Comment by rsj_hn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsj_hn | Hacker News Reader

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Could we meet the HN guidelines against editorialization, and call this the less incendiary "Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary"?

Some facts:

* The number of job openings declined to 10.4 million

* Hires decreased to 6.3 million

* Separations were unchanged at 6.0 million

* Within separations, the number of layoffs decreased but the number of voluntary separations increased to 4.3M

within the number of voluntary separations (see https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm):

* Private industry quits up from 3.87M to 4.1M (increase of 140K workers), primarily driven by Accommodation and Food Services (157K more quits. Wow.). The other separations were not particularly meaningful. Next biggest was healthcare (+30K). Perhaps this is due to the traveling nurses phenomena. Everything else was noise and separations decreased in all other industries (in aggregate) other than Hotels and restaurants.

This does point out that the Hotel and Restaurant industry is still being hit hard. Note that just because something is a "quit" doesn't mean that it was voluntary per, se. It could be a buyout offer, or people quitting who have had their hours reduced or are earning much less in tips to keep working. Hotels and Restaurants are definitely hurting due to ongoing lockdowns and reduced travel.

Note that in Information, separations declined. In Professional and Business services, separations went from from 697K to 706K (+1.3%). That is statistical noise.

>This does point out that the Hotel and Restaurant industry is still being hit hard.

It's also the case that my observation while traveling to a number of different places the last couple of months is that a lot of restaurants are still having trouble getting staff. I got into one (crowded) restaurant just before it was closing at 3pm on a Sunday and it wasn't reopening until Thursday. A lot of mid-week closures in the city that didn't seem to be the result of weak demand.

Now, could they just increase wages until they hire enough people? Possibly. But if it's not a coordinated effort, they'll probably lose out to a competitor and presumably higher prices have some effect on collective demand given that eating out is not a necessity in general.

I ate at another restaurant in another city that had explicitly jacked up prices considerably--like maybe 40%. It was empty even though other restaurants in the area looked pretty busy. And service was still pretty bad.

Yes, the problem here is that as fewer people are dining, there just isn't the revenue to raise wages.

If you look at someone like a waiter, he is as busy as the number of customers and the amount they are ordering. If he is spending a lot of time standing around, well, then his wages are going to have to be cut. It could easily be cut to such a low level so that the waiter can't pay his bills and has to quit.

So restaurants can be in the simultaneous situation of not being able to hire enough workers to handle some peak hours, but also not being able to pay those workers enough to work full time for them.

And raising prices again results in fewer customers who can always eat at home or order delivery, which doesn't need the waiter. Restaurants, if they could just raise prices and earn more revenue, would do so. They charge as much as they can, assuming they are well run, to already maximize revenue, regardless of what they pay waiters.

You have even a bigger problem with hotels. If the hotel doesn't have enough guests, it's going to have to either lay off the cleaning staff and hotel staff, or reduce their hours and pay. And again, that could mean that the hotel staff have to quit. Here, too, the hotel is already charging what the market will bear to maximize revenue.

It's just a screwed up labor market when it comes to Hotels and Restaurants.

> It's just a screwed up labor market when it comes to Hotels and Restaurants.

It was a screwed up labor market. Basically, the bottom two deciles working for garbage wages and working conditions to the benefit of everyone else.

If those people can find better work/compensation options, good for them, even if it means less eating out and traveling for others.

I would love to see higher pricing for late night meals or overnight/weekend/holiday shifts at a hotels, restaurants, and other leisure businesses.

This biggest hinderance to adoption of UBI (imho) is the fact that nobody will want to 'volunteer' as the 'servant' class... I mean some will, most who would will do it part-time, most people probably could get by without restaurants. It'd be painful, maybe communities work together and form communal kitchens where people take turns making meals, and maybe they get tipped for the effort...

I'd rather not have the options to eat at places where people hate working, if it meant that person could have a better life, I'd be bummed when I'm craving something, but I'd find an alternative.

The wealthiest people and upper class they probably couldn't survive if the only option was cooking something themselves. They'd probably end up hiring a personal chef for 500k/year, or something elaborate... There's so many jobs the top levels would never volunteer to do, not even just for a podcast or something. Dirty jobs or jobs that just suck.

I consider these jobs basically modern forced servitude. Make no mistake you are forced unless you like being homeless and starving.

I'm anxiously watching what happens, something has to balance out soon. It happened in the 1920s, and I think 60 years earlier... we're just do for a great re-balancing. It won't be pretty, and it'll be harder than any before it (global warming and all) but if we succeed, maybe post-scarcity could be in reach.

> This biggest hinderance to adoption of UBI (imho) is the fact that nobody will want to 'volunteer' as the 'servant' class... I mean some will, most who would will do it part-time, most people probably could get by without restaurants. It'd be painful, maybe communities work together and form communal kitchens where people take turns making meals, and maybe they get tipped for the effort...

Why would anyone need to volunteer to be in the servant class?

The biggest hinderance to UBI is the 50% to 95% class not being able to afford all their normal luxuries since they are based on being able to purchase cheap toilet cleaning labor, due to the circumstances in which the people cleaning toilets were born.

So many of people’s expectations of quality of life rely on them being above others on the socioeconomic ladder, that messing with this ranking is a political minefield. But supply and demand does not care for politics, hence you see the gutted US manufacturing moving to China, and the current moaning about “labor shortages” when migrant Mexican/Latin american labor slowed down due to Covid.

