I saw an interesting article about how part of the labor shortage could be related to long COVID. I had not heard that before.
“Kathryn Bach, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, who has studied the issue, calculated that long COVID accounts for about 1.6 million people missing from the U.S. labor force. That’s equivalent to at least 15% of the nation’s job openings.”
https://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-news/mystery-of-the-missing…
And it is being compounded by the Great Retirement.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/18/great-res…
Mario Valadez, now 67, hadn’t intended to stop working yet. Starting as a busboy at 16, he had moved from one Los Angeles-area dining establishment to another, eventually working his way up to restaurant manager. When he lost a position in January 2020, he thought it would be a temporary pause.
Then covid hit. The longer Valadez was out of work, the less he wanted to return to 12-hour days in the stressful environment of the restaurant industry. When the economy reopened and potential employers began to reach out, he surprised himself by saying no. “I talked to my wife, I talked to my sons, and they told me, ‘Don’t work. You work too much,’” Valadez told me. Instead, he filed for Social Security.
Multiply that anecdote times the millions of Baby Boomers between 58 and 76 years old and you have a significant labor shortage. Oh yeah and while we’re at it let’s make sure that foreign workers can’t get visas.
Watty,
Very nice find. Thanks