Are these new jobs or recently vacant ones?
I wonder how many people have decided to permanently leave the workforce - I know a number of families where one parent stopped working during covid and has no plans to return.
Rather than a few years ago when people's decision calculus was "do I want to trade my time for $X/hr to do some work?" it feels like it's become "do I want to trade my time for $X/hr AND risk getting myself or family members seriously sick AND deal with unhinged people at a time of political strife?" And sure, the X in $X/hr has gone up, but apparently not enough to convince as many people to wait tables as in 2019.
But I think controlling for demographic factors would take some work (look at the drop past 2000)
For example, more old people or otherwise disabled people wanting to buy labor relative to people willing and able to supply it, compared to previous decades.
They always had plans to do it but never enough savings to take the leap.
The fact that labor has seemingly collectively walked away from restaurants en masse has been one of the best things about the pandemic. Of course it's complicated (What about the ability for people to source food from restaurants, what about other economic factors that go into it, poor sad owners who invested all their money, went belly up, and now have to act like the labor they abused, "not all restaurants", etc) but the food service industry is one of the most vile, exploitative sectors out there and the schadenfreude over it getting a swift kick in the teeth has been massive.
Out here in the sticks everything is basically back to normal, though one restaurant that was already on the edge appears to be slowly folding.