True story:
A man brings his father into the emergency room at a small-town hospital in New Mexico. The elderly man is gasping for breath. The doctor asks if he’d gotten his Covid vaccination. He hasn’t. Nobody in the family had.
“He’ll be OK won’t he?” the man asks.
A test confirms the old man has Covid, and the doctor informs the family that he probably won’t survive. They move him into an ambulance for the trip to the nearest hub hospital, but he dies before the ambulance leaves the parking lot.
Another true story:
A popular, family-owned restaurant with a loyal clientele posts a sign on the door that they will close at 3 p.m. on Saturdays until further notice because they don’t have the staffing to stay open for Saturday nights.
The governor has announced that New Mexico will fully reopen on July 1, but Covid and its ripple effects will be with us for a while. The numbers are trending gradually downward, but the disease is still killing people – the new Delta variant is spreading and killing faster – and the job market has changed profoundly.
As I write this, I’m reminded that a recent study reports that most journalists have been cautious – sometimes overly cautious – in covering the pandemic. Nobody wants to do any reporting that results in harm or inadvertently encourages irresponsible behavior.
And as I write this, it’s Father’s Day. The reason my own father isn’t here to celebrate is because he succumbed to a fatal lung disease that resulted from work-related toxic exposure. I watched him die – an otherwise strong, healthy man lying in a hospital bed with ruined lungs. His own father died of tuberculosis contracted in the unhealthy workplaces of his day.
I take lung ailments very, very seriously. And I have close family members who work in healthcare in vulnerable positions. Some readers have politicized my comments, but I said from the outset that this is personal for me. I can’t, I won’t be cavalier about this pandemic.
So you don’t want to take advice from politicians? Talk to doctors about what they’re seeing.
As for the labor market, it’s interesting that the folks who normally champion supply and demand are burned up about being on the wrong end of the equation.
The boilerplate argument is that inflated unemployment benefits are encouraging workers to sit on their duffs. It’s not that simple.
For many people, Covid-related layoffs forced a reckoning. They decided to go back to school and transition to work in some less vulnerable sector than, say, restaurants. Or they learned to like working from home. Or they have kids and want jobs with more flexibility. Or they decided it was finally time to retire. Or they decided they don’t want to return to the same dead-end, low-wage job, or they don’t want to work two or three jobs to pay the rent. They’re looking around, and well they should because employers are offering more pay and better benefits.
Another problem is demographic – the supply of people in certain age groups is tapering off. So the labor pool, which was shrinking even before the pandemic, can’t meet demand.
“Managers who could take their pick of the crop simply don’t know how to handle being on the other side,” wrote a Forbes columnist. “That may explain why some of the worst shortages are in industries like restaurants and construction known for uncertain pay, harsh conditions, and low job security.”
Bottom line: People are making choices – something we say we support until it inconveniences us in some way. It’s not a calamity, it’s a business cycle. Business models are going to be different.
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