Desperate Employers Calling Job Applicants from Years Ago...

Yet, wages aren't skyrocketing. Strange.

“I was in high school then, I just graduated college. HELLS TO THE NO!!!!”

I find this hard to believe. I work in hospitality and no one is raising wages, in fact we have the opposite problem. Since minimum wage went up where I live, now we have people who've have been in the same job for ten years making the same as new hires. And employers are NOT raising wages at all.

If anything, if you Covid showed employers don't need as many people.

In Chicago and NYC hotels bitch about no occupancy, but the average daily room rates are HIGHER than they have ever been. I guess they want to make up for the Covid losses of last year, but inflation really has hit hard.

My company is bringing back people who quit without notice. As long as you weren't 'fired' for something egregious.

I received an insultingly low offer for a management position a few months ago. They refused to negotiate. I don’t know how they are going to hire someone for a management position at an entry level salary.

Large chain stores are still doing the same pre-pandemic shit. Claiming nobody will work, but then the new hires find out that they will never work a regular schedule, never get full time, and will be called in to work at a moment's notice to work four hours because the computer scheduling at corporate thinks so. So consider having a slave wage job that you are basically on call for at any time, will not ever work full time, be told in the middle of a say a six hour shift to "go home" we don't need you right now, and be treated like an animal by customers and the management.

This hurts employers and helps workers get a higher wage. Keep that in mind as the media obsessively remind us in the coming months that we have a “labor shortage.” The media serves the elite who want this to end.

We don’t have a “labor shortage.” We have a tight job market, and that is a good thing.

Keep em' hungry.......and they work for peanuts.

R7, exactly. When the "free market" is favoring employers, no one sounds the alarm. But once in a blue moon the market is good for labor and suddenly the powers are in a panic. Ironically, if you think the system should benefit employers over labor, you're pretty much confirming the core tenets of Marxism.

Any retail business that wants to survive is going to have to raise wages.

This worker shortage is a bunch of bullshit. They want to employ temporary guest workers at less than minimum wage — which is entirely legal & aboveboard. They did the same thing to nurses & tech workers. Media gets told there’s a shortage & they do no investigation….they just repeat it until it’s the meme. “Nursing? I hear there’s a severe shortage.” I’ve been unemployed during a “nursing shortage,” looking to get work unsuccessfully. I’m retired now. Hospitals used to do their own hiring. They’d put an ad in the newspaper saying which hours and what units needed nursing on which shift. You’d send an application, they’d call you in and you’d talk to the nurse recruiter. They stopped that whole civilized process, handed hiring over to agencies…..nurses submit their CVs to an agency and wait for a call. They don’t know where they’re applying, what the hours are, what the pay is.

You submit your resume and never hear from them again because they just hired a plane load of Filipinos or Canadians because of the “nursing shortage.” I knew many people looking to switch jobs in the hospital I was working at while the hospital recruiter was in Canada interviewing nurses. Then I moved to an area that’s more populated in summer and sent in my resume saying I’d like a full time job but I wouldn’t mind coming in and doing per diem in the summer as I had a lot of experience. Couldn’t understand why I didn’t get called and a neighbor who worked in hospital billing told me “They started hiring travelers for the summer a few years ago and now they only hire travelers for all nursing jobs..”

This is the same bullshit. Republican business owners have decided their answer to the higher minimum wage will be concocting a phony worker shortage so they can get foreigners doing short term contract work. “News” media could blow a hole into this plot by just putting up a request on social media for people to contact them & tell their story of not being hired while owners do a sham boo hoo, poor me. The media used to do things like that in the 1960s & 1970s before Reagan deregulated media so it could all be owned by one or two rich people. Media investigated Big Business bullshit all the time. 60 Minutes would be done a story and even called it “The Allleged Worker Shortage.”

Remember when Trump