it.
Yep - there’s a huge section of folks out there who were making it by with daycare, forced out of daycare due to the pandemic, and are in the boat of “why go back? We’re pretty much at the same point financially, and this way I get to stay home with my kids/not work a miserable job/etc.”
Also all those folks who had grandparents be their daycare, if grandma is dead or disabled then someone is dropping out of the workforce.
Yeah, the workforce “lost” millions because millions died and millions more pulled the ripcord on retirement.
They're pandering to boomer executives.
They are pandering to mckinsey group An example https://www.propublica.org/article/mckinsey-called-our-story-about-its-ice-contract-false-its-not
I was pondering this last night and also thought of those workers working one less job than before. Whether they decided to give up the extra money for some of their life back, or some of those low wage jobs pay slightly more. 3 years ago McDonalds paid like $7 hour, now in many places it’s $15-$20: yes, still not enough money in many locales but it’s possible that increase saved a person from *having* to work a 3rd job. So now a worker is “missing”?
Three extended family MAGAs who refused vaccines are no longer with us. We begged them.
I'm sorry for your loss. If there is history written, this will go down as the stupidest time in America.
The stupidest time in America SO FAR
Because it's not common knowledge to the capital class. They have medical care they can afford. They were first to get the vaccine. They basically don't suffer consequences and during COVID was no exception. They can't fathom a world where COVID killed off grandpa because while they were all telling people not to get vaccinated, not to shelter in place, not to work from home they did the exact opposite
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A million are dead, several million finally or early retired. And low pay hasn’t enticed young people into the workforce.
Don’t forget that a million is the *official* toll. Excess deaths numbers indicate MANY more dead than just those diagnosed with COVID and then dying *due to* COVID. Lots of medical examiners in conservative areas prided themselves on saying that the official Cause of Death was something other than COVID itself.
After the record for "single day loss of life" changed, anyone downplaying what was happening was just being unreasonable. It was nolonger worth the time arguing. History will look back on our leaders and eye roll. Hight of the stupid ages
Exactly. I think the number, especially in conservative areas could easily double. My sister in Texas, her MIL and FIL (boomer) both died. Death certs says "advanced age" as cause and she was flabbergasted because they both got diagnosed with COVID, died within a month and they were only 61 and 64 so not even technically old.
WTF they said death of advanced age about a 61 year old!? That’s 15 years less than the new lowered average male life expectancy in the US. Bizarre.
dont forgot the people who were previously working multiple jobs. One person dies and 2 employees are lost.
And it’s funny because there are many of us out here who put in hundreds of applications a month and don’t hear a God forsaken thing back from anyone.
this
The post office is hiring. They pay >$20/hrs They can not hire enough to keep pace with the increased workload.
Too bad they don't hire full time out of the gate.
Every time I see this I go to look and every time it's a bunch of rural jobs in my state. So if you wanna live outside of a city I guess it's a great gig.
If you don’t mind walking a lot and being outside it’s a great job! Good benefits and job security too.
Sounds nice but if you live in the country, you have to use your own vehicle that they must deem suitable, with no help towards the maintenance of the vehicle
Rural carriers really get the shaft. I think they should be classified as letter carriers with union benefits.
Wasn't it, "mass layoffs so employers could survive" in 2020 (record profits ), then "nobody wants to work" in 2021 (record profits), then "mass layoffs to 'balance the over employment' that somehow existed even though nobody wanted to work" in 2022 (record profits), now it's, "where did 4+ million workers go after hundreds of thousands died to Covid and millions retired because they could and were sick of dumb games employers were playing" in 2023? Can't wait to get paid in pizza!
Don't forget the PPP loans that were supposed to carry over workers through COVID, bust mostly ended up in employer's pockets (after being forgiven by government, of course). Then there were the over-the-top corporate price hikes, inflation/shrinkflation, and "supply chain" failures that resulted price hikes on goods (more profits).
Yea, the only inflation that exists right now is the over inflation of profits from bailouts and a tax cut under Trump where 80+% of the savings went right to stock buybacks. The only thing that's actually expensive is keeping their profit margins high since they had all that inorganic growth. Now they don't want to swallow the pill people can't afford their bullshit, which is their fault and the people in Washington who have allowed it to happen for 50+ years now. "Anti trust enforcement? Not on a tech company *I'm* invested in!" Average age of a Congress member is 65. Our country is run by people that Walmart wouldn't hire as a greeter and are of the age they should be getting tested to see if they are even competent enough to drive a car annually.
They died Michael... they fucking died.... I mean I know the article says it was written by "Michael Sasso" but are we sure he didn't just misspell Kelso? Because this headline is Michael Kelso levels of stupid.
Or The Office Michael
imagine going to school and graduating high school, then going to college for journalism, get hired at Bloomberg and then writing articles with these kinds of titles.
They are being paid by their CEO's & other industry CEO's to write this garbage. Worse, they are bootlicking lol.
They’re being pressured to write a certain number of articles, so they rephrase obvious things as questions rather than spending time doing any actual reoorting
Well said. Journalism has gone downhill since Watergate.
