Wage-Price Spiral Beckons As Americans Quit By The Millions
Job openings barely budged and the quit rate rose in February, closely watched data out Tuesday showed.
There were 11.266 million available jobs on the last business day of the month, only marginally fewer than the number of openings at the end of January.
Hires rose 263,000, but it wasn't enough to make a serious dent in the gap, which remains near record wides (figure below).
That suggests very little progress on the road to labor market normalization. The labor supply-demand disparity is
Labor supply will pick up as smaller companies dependent on cheap labor are forced to close. Think local coffee shops, charming little boutiques and such. Sadly, that will be to the benefit of the larger chain operations. Soon all of America will resemble the homogenous little shopping centers attached to every tract development around Phoenix.
I haven’t looked at any national trends, but after the pandemic we probably didn’t have an explosion of karate studios, massage parlors, nail salons and trinket shops open? I assume many of those dreams have been left behind in the GFC, but theoretically that human labor is waiting to jump into low paying big box jobs that don’t offer benefits, but, there may be an issue of pent up anger attached to this? It’s possible that now that America Isn’t Great Again, there is a segment of the labor force that’s simply waiting to provide their talents after Sleeping Joe is swept away.
These thoughts have been my own…
Gosh it’s almost like having a president who’s only objective of building a wall and keeping immigrants out because “we’re full” might have something to do with these employment gaps!
Hehehe. We were promised that clamping down on immigration would support wages. Guess what? It worked!!
Last night I went into a popular restaurant in the Biltmore (Phoenix) for dinner. We were told the wait was 25 minutes (even though 70% of the tables were empty). I asked the lady why we had to wait when the tables were all empty (suspecting that the tables were reserved), she said “we only have one cook and two waiters”. Where did all the servers go?
Back over the border, perhaps?
Is ‘crushed by my overhead’ on the Biltmore’s menu?