Blame it largely on the pandemic, which weakened the hold the workplace held on people’s psyches
By outward appearances, the labor market today looks much as it did before the pandemic. The unemployment rate is just as low, the share of adults in the labor force is just as high, and wages are growing at roughly the same pace after inflation.
But beneath the surface, the nature of labor has changed profoundly. Career and work aren’t nearly as central to the lives of Americans. They want more time for their families and themselves, and more flexibility about when, where and how they work.
The impact of this change can already be seen in both individual companies and the broader economy. It has led to a persistent shortage of workers, especially in jobs that seem less desirable because, for example, they require in-person work or fixed hours. That, in turn, has altered the bargaining position of employers and employees—forcing employers to adapt, not just by paying more but giving priority to quality of life in job offers.
To be sure, some of these changes arise from an exceptionally tight labor market. If unemployment rises, some of employees’ newfound leverage may evaporate.
It’s telling that the people who push this narrative are the people whose jobs pay the most money for the least amount of actual work.
Yeah but they deserve it because they are the guilded class and also fuck you.
This comment offers such great perspective that I wish more people were aware of. The problem with the youngest generation is always there same. Maybe Gen Z will remember where the rest of us have forgotten, but historically the odds are long.
Eh, I have faith that the wide availability of knowledge will lead to a better result
Plus less lead doesn’t hurt the odds.
Once we get over killing each other about it, it’s gonna be great
Eh, I have faith that the wide availability of knowledge will lead to a better result
You wouldn’t want anything to happen to them Tik Toks now, would you?
Racks shotgun Republicanly
The pandemic showed that a huge percentage of our work is literately bullshit used to keep us grinding away and not actually living life. And to keep us from dealing with the huge and glaring problems in our society.
The Puritan idea that we must slave away in order to be worthy is a lie.
One of the greatest economists, Keynes, expected us to be working 15-20 hours a week at this point because of productivity increases.
But instead of sharing in the blessing of productivity, we were forced to do an increasing amount of meaningless work and spend less time actually living, all while being shackled with debt rather than even increasing our pay.
A pretty garbage system if you ask me.
I work 9 hours a day either sitting at my desk doing nothing or sitting in meetings doing nothing. My only reprieve is that it pays decently well for the area I live in.
My time at my job could be cut in half and I’d still get just as much work done as before. So much of my life and and everyone else’s lives are being wasted doing such meaningless work.
This is why I don’t trust people who claim the jobs AI takes will be replaced, because that’s how it was in the past. It wasn’t, we never replaced those jobs, only created meaningless work. David Graeber is right.
It’s not that AI is good enough to take our jobs. It’s that AI is good enough to fool hiring managers into thinking it can take our jobs.
We didn’t replace jobs with productivity gains. We absorbed them into our jobs. Consider expense reports. Used to be that you would send all your receipts to an administrative assistant and they would send you a report to approve. Now that work gets pushed down to an individual responsibility. Company thinks if we let each worker do a little more, we can get rid of this position.
It’s just incredibly apparent now that not all of us need to work anymore, by a longshot, but how can they keep the working class in its place without scarcity?
They say blame the pandemic. I say blame the companies that removed when people finally realize how important their time was.
Indeed. Death is approaching us all at a pretty respectable pace, so it’s not really worth toiling your life away for next to nothing
It’s not worth it regardless of the pay.
I say blame the lack of enforcement of antitrust law for eroding the value of work.
People finally realized what is important and got a taste of life without constantly being overworked. Good for them. Most of modern work is totally ridiculous bullshit in the big scheme of things.
Other people in the comments are mentioning incentives, low pay, crappy management, etc. I don’t want to work, but it’s not really about any of this, or it’s about all of this a little, sort of.
I want to do good work.
I want to make software that helps people, that does what it’s supposed to do, that is fast, non-predatory, and doesn’t succumb to endless feature creep or artificially rushed scheduling. Pay me enough to live comfortably, and I’ll do this basically on my own. I don’t even need all of these things.
I’ve found that most businesses prioritize between 0-1 of these things.