With a UBI I'd probably go back to cooking professionally. Not for the crazy hour weeks I was doing though, but more passion cooking.

One thing hotels are doing is essentially getting rid of cleaning during a stay for "COVID safety reasons." Now, I don't doubt that there is an element of that--and some chains have off and on been willing to trade cleaning for a few loyalty program points pre-COVID.

In general, I'd observe that hotel pricing, while certainly not dirt-cheap, is at relatively "rational" levels in places where you were easily getting in the $300-400/night range pre-pandemic. (And that was for generally midrange business hotels.)

I've noticed that, too.

My guess is that both restaurants and hotels plunged a lot right at the beginning, and now they've recovered about 2/3 of that and that recovery has now stalled. People are still trying to figure out what is sustainable and what isn't, in terms of staffing.

We may not see this industry rebound to pre-covid employment levels ever. For instance, Uber delivery and other services may just be a thing and permanently shift labor away from waiters, and hotels may have permanently ceded market shares to AirBnBs or other lower service offerings. Maybe in the future, daily cleanings will be seen as some kind of odd luxury.

But I think it's all up in the air right now.

Uber food delivery is insane and no way that its a sustainable business. It's absurd paying $25 for a meal that's $10

While I tend to agree--I've never used any of these delivery services--there is a slippery slope where you can also argue that local takeout and fast food generally is "absurd" compared to just cooking a simple meal at home, whether delivered or picked up.

In the higher cost of living areas I am familiar with, there is a material difference from 10 and 20 years ago. The calculus changes when a quality takeout or fast food meal goes from $10 per person to $20 per person. It might be worth purchasing meals when it is a few dollars extra in exchange for saving your time, but when it is a $10+ premium, it changes the calculus for a lot of people.

I don't really disagree. If I really don't feel like cooking/don't have stuff in the house, spending 20 minutes to drive (or walk if I were in a city) to my local pizza place for a $10 pizza or sub isn't that different from cooking--at least for a single person. I wouldn't spend $25 even though I could afford it.

But aside from some pizza delivery in college, I've never been in a situation where I had access to cheap and decent takeout delivery options.

I agree with all that. Whether it's cheaper rates for "serviced apartments" that only clean once per week and tend to have cheaper rates, cooking at home, watching more movies at home, or any number of other behaviors that shift money from one group to another (including the consumers of the services), there's pretty much zero reason to expect that the new normal looks like the old normal.

Just to take one of the most obvious examples, there will probably be fewer person days in downtown offices which has all sorts of ripple effects. And I expect fewer flights to do a quick meet and greet lunch or to have various internal pro forma meetings every single quarter.

I've seen some surveys about this sort of thing but no one really knows what it will look like until it plays out.

How much cost does daily cleaning presumably add to a hotel room?

I'm imagining that the 20 or 30 minutes of labor is the majority of it. So like $10-15 dollars.

Where am I going wrong?

It depends on how consistently the hotel is occupied and how many rooms you can amortize the labor costs over. Quality housekeepers cannot be spun up on demand, so if you are not giving them consistent pay, then they will find something else, but you need to consistently sell room nights in order to do that.

No, you're probably about right on a marginal basis. When hotel chains give loyalty points credit, they give about $5-10 worth. If you do it systematically at the level of an entire hotel/apartment, you can probably save more. But still. Probably less than $25-30 which isn't nothing competitively to slice off a room rate even at expensive urban hotel prices. (Or to add to your profit given that I honestly don't really care much about or value daily cleaning and, to be honest, it can be a bit of a nuisance.)

Just one more cost (from the perspective of the consumer) to take out of the system, which someone was making money to supply.

Hmm, it's been years and years since I worked in cafes, but I don't think cutting wages is very common - cutting hours or shifts, yes. Of course, with tipped wage laws in some states, people barely get paid in the first place[1] so not having customers (and tips) would drive you to quit I'd think.

1: https://www.minimum-wage.org/tipped

The net result is the same. They're not getting paid enough to work outside of peak hours.

Can anyone explain how these people are making money? This is a serious question. It's easy to understand why they want to leave food and hospitality jobs, but are there other industries hiring these workers at higher wages? Are they working at Amazon warehouses?

Yes many of them are. Amazon added a huge number of warehouse and logistics jobs in 2020.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/29/amazon-...

I suspect that a big factor at play is that a lot of ex-restaurant workers realized those jobs kind of suck. The pandemic made a lot of restaurants close and lay off staff without a foreseeable return date, pushing people to seek employment outside the sector.

If enough such people decided not to try to come back when restaurants reopened, you'd see restaurants struggling to attract employees in a tight labor market and the resulting employees being, on average, less experienced / skilled.

Compound that with the remaining employees getting increasingly burnt out working at a short staffed restaurant.

> I got into one (crowded) restaurant just before it was closing at 3pm on a Sunday and it wasn't reopening until Thursday. A lot of mid-week closures in the city that didn't seem to be the result of weak demand.

> Now, could they just increase wages until they hire enough people? Possibly. But if it's not a coordinated effort, they'll probably lose out to a competitor

Or they'll be the place that's reliably open all week!

Some cities just have more restaurants than customer demand can possibly support. A lot of people like to cook and think it would be fun to open a restaurant. Even before the pandemic, most restaurants failed within a few years.

Fixed now. Submitted title was "4.3M Americans quit their jobs in August". Submitters: please don't do that. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

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