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It’s not a ‘labor shortage.’ It’s a great reassessment of work in America


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Hiring was much weaker than expected in April. Wall Street thinks it’s a blip, but there could be a much deeper re-think going on of what jobs are needed and what workers want to do on a daily basis.

 

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It’s happening on a lot of different levels. At the most basic level, people are still hesitant to return to work until they are fully vaccinated and their children are back in school and daycare full-time. It’s telling that all the job gains in April went to men. The number of women employed or looking for work fell by 64,000, a reminder that childcare issues are still in play.

 

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A Pew Research Center survey early this year found that 66 percent of the unemployed had “seriously considered” changing their field of work, a far greater percentage than during the Great Recession. People who used to work in restaurants or travel are finding higher-paying jobs in warehouses or real estate, for example. Or they want to a job that is more stable and less likely to be exposed to the coronavirus -- or any other deadly virus down the road. Consider that grocery stores shed 49,000 workers in April and nursing care facilities lost nearly 20,000.

 

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Even among those who have jobs, people are rethinking their options. Frontline workers are reporting high levels of burnout, causing some to seek a new career path. There’s also been a wave of retirements as workers over 50 quit because they don’t want to return to teaching, home health care or other frontline jobs. And more affluent Americans say they are retiring early because their retirement portfolios have surged in the past year and the pandemic has taught them that life is short.

 

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The overall expectation is still for hiring to pick up this summer as the economy re-opens fully and more people are vaccinated. But the past year has fundamentally changed the economy and what many Americans want in their working life. This big reassessment — for companies and workers — is going to take awhile to sort out and it could continue to pop up in surprising ways.

 

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