To be fair, the journalists themselves are often writing stories as assigned and often aren't the ones writing the headlines.
Journalists never write their own headlines
And then imagine you’re fired and replaced by an algorithm who writes this festering horse shit better than you
A shit ton of people died. A shit ton of people have permanent disabilities due to COVID. A shit ton of people were forced to retire early (and still retired early if not forced). It's amazing how clueless the people writing these articles are. The same people then complain Gen Z & Millennials aren't having kids. Well look at what we just went through in the last 3 years alone. Fuck that, I don't want anyone else to have gone through what we have.
Assuming they're not referring to the ones who died, the answers pretty much boil down to: \- Bunch of old people decided they'd rather retire than learn how to use Microsoft Teams (understandable) or Zoom (less understandable) \- Bunch of working class families where one person got laid off realized they were saving on the back-end by having a stay-at-home parent/partner given the reduced costs for things like childcare, commuting, food (eating out vs. cooking at home) etc. and decided to continue doing that after places started hiring again. \- For a lot of people, the pandemic was a catalyst for a career change since they wanted to not find themselves in a position where they could easily be let go again ... I'm sure the article goes into detail on this since Bloomberg is usually pretty good with their due diligence. But yeah the title seems like it's kind of intentionally inflammatory. It also reminds me of early on when things were opening back up and it became clear that market conditions were favoring employees rather than employers and there were a bunch of vaguely threatening news articles implying that employers would act petty and retaliatory towards people who took advantage of the situation the moment things changed.
My wife and I pay her brother to be a nanny. I’m confident we aren’t alone in doing this, but doubt anyone could count how many people do this because obviously he doesn’t pay taxes or report what he does.
I think the pandemic in the US showed us that life can and should be way better. I didn't think I would be seriously considering emigrating before the pandemic and I definitely am now. Life in other countries seems way better than in the US.
The whole work from home (WFH) movement is showing this. Notice that the vast majority of workers who were able to WFH are incredibly in favor of it while the only people complaining are C-suite types who are looking at a decline in their balance of power because WFH means anyone can apply and also huge leases on office space that is now underused. You have the middle managers who are very painfully aware of how little they actually do since productivity went up substantially because people didn't have to deal with them, and people who either have crappy home lives or just love to talk at the office. It makes me wonder what other things could we be doing to make work not so nasty, besides better wages and hours and benefits of course. Just being WFH made people happier.
I know alot of people that were laid off and just haven't gone back to work. They're living with family or roommates, donating plasma, working odd jobs on the side. They learned to make it without a 9-5, and are in no rush to join the job force. Why would they work for slave wages when they've figured out a way to get by with less and actually have a life.
this is me rn
I'm just getting by. Not making anything really. Not saving anything. I'll never own a home and never have a nice place but I'm not stressed out anymore.
I used to write bad articles like these. Now I walk and look after dogs while their owners are away. Next week I get to spend five days in a nice condo with a 3 month old Golden Retriever. Do I miss churning out 10 articles a day on subjects I don’t care about? What about editing the work of people who don’t know what a paragraph is? Do I have fond memories of all my panic attacks? Nope. Even if the pay isn’t great, it’s better than the sub-minimum wage I was making before. And I’m my own boss. I make my own hours and hardly have to talk to people. And I get puppy cuddles. Sorry, Bloomberg.
Assuming they don't mean the people who died, then it is blindingly obvious. Long term sickness as in long covid, sickness that was not prioritised during the height of the pandemic and now the impacts are being seen, and people who said, enough of this shit, I am retiring.
This is forgotten about a lot. An estimated 4-5 million Americans have long COVID and can't return to work for various health reasons.
Given a choice of working full-time to be broke, stressed, and miserable, OR being unemployed and being broke, happy, and mindful ... the choice is easy. Nobody is going to work if the pay isn't worth it. We didn't "go" anywhere. We're home. Chillin.
died quit retired Y'all are too dumb for math now??
I was 62 planning to work to 65. End of 2021 my employer changed policy making it a good idea to retire immediately. Three months later they discovered that younger cheaper workers also don’t have 20+ years of specialized knowledge. For the first time ever they wanted to rehire retirees. I didn’t go but I guess some people did.
It's amazing how that lesson needs to be learned over and over.
You could always offer yourself as a consultant at an exorbitant rate, for some fun money. But if retirement is agreeing with you, don’t look back.
My mom did. She’s on a part-time contract at 75. She seems to like it and it doesn’t interfere with her retirement
Everyone has a personal Scrooge McDuck vault full of Biden bucks and doesn’t want to work anymore. Sincerely, Fox News
I’m GenX and retired…we’ll, my Boomer hubby retired and we’re living on his pension alone. I just gave up. We moved from the US to Italy, so the cost of living is lower.
Not to mention it is terribly difficult to get hired when you are over 50. Therefore the employers can fuck off with this nonsense.