This is the real crux. Nowaday, I feel I can only do good through personal and community work. Professional work mostly involves being told to cut corners, mislead people and jack prices to grow the company infinitely.
While, frankly, I think infinite growth is one of the most damaging ideas in human history
Dumb question: how does one get into “community work”? I barely even know my neighbors
You have to take the first step and get in touch with people. It’s very likely there are one or more instagram (ugh) profiles of community work around your location. Failing that, the nearest church might be a good place to ask, even if you’re not religious.
Honestly, it took hard work to get out of my comfort zone but there are likely very nice people with welcoming organizations in your area. Donating time to library maker space is my extra activity for now
I loved 12 oz. Mouse. Thanks
I used to do IT for ‘digital advertising in healthcare’. I helped fix those accursed screens that sell you shit while you wait at the doctor or hospital.
When I did my job well, it made the world worse.
This conflicts with my basic sense of humanity, y’all. It broke me, and it was like the 17th problem on my list of shit to worry about.
Capitalism offers to sell me lame drugs and garbage to fill the hole in my soul it’s created.
People want to meaningful contribute to their community. Work stops most of us from doing that but instead do something that pays
I wish I could live comfortably on self-employment instead of that being a big risk. Income isn’t guaranteed but bankruptcy over a single medical event is.
You should work in government or for a university. You’ll feel like you’re contributing to a mission and nobody is backstabbing over their bonus.
I work in IT for the health sector of my local govt (not USA). The pay is decent, but it’s a constant fight against medics’ egos, lack of programmers (there are decent systems, but not enough manpower to really keep them in top shape), political interference in the form of “great ideas”, budget constraints and private contractors wanting to charge more while offering less.
Seriously go look at a university. I manage two teams of students and about to move into a director role where I will also have a team of FTEs and a developer to manage. It never gets old and people are really nice. You will also never be the smartest person in the room since half the people have a doctorate in something.
I’ve been lucky enough to have a great job at the moment, and after being where I am for this long (without doxxing myself), I can say that I will never, for the rest of my life, work anywhere that chases profit. Unless I literally have no choice.
Look into government jobs, or NGOs/non-profits. I’ve found work to be much more fulfilling, less stressful, etc., when everything isn’t about quarterly earnings, and profit margins. That shit ruins EVERYTHING.
I don’t really care how much less my salary may be, as long as I’m making enough to survive (and have enough of a cushion that I don’t need to worry that one or two emergencies will bankrupt me), then I’m good to go.
Perhaps I’m just not an ambitious person, but I just have zero interest in pursuing monetary gain beyond what I need.
Work is less valuable to us because it has literally become less valuable. We get much less in terms of real purchasing power.
You want me to care more about my job? Make it more valuable to me.
Also any job one might be passionate about pays the bare minimum it can, because not hating your job is basically a rare perk now.
Absolute bullshit.
Loyalty is paid in cash, want me to be loyal, then pay me what I feel keeps me loyal.
Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.
Bob Porter: Don’t… don’t care?
Peter Gibbons: It’s a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don’t see another dime; so where’s the motivation? And here’s something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?
Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.
Bob Slydell: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
Plus ça change…
This movie has defined my working life.
The fact that nothing much has changed about this in 25 years is an indictment of both our economy and society.
Oh it’s definitely changed. For the worse.
Compared to an open office the cubicles in Office Space look amazing.
They saw it and said, “how can we do this, exploit it, and pay them less?”
“How much more can we steal from them without getting our building burned down?”
“Just make sure they don’t have enough money to buy gas or matches and we’re golden!”
I don’t have a Swingline…
It was Marxisim 101 stuff that goes back well over a century. Peter was basically reinventing the premises on the spot.
Americans are being treated like shit by their bosses and are finally starting to realize that the fantasy of “anyone can be rich” they’ve been promised all their lives is a total sham. Of course they’re not working as hard.
