Originally Posted by mswlogo
Sorry for the click bait subject.
There has been a lot of discussion about the impact of labor shortage around the lakes and thought folks would find this informative.
I received it in a Daily NYTimed email.
It probably applies more to big cities but I’m sure some of it applies to lakes regions.
Also I don’t care to get into politics but universal health care would solve so many problems for small businesses. It puts so much burden on small companies to have to deal with health care. And large companies pull stunts like below because we lack it.
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Wait it out
Brenda Garcia, who works at a Chipotle in Queens, has a problem that may sound surprising in today’s tight labor market. She is a part-time employee who wants more work, but the restaurant keeps assigning her less than 20 hours a week.
“It’s not enough for me,” Garcia told my colleague Noam Scheiber. “They’re not giving me a stable job.”
Garcia is one of millions of Americans who want an established, full-time work schedule and are struggling to find it, as Noam explains in a Times article. As a result, these part-timers struggle with not only low pay but also uncertain shifts that can change at the last minute, disrupting the rest of their lives. The workers can obviously quit, but they often find that the other jobs available to them have similar problems.
How could this be when the country is in the midst of a labor shortage in which employers are struggling to fill jobs? Because executives at many companies have decided that part-time work is too important to abandon just because the labor market is temporarily tight.
Part-time work allows companies to hold down labor costs in two crucial ways. First, companies can reduce their benefit costs because part-time workers often do not receive health care and retirement benefits. Second, companies can change staffing levels quickly, to meet demand on a given day or week, rather than having workers sit idle during slower periods.
“It’s very deeply embedded in employers’ business models,” Noam — who covers workers and the workplace from Chicago — told me. “They’re incredibly reluctant to give it up, even if it means enduring labor shortages and elevated turnover in the short and intermediate term. Basically, they think it makes more economic sense to wait out the current shortages than to fundamentally change their labor model.”
That may well be a rational decision for individual businesses. The shift toward flexible, part-time and often outsourced work is a major reason that corporate profits have risen in recent decades. After-tax corporate profits have accounted for more than 7 percent of national income in recent years, up from an average of 5.6 percent from the 1950s through the 1970s, according to the Commerce Department.
If employers shift away from part-time work during a tight labor market like today’s, they worry they will be stuck with higher labor costs for years. “Employers will typically try everything else first — raising wages, offering bonuses and other financial incentives, giving part-timers more hours temporarily,” Noam explains. “All these measures are reversible, and presumably will be reversed once the labor shortages subside.”
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