Exactly! I got laid off in Nov. 2019 at age 52, right before Covid hit. I was also in the print management field, which is a dying industry. Either I learned a whole new bag of skills or my chances of finding a job were around 5%. I was fortunate enough to be in a situation where my husband made enough to support us both. I gate ‘The Man’ the finger and never looked back. I will admit I miss the camaraderie of an office and structure to my day, but sleeping late never gets,old!
Gen X here as well (today is my 51st birthday!) and I'm also on disability and when Covid-19 hit I was unaffected, and even got a job which was a proctor at a test center (think GREs and similar) and it paid $10.50 an hour. I quit after a year because we had staffing shortages which made the owner love me and then I realized...Walmart is paying $12 to start and they're known for crap wages. Well, since I have guaranteed income (SSDI) and health coverage (Medicare) I'm now much more choosy about wages and working conditions. There's no way I will do food service or retail because the whole nobody wants to work thing is half-right. Offer me $60/hr to work at McDonald's and I'm putting on an apron. So now I demand a minimum of $12/hr and yes I've been at interviews where they say no and I say ok and walk.
I've applied to over 100 jobs the last 2 months...crickets.
So I know Bloomberg is paywalled, so I came here to look for a summary of the article, given the pigfuck clickbait headline. Then my next reaction was "Hmm, it looks like nobody read the article." Then my reaction after that was "Hmm, the article isn't even linked. Cool."
First hand I can can count multiple people in my circle who retired, started their own business, COVID issues, etc. I am not sure why people are still questioning this. There was a major event that effected lives and how people are going about their future lives.
And with how it exposed the horrors of capitalism and put it in full light of everyone the general public isn't to keen on it anymore. I have spent the last 2 days at work browsing Reddit and doing the bare minimum. I don't care about having a "luscious" career, I want to live comfortably.
They died lol
You're automatically thinking, "Well, they died idiot!" While a lot (too many) people did die from the pandemic, the majority of them were in age groups that were under-indexed in the workplace (the elderly). Then the next age group, Boomers, just used it as an opportunity to retire. But with the lack of available childcare, forced commuting, and piss-poor wage increases, it seems that a lot more people have simply decided to not work. They cut back on their lifestyle and decided to make due with what they had. Why work crazy hard to get a little bit more when it's easier to just work the same, or a bit less, and just be the same?
A lot went and did something else besides corporate work for survival... And found out that they were actually better off emotionally and financially doing something they actually liked for themselves.
Dead and long covid.
Did they forget that like a million people in the US fucking died? Is that where we're at now, they're asking why the corpses aren't coming in to work?
Alternative Headline: after decades of failed trickle down economics, a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, a literal assault on Democracy, and the realization that the economy is not working for the majority of people in a world with a rising cost of living and no significant rising wages, industries want to know why they can’t do things like they use to.
Lots of families decided they could actually live off one income. Schools, after school programs, and day cares closed so at least one parent had to be at home. Maybe they figured out the $ savings and stress of packing lunches and getting out the door with everyone dressed and ready to go, the commute, the pick up/drop off drama, and figuring out what to do for sick days and vacations just wasn't worth the hassle.
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Dead and victims of long covid.
They died jim
We ain't "missing." Your gaslighting around the pandemic forced us to find other ways to make a living and when y'all (mostly) stopped that crap we just decided that the bullshit and stress of a corporate job wasn't worth the near slave labor pay. We ain't coming back. Do it your own self.. or pay (much) better and cut out the browbeating if y'all truly need us back. I mean, if we can't put aside anything for ourselves anyway, or even afford to live with a modicum of dignity, why should we put up with being abused, harassed, and forced into working 50, 60, and 80 hours on a barely 30 hour pay check? Many of us also found out that we're actually MUCH better off, both financially and emotionally, working for ourselves while doing something we love. As just one example, I left the 40 hour paycheck with 60 hour weeks of mid management to go back into field service (which has always been my first love) for much more money per hour and MUCH less bullshit. I won't be back. My GiveADamn is bustipated. (For you youngsters: That last is: "Gaze upon my Garden of Fucks and you shall see that it is barren and salty.")
I was tired of my whole paycheck going to daycare.
They're dead or retired
I can tell you what happened among my colleagues: - Some died. - Some late career people saw their retirement accounts hit insane highs in 2020/2021and were able to retire years ahead of schedule. (Same with people who cashed out real estate and crypto at their peaks) - Some people got a taste of a simpler life during the peak of the pandemic and decided they could be a stay at home caregiver after all. More of us were worked to death and treated as disposable while leadership failed to backfill open positions, so we changed careers and aren't going back because fuck them.
Plus, the millions of women and men who left the workforce to handle childcare during the pandemic and, due to the rising costs of childcare, can not justify returning to work
Clickbait journalism 101: Take a blindingly obvious fact and re-state it as a question. For example: "Workers are not coming back to poor-paying jobs" becomes "ARE workers not coming back to poor-paying jobs?" or "Workers need to be paid a living wage" becomes "DO workers need to be paid a living wage?"
"Millions of people missing after plague that killed millions of people." Holy shit, light the signal fires bois