We are passing through the retirement of the peak Baby Boom years (approx 1957-1959), and remember that what walks out the door with a 65-year old retiree is about 40 years of work experience. That means you probably have to hire 2 (or more) under-40 year olds to get an equivalent amount of work experience. We don’t have sufficient employees to do all the tasks that we’ve programmed into the system as the Boomers were working their last few years into retirement.

I retired at age 65 back in May 2019 – pre covid. I do pretty good combining my SS and a moderate pension with investments. I did not need a job. However, in early March of last year, after seeing “Help Wanted” signs everywhere I went, I decided to give it a try and go back to work. Specifically, I had never worked retail before and all of the big-box stores were begging for customer service/floor help, so I thought I would give it a try. I applied for and was hired at a local Ace hardware. I found out that I really enjoyed interfacing with the public and because of my knowledge of plumbing, electrical, and general handyman stuff, I was actually pretty good at it.

I quit after three months. Why?

1 – Because of knee and ankle problems, I found that I could only stand to be on my feet on their concrete floor about two hours before I had to take a get-off-my-feet break. That didn’t set well with the bosses even though they themselves mostly worked behind a desk.

2 – About half my coworkers were high-school and young adult aged kids. The other half were mostly old codgers like me. I tried to mentor the young folks as much as I could, and I actually enjoyed working with most of them. Most of them were enthusiastic and worked very hard. A lot of the old codgers, however, wanted to treat the kids as no-load shirkers regardless of how hard they worked. And indeed. After awhile, they decided to treat the new guy – *me* – the same way. NO! “Eff” that! I’ve put way too much time in the trenches of life to put up with bad treatment like that!

3 – The pay was low – above minimum wage, but just barely – and there were no benefits like paid time off or medical insurance at all. I accepted the wage and benefit terms going in just to see if the job would be a good fit. It wasn’t. After the drawbacks became apparent, I did the math and saw that my wage, after adjusting for inflation, was actually lower than what I had made when I was 16 years old back in… 1970!

I didn’t bitch and complain about it. I just decided that the loss of my retirement time and the drawbacks of the job, including the additional wear and tear on the old body simply wasn’t worth it. So, I gave a two weeks notice and quit when it was up. Most of the young people that came and went while I was there didn’t give any notice at all. They just failed to show up one day. (One of the younger guys, Jack, in his twenties. was a very good worker. He was always willing to help out no matter what and he would gladly do the hardest part of the job – horsing around heavy bags of cement. One day, Tom, one of the bosses, and a 70 something old grouch, was giving him a hard time right there in front of everyone for something really stupid mistake. Jack interrupted him in mid rant and said: “Tom, I have the solution to this problem.” Tom said “What?”. Jack took off his red vest, handed it to Tom, and walked out the door, never to return.)

So, I told you all of that just so you might see one side of the labor shortage. Nobody works for free. (…or the ones that do are a vanishingly small subset of the workforce.) The wage and benefit package, not to mention the working conditions, has to be worth it to the individuals involved.

PS: Almost all of my physicians lately have either retired or quit their practice. When I asked them why, *ALL* of them told me it was because government regulations put in place by the Obama-Care regime has made the independent practice of medicine much more difficult, if not impossible, at the hours and rates they were used to getting. So they too – quit!

Certainly did. In Washington the Governor declared an ’emergency’ (it’s still on), and shut down a big swath of small businesses, particularly restaurants and small-proprietorships. Then the State turned loose a flood of unemployment cash, which together with the Federal version, made non-work a luxury vacation for months. The State’s version was so badly monitored that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars disappeared into various scammers. Also there’s been a major assault on the gig economy, with the political object of forcing former self-employed earners into dues-paying union servitude, the better to buy legislators. Combined with the lavish layoffs by Microsoft and other Big Tech orgs, this is a strong signal that the Golden Age is over – the real estate market is making an abrupt turn for the worse.

But automation has been replacing workers…and not all of them low-skilled…since the late 1700s, and especially over the past century. For some perspective on this, see my series of posts Attack of the Job-Killing Robots:

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/60616.html