My read on this is we are readjusting the deal, seems like a good thing. Let’s keep going. We don’t need more rich people who never need to work while there are still people who must work their whole lives just to survive.
make a fourth of what made five years ago but same job
think part of why people work less now is because of no incentive
pay is way down, moral is low, and bills are higher than the income
recreational drugs are being outpriced for the first time in my lifetime by food costs
Dude. For some time in my area of Canada, I could buy a gram of weed for less than a head of lettuce ($6 vs $7)
Weed salad for dinner
Economy solved
Yeah, people stopped caring about work because we all know it doesn’t matter. You can give every last inch of yourself to your employer and they will simply say “not enough”. You can give your left kidney to an executive in need of a transplant, in the hopes that it will look good on your review, and the executive will say, “Should have given me both kidneys.”. They are hungry and ravenous beasts, who bite and bite and bite and are never full.
I hate that that kidney case actually happened.
Yeah. Employees used to be rewarded for going above and beyond, now “above and beyond” IS the expectation. And nobody was ever rewarded for just meeting expectations.
It’s really hard to give a shit about working when doing so only barely keeps you from being homeless, meanwhile the CEO drives to work every day in his Ferrari.
EDIT: That is to say, we want to give a shit and be really passionate about what we do, but it’s tough when the time and effort to do so isn’t properly recognized or compensated. My wife loves taking calls and helping people however she can, but the company she works for prioritizes number of people helped as opposed to the quality of that help. As such, she’s looking to leave her job and the medical field entirely. Her experience is that every single company that writes any sort of prescription is only in it to sell as much product as possible, not actually using that product to help people.
There’s nothing at all wrong with loving what you do, or wanting to love what you do. There’s also nothing wrong with wanting to be able to pay your bills while doing so.
So many different ways to cope with the horrifying idea that companies need us more than we need them. For this rare moment, just a sliver of time, we workers are not forced to prostrate ourselves at their feet. Instead of understanding that labor is a market and right now it’s a sellers market, they are inventing cultural changes to explain their sudden loss of fortune and power.
Millions of American workers died or became disabled due to a virus that we failed to handle responsibly. Millions more left the workforce to care for children or family members. All the while, demand for goods and services stayed strong. More work to do and fewer people to do it, gonna have to pay more for labor. It’s so fucking simple.
It’s not that I don’t care about work, it’s that I don’t care about YOU! I have other options my dude, cough up or I will find somebody who will.
This also isn’t the first time this has happened. The Black Death in the 14th century put the final nail in the coffin of serfdom and also led to the rise of the middle class. It turns out that, when a significant portion of the workforce either dies or leaves the workforce, the bargaining power of the remaining workers goes up. I don’t think it’s any surprise that we are also seeing a resurgence of unions as well. Workers have been tired of this shit for a long time, we’re just now in a position to do something about it.
You seem knowledgeable in this, can you recommend further reading on plague effect on labor & class? That’s fascinating
Not OP but I learned about this first from the show Connections with James Burke, but got a deeper understanding of it and many other ancient economic systems by reading David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5,000 Years.”
DINKs (double income no kids) would do wonders to the labour market, to keep the wages up.
Gen Z here. I have a house, (its small, i wouldn’t want a bigger one, because there is no need for it,) a decent car, am married, dont have any debt other than a mortgage, and i can comfortably pay everything i need to now and save a bit for the future. Why would I want to work harder for a better car? I don’t have a desire to show off or anything. Instead of working hard for someone else, I want to create things. Stories, games, art, I want to be creative, i dont want to work my ass of for someone else, doing menial labor.
Talk to some older folks.
As late as 1980, $20.00 made you feel like a big shot. You could buy yourself something fancy, or go out for a nice night on the town, or throw a great party.
You can have $20,000.00 in your hand today and feel like a chump. It won’t get you a new car, or make a downpayment on a house, Might let you rent a tiny room for a year, but you’ll be eating a lot of ramen.
Won’t somebody think of the shareholders!
Me while holding my firearm
I’ve done the math. I make $10,000 less today than I did in 2018, adjusted for inflation. No shit I care less about work.
The pandemic also showed how quick companies were to cut staff the second stuff happened. And while the government quickly came up with PPP, with Trump’s poor oversight, companies learned they could just pocket the money and screw the employees it was meant for.
That said, the pandemic just exposed a lot of long term feelings the younger generation has had.
