I don't want to make a separate thread on this and I don't think the Jobs thread is the right place either so I'll stick it here -
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/29/fas...-losing-100percent-of-workers-every-year.html
The article is about the toll that massive turnover is having on the restaurant industry. The article laments how restaurant chains are struggling to keep workers and/or automate themselves out of the problem of having employees. What's frustrating to me about the article is how many times it points out that 'restaurants can't afford higher wages'. What a load bullcrap. For independent mom-and-pop shops, this may be true to an extent but it's certainly not true for the large chains that pull in billions in profits. While I don't think these jobs were ever truly desirable, minimum wage used to be much higher when adjusted for inflation, health care and rent was cheaper and they didn't uniformly rely on scheduling gimmicks to keep everyone under full-time employment. These jobs
used to support families.
Obviously automation is going to gut employment in a lot of these companies but we as a society have completely dropped the ball on supporting our workforce. Without countervailing forces (unions!) and with super-lax labor protections, these companies have pulled more and more out of our economy by underpaying and overworking their employees while shoving all the profits to the top. Wal Mart keeps their announcement boards stocked up with information on how their employees can apply for food stamps and medicaid because they pay so little their employees can't support themselves. That's one of the biggest, most profitable companies on the planet and our government is actively subsidizing their wage suppression.
There's also been a major shift in the fast food industry as younger workers avoid them to focus on their studies. The median age for restaurants is now 29 - putting paid to the notion that these jobs are throwaway temporary jobs for kids. These jobs are now the only option for gainful employment in many communities for people without higher education and we have collectively decided these working families aren't worth a living wage.
Even in places where you can find a non-restaurant job, pay has been suppressed to the point where if you don't know one of the business owners, you aren't going to be able to support yourself. At the small town I lived in in Illinois, I managed to get a job at the only factory in town. It was the kind of job that used to support families but when I joined, they had recently fired everyone involved in a unionizing attempt and the pay was $7.25 an hour - even for the overnight workers. I actually worked two jobs back then, in the mornings I was a manager at a Quiznos and at night I'd work at the factory. One of the supervisors promised me a raise if I quite the restaurant job to focus on the factory job. When I did so, he gave me a whopping $0.10 an hour raise. Obviously, I was no longer able to support myself and quickly quit to pursue an education. And of course my anecdote is just that, a story, not evidence. But I think it's instructive of how off the rails our job market has become as we allow the monied class to extract everything of value out of our economy to park it in the accounts of billionaires who do not re-invest in proportion to how much they've accumulated.