Why has the workforce participation rate cratered? If people simply changed to a better job, that figure would hold steady. Instead it shows us that millions of Americans decided to stop looking for work.
Just 1 percent, 63% to 62%, which could just be aging demographics since a greater and greater proportion of people in America are going to be too old to work, especially for hard labor work like cleaning hotel rooms.
Also, hotels (and other low pay to quality of life at work ratio employers) were already struggling before COVID. COVID just accelerated the inevitable.
Look how much the workforce participation rate has varied over the last 20 years. Only a few percentage points even through massive global recessions. Small percentage changes in this statistic can easily deceive the layman into thinking it's not a big deal.
I do not understand why a change from 63% to 62% is a sufficiently big deal to be able to claim “millions of Americans decided to stop looking for work”, especially when we know a greater and greater proportion of the population is elderly who cannot work.
I admit that is technically true, but due to their use of the word “cratered”, I was reading the phrase to mean that relatively large amounts of people have decided to no longer work (outside of those who have decided to no longer work due to aging out).
Of course, prices are set at the margin, and so if hotels (and other businesses like restaurants and retail) were used to paying the lowest pay to quality of life at work ratio, then I guess it would be accurate to say their problem is a couple million people decided to no longer work, because presumably a greater proportion of those who decided to no longer work would have been from these least desirable to work in businesses.
Which is exactly as it should be. ~Half the country doesn't want them. If that results in hotel stays being absurdly expensive (or perhaps changing laws so that hotel rooms don't need to be cleaned between guests), then so be it. America is democratic, and the people have spoken, so now let them suffer the consequences.
> or perhaps changing laws so that hotel rooms don't need to be cleaned between guests
I do not think there are any laws requiring this. It probably just has not been price competitive enough to hand a customer the housekeeping cart at check in.
Another portion is no longer able to work those jobs (especially service sector jobs where one is required to show up for a shift or get fired). New data shows long Covid is keeping as many as 4 million people out of work - https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-data-shows-long-covid...
> The number of persons not in the labor force who currently want a job was little changed at 5.6 million in November and remains above its February 2020 level of 5.0 million. These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the 4 weeks preceding the survey or were unavailable to take a job.
> Among those not in the labor force who wanted a job, the number of persons marginally attached to the labor force held at 1.5 million in November. These individuals wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months but had not looked for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. The number of discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached who believed that no jobs were available for them, was 405,000 in November, little changed from the previous month. (See Summary table A.)
It has actually rebounded to 1 percent less than it was prepandemic, and health risks were legitimate reasons for people to not work for a period. Really it shows since 2002 the rate has gone down fairly consistently, show overtime it's worth less and less to work.
The main factor in choosing a job is pay in the end and that's also the main variable when choosing to work or not imo.
