The Investment Thread
That’s what happens when it’s more lucrative to stay home and collect benefits than to go back to work. Anyone that didn’t see this coming is blind.
There are 8 million job openings right now. Anyone can get a job that wants one.
First off, everything that Chuck said in terms of child care, maybe health risk, concern about how the place is treating Covid.. I know some who just won't go back to a restaurant without certain conditions or changes.
Secondly, I want to push back on this a bit. In some cases, you're probably right. But it's a lot more complicated that job vs no job.
My group has two job openings.. one for a technician one for an engineer. We had two tech openings, we filled one a while back, but the other, we can't find anyone worth bringing in (probably my boss's fault, honestly). For the engineering position, we want a recent grad (i..e don't want to pay), however, a lot of the bites we've gotten on that are from people with more experience who are out of our budget. So, the job sits unfilled, yet there are workers out there, just over qualified in that case.
You have a lot of job openings in certain fields that actually are competing with ultra LOW unemployment. So, some of these job openings can't be filled by the people unemployed. i.e. a lot of white collar jobs, but blue collar unemployed.
My wife just graduated with her Masters in Social work. She's getting a lot of interviews and a few, what I'd call, near offers (she politely declined two before they even were formalized). To add, she has $0 in benefits coming in. Why did she turn those two jobs down so fast? The first one, their pay offer was so low, she was making more with his bachelors. The second one, was sort of a "contractor", and you get paid per the client, not a salary. So you "could" make a certain amount, but you also may not. And the case load was like 2-3 times more than what any clinician would honestly be able to handle.
There are others places that still have an issue with Tattoo's meaning you can't be professional, or that have other odd issues. Some jobs require very specific certifications and licenses, that are actually well below someone's education level, but they just don't know any other way of filling the position.
There was one job, I kid you not, that is for an Addiction Recovery place, that the certification they wanted, actually can only be obtained if the person is a Current recovering Addict in a half way house, AND has gotten their Bachelors or Master's Degree. Like, you need to be educated, get addicted, get clean.. or you need to finish school while in recovery.. who the hell came up with that certification?
Going back to me, for a while last year I was furloughed for 2 days a week for a couple months. The money I got from the State, with federal benefits, make it almost a break even for me, for only missing 2 days of work a week. If I was laid off, the benefits wouldn't be enough to pay the bills. We'd have major cuts. Also, I can't just find another job in my field here. We'd have to move or work remotely, if I could even get an interview. Because even with a need, a lot of companies don't want to pay for the expertise.