The Daily - Stories from the Great American Labor Shortage: An Update

Episode Date: December 27, 2021

This week, The Daily is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year and checking in on what has happened in the time since they first ran.This episode contains strong language.Bartenders, sous chefs, wait staff — back in August, managers in the U.S. hospitality industry were struggling to fill a range of roles at their establishments.One owner of a gourmet burger restaurant in Houston said that before the pandemic, a job opening could easily get 100 applicants — but that was no longer the case; applications were in the single digits. “I had never seen it like this before in my career,” he told us. “I’ve been doing this for over 25 years.”Managers blamed pandemic unemployment benefits for the dearth of job seekers. Employees said that the pandemic had opened their eyes to the realities of work.Today, we return to the country’s labor shortage to find out why so many Americans have left their jobs, and whether the people we spoke to back in August are working again.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Why is it so hard to hire right now? Experts weigh in on what’s going on in the labor market — and what companies can do to attract workers.The sharp rebound in hiring, especially in service industries, is widening opportunities and prompting employers to compete on pay.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

Hey, it's Michael. This week, The Daily is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year and hearing what's happened in the time since they first ran. Today, we return to the country's labor shortage to find out why so many Americans have left their jobs since the start of the pandemic and whether the people we talked to back in August are working again. It's Monday, December 27th. Hello, hello.

This is Sydney Harper, producer with The Daily here in D.C. This is Claire Tennesketter. I am on Smith Street in Brooklyn. Walking up and down 18th Street in the nation's capital. 18th Street is a big hill. Child, just breathing hard, breathing hard, breathing hard. Hi. Hi, how are you? Hi. I'm a producer with the New York Times, a daily news podcast. We're trying to do an episode looking at businesses and local restaurants hiring people and if they're having trouble finding people.

Can I get your name and, like, your role here? Dave Delaplane, general manager. My name is Vanessa, and I'm the manager here at Xochitl Taqueria. My name is Jonathan. This is my family's restaurant. I am Daniel from Savelli Restaurant in Brooklyn. I'm the manager here at Xochitl Taqueria. My name is Jonathan. This is my family's restaurant. I am Daniel from Savelli Restaurant in Brooklyn. I'm Simono. I'm a manager at Mama Capri. How big was your staff pre-pandemic and how big is it now?

So in February, I believe we had about 13 employees. Now it's six of us. Pre-pandemic, we had a staff close to 50. Wow. What are you at now? I have 30 now, I'd say. So you're actively hiring then right now? Always. It's been so extremely difficult trying to find employees.

Hiring is something crazy right now. Finding waitstaff. Servers. Bartenders. And the kitchen probably is the hardest. Busboy, runner. Susha. Pizza guy.

Experienced grill cook. Line cook. Line cook. Line cook. Dishwashers. Sometimes I clean the dish myself I've even had to do the kitchen I've had to do deliveries I was cooking in the kitchen last week

I have a huge burn on the bottom of my leg Oh wow, I can see it Are you okay? I'm okay, but it tells you that I shouldn't be working in the kitchen most likely We'll take anybody and we're willing to work with them and train them. We get down on our knees and we beg. But we can't even get that. Where do you think everyone went? What do you think is happening?

Everyone is getting free money, sitting at home. That's all the reason is. It's very clear. The government is just giving out so much help. You know, they're basically making more money to stay home. If I was getting $600 a week, I would not be going to work either. I would be chilling out with my money. This unemployment, it makes people more lazy. People rather stay home and watch TV than go back to work.

Hello? Hi, is this Caleb? This is. Hey, Caleb, it's Diana. Is it still an okay time for you to talk? Absolutely. Just to start, can you introduce yourself, tell me your name and your age and where you live in the U.S.?

Sure. My name is Caleb Orth, and I am 35. I am pretty new to Chicago, and I just moved here at the beginning of June. I've worked in kitchens since I was 19. I didn't go to college. I went to culinary school. I wanted to be a chef, and I really tried to make that happen throughout my 20s and early 30s and I got really far. My last job that I had before the pandemic was in Portland, Oregon at a seasonal, highly acclaimed sort of American-Italian restaurant. It was the kind of place that had the sort of prestige but it was by no means a dream job. Working in the back of the house in a restaurant, especially a restaurant like that, of that caliber, is more than a full-time pursuit.

It is a complete lifestyle. So when I say that I worked there, what I mean by that is I worked there 80 hours a week. I worked there from 1130 in the morning until 1 o'clock in the morning, most days. So that's very unsustainable to me. Just the culture of the work itself. You don't eat meals at appropriate times. You're always standing. You're working so hard.

I would usually work a shift at this restaurant nearby. Working in a kitchen where we're like regularly 80, 90 degrees, sometimes even 100, being right next to ovens and heaters and grills and fryers. You know, waiting table jobs can also be very kind of psychologically damaging in some ways because you have interactions with people who don't respect you. It would be horrible. We would be soaked in sweat. And then Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would sub in for like a barista shift. Standing for eight hours and just five minutes to sit down and eat something quick. You know, you have to learn to perform at a level that's like essentially flawless. Basically living paycheck to paycheck.

I was depressed. It can be very overwhelming. Like we're constantly overworked. There's a lot of multitasking. Underpaid. Remembering stuff. Underappreciated. There's a lot of pressure.

You know, like dropping the meat and the chicken. So, you know, there's oil everywhere. When you put the meat down, sometimes oil drips down. So for a very long time, I had a lot of burns and scars in my hands. I still have some scars. I don't think they'll go away. It sucked. It really sucked. My last day of work was March 15th, 2020. The night before, we had a very, very slow service. And I remember talking with one of the other guys that was in kitchen management. And, you know, I just said like, hey, tomorrow, you know, I might be a little late because I'm going to go to the store and I'm going to stock up on, you know, supplies in case this gets bad.

And so when I was at the grocery store the next day, buying food and stuff, you know, with everybody else in the city, I got called and they said, you know, we're closed indefinitely. We don't know what's going to happen. You know, everybody still has a job right now. But we don't know how long this is going to last. And we got an email, you know, about five days later, basically laying off the entirety of the staff. My name is Katya Barmoetina. I'm 25. I am a musician, teacher. I live in Brooklyn in Bed-Stuy, and I grew up here too. So yeah, that's me. Tell me about unemployment. Did you start applying

right away? I didn't apply right away because I thought, you know, I have money, I have savings. And then two months later, when I had like maybe one month's rent, I was like, no, we got to do it now. We have to apply. This is a bad situation now. Once unemployment started to come in, do you remember how much you were getting a week at first? After taxes, I think it was like a good $600, $700 a week. So very, very decent. It was great.

I loved napping and having money come in. I was able to rediscover and discover things that I never really did for myself. I never took a moment to just take a walk. Be with my thoughts. Read in the morning. I'm reading Immodest Acts, which is a book about lesbian nuns in the Renaissance. I was able to really think about the kind of relationships I want to have. Lying organic. I invested in a cat for my mental health. You know,

some of those rich, bougie things that I wasn't able to do. And then I start teaching around noon. So I have one or two students from 12 to 1. Sometimes I take a nap in the middle of the day if I don't have anything between like 1 to 3. I take a two-hour nap. It's amazing. Thankfully, unemployment. Thank you, government. About how many hours a week would you say you're working now? Honestly, just teaching-wise,

I'm working like 12 hours a week. Hmm. Do you see any scenario in which you go back? No. Absolutely not. No. 100% no. We'll be right back.

In the initial period of the beginning of COVID, the spring of 2020, we all filed for unemployment. And unemployment at that time was more than fair. The money from the federal government at that time was $600 a week.

And that's on top of the amount that your state would give you, whichever state that you're in. So for a while, I made considerably more on unemployment than I did working. And I just told you how hard that I worked. So I really thought like, well, this is a good chance for me to just sort of take a rest. I know that I want to go work in a different restaurant. My girlfriend and I were seriously considering a move to New York City. And I had a line on a restaurant job there, the restaurant that I really like and admire. And I was going to try to go work there.

And then the thing that happened for me is that I started to notice how well rested I was. I started to notice how well rested I was. The bags that were under my eyes forever, for years, went away. My feet stopped hurting, and I never had really thought about how much my feet hurt all the time. But they did. My back stopped hurting. I was going to bed at a reasonable hour and waking at a reasonable hour rather than going to bed at like four in the morning and waking up at 11 a.m. And I was eating healthy and exercising. My girlfriend and I were going on daily bike rides at the time all over the

city. We were going out and seeing places that we'd never seen before. Granted, you know, everything was closed. But it was spring. You know, Oregon is beautiful in the spring. And there were all these things that, you know, that I never, ever had time to experience. I also got really into cooking at home because I really do love to cook. It was a hobby of mine before it was my job.

You know, there's this adage that my dad used to say to me and my grandpa used to say to me too, that you should take what you love to do, you know, your hobby, and make it your job. You know, so you get to do that all the time, right? And that'll make you happy. But I actually, I actually 100% disagree with that now. I think that if you take your hobby and you make it into your job, your job being something that you have to do every day, whether you want to or not, that you end up hating your hobby. I know that's true for me. There were lots of days where I had to go into work and I'd just be like, I really don't want to do this. I'd be thinking about it and it'd be like, I really don't want to have to make this food again. I'm so tired of making this food.

tired of making this food somebody else's food the same thing over and over and over so during covid i'd be making meals at home and i got really into it i'd make like you know the best version of some kind of takeout that i could make so like stuff that we couldn't get right like a full-on indian meal or something with naan and a bunch of different curries. And that was really fun for me. And I sort of got to reconnect with this thing that I really do like doing. And I just started to think that this is how I'd like to live. I'd like to feel rested and well like this all the time, not have this just be some kind of little vacation, you know? And so I started thinking like, well, why am I really doing this? Is this really serving me or is it just serving, you know, whoever my employer is?

And the easy answer to that question is it isn't serving me. It's serving whatever my employer is, hands down, you know, For all of my 20s and in the first three years of my 30s, I worked in the service of someone else. And I was making $3,000 a month, maybe $3,200 a month. So it was enough for me to live, no doubt. But you got to bear in mind that that was for 80 hours a week. And so I don't want to have to live like that anymore. I want to have my work be my work and have it be something that I punch in for. And I do for a set amount of hours during the day and then I punch out of it and I go home and I don't have to think about it. I think it's a wake up call.

and I don't have to think about it. I think it's a wake-up call. Once I took stock of my life, I was like, I'm never, ever, ever. There's a whole generation. Ever. They're gone. Ever, ever, ever going back to that.

They're not coming back. I worked at McDonald's for three years. There are people all around me that have this exact same story. I was overworked. You have nights where you just want to rip your hair out. That are out. I started getting more inquiries for online lessons. Was able to escape McDonald's.

They've taken a job somewhere else and now I currently work at Universal. And then somewhere around like five students, six students, I was like, maybe I should invest more time and more energy into this business and see what happens there. Because here at Universal, I get an hour break and half of that 30 minutes is paid. And that for me is so wonderful. Like when they're out, they're back in the school. I had just been having a conversation with my father and he had said,

why don't you go back to school? So they can do something else for a living? Eventually, I want to be doing my own thing. E-learning is such now a huge business.

Our dream is to open a cafe that is also a greenhouse. I have a lot of dreams. I know a lot of people that have made a lot of changes. I feel like I wouldn't have even considered doing that if I didn't have the time to even think about it. I think I feel a lot more hopeful now. What's your plan?

I've accepted a conditional offer of employment with the United States Post Office here in Chicago, and I'm going to be a mail carrier. And I'm doing that because it offers me a regular schedule where I work during the day and I go home at night, where I have holidays off, where I have benefits and the protection of a labor union. And most of all, I'm doing it to be as far away from the tractor pull of work as I possibly can be. well is there anything else that you is there anything else that i didn't ask you that you feel like i should know well um i i was thinking the other day i was looking at instagram and it was you know this uh sort of trope that's going around about these low-wage food places, McDonald's, Chipotle, etc., not being able to find anyone for their low-wage jobs. And it's always something along the lines of unemployment is too generous, and none of these people want to come back to work. And I just, I find that so offensive. I do think that there are certain people that are saying that, right? That unemployment's paying me far more. I don't want to go back to work. It's a

terrible job, you know, and I don't blame them for that. But I also think that there's a huge part that's being left out of that conversation. And that part is this, almost 700,000 Americans have died of COVID. So I think that, A, it's super offensive to think that, you know, why won't these people come back to their terrible jobs, where they're going to make less than they are on unemployment. But B, what's really not being said here is that a bunch of us died going to work. A bunch of us died. So-called essential workers, right? Paid the highest price. So I really, I feel like that's something that's not said enough. So I did want to say that.

When we come back, an update from Katja and Ben. Katja, hello. Hello, how are you? Um, you know, other than like my cat having a skin infection we're doing all right sorry to hear about the cat it's fine he just licks himself unnecessarily um yeah i mean so i guess we just are trying to check back in with some of the people we talked to back in the summer. And I don't know, the last time we spoke, like, I think you were pretty determined to, like, make it work, not going back to sort of the traditional job.

And I guess I'm kind of curious, like, where are we now? Yeah, well, I lost a couple of students this year, So I did have to like take on a part time job. It's kind of perfect for me because it's a receptionist job, but it's a reception job at a yoga studio. And it's in the mornings, like 20 hours a week. Nobody talks to me. I'm totally alone. I go in, do the bare minimum, check out a bit, go home, get paid.

It's great. I think when we talked, you were still on unemployment benefits, which I assume those have ended now. Yeah. Yeah. They've ended. Was that a blow when that came to an end? It wasn't a big blow because I was expecting it. So I just, you know, I just found a way to like make that money back with in a job environment that doesn't make me want to keel over, you know? It seems like a lot of the things that we talked about the last time have actually become like even more a part of the i don't know the conversation more recently like the whole idea of like workers sort of saying you know what i don't want to go back to the way i used to do things like that actually seems to have like become even more i don't know in the water since we spoke yeah i well what, weren't they saying that once unemployment benefits stop, people will come back to work?

But no, now we have a great resignation. Like, duh. Duh. Why would people want to work again for shitty jobs when they can go out there and get better for themselves? But I guess that part is the key part. Because I think what some people were saying was, like, not that people would necessarily want to come back

to lousy jobs with low pay, but that they're basically like, you'd have no choice but to come back to lousy jobs for no pay for the same reason that you did the lousy job with low pay two years ago. Well, but then it's also like the choices I think right now are like, do I go back to a job I might not particularly like, or do I go out into the unknown? And it seems like the unknown is more appealing to people than going back to a work environment pre-pandemic. I mean, didn't I say that people won't want to go back to their normal jobs? I called it.

You are proving right. I called it. You're going to fire the economists and bring you in, although that is an office job. So I don't know. Maybe. Okay. I have to teach a student. Yeah. Go, go, go. Thank you. Bye. All right, bye. Hello?

Hi, Kayla. Can you hear me? Hi, how are you? I'm good. Can you hear me? Hi, how are you? I'm good. Can you hear me? I'm talking on my car's Bluetooth thing. Yeah, I can hear you. Are you on your way home from work right now? I am.

I'm a mail carrier in Chicago. What was it like to go back to work after, you know, having a break for, I guess, almost a year and a half or so? It's been really nice. It's pretty hard work, but I don't find it to be nearly as taxing physically and especially emotionally as working in a restaurant is. It pays really well. I'm doing better financially than I ever have before. Wow. That's great. Yeah, it's good. I was ready to go back. You know, it's nice to feel useful again. And it's nice to

be earning a living again. And I don't mean to say that, like, I don't think that I deserved the unemployment payments that I got. I did deserve them, and everyone else did too. But it's really nice to be earning your living independently of any sort of government oversight. What are your hours like? I generally go to work at 8 a.m., and it's pretty typical for me to get off at about 7. Hours are pretty long, but they're not at night. And every time I go over eight hours, I go into time and a half. Every time I go over 10 hours, I go into double pay. So there were some times where I was working late thinking like this

is bullshit I don't want to have to work for 12 hours a day but then I got the paychecks for it and uh that really made it worth it do you still feel like you have time to kind of like pursue the other things you want to in your life and to enjoy, you know, your evenings and whatever else it is you want to do? Well, I haven't been cooking nearly as much, that's for sure. I'm pretty tired when I get home and I don't really want to stand. And then, you know, I'm still free in the evening, so I'm able to, you know, see friends and hang out with my girlfriend, my fiancee, actually. We got engaged. Congrats.

Thanks. And, you know, I don't have nearly as much free time as I did when I was unemployed, but that's okay. I was getting sort of tired of that. Thank you so much for taking the time, Caleb. I really appreciate it it especially after your long work day yeah yeah no problem it's it's my pleasure okay cool you have a good night thank you all right you too okay bye-bye bye Thank you. and contains original music by Dan Powell. Special thanks to Vivian Rusk, Ben Castleman, Patty Cohen, Neil Irwin, Gina Smilick, Sarah Maslanier,

Sydney Ember, and Sapna Maheshwari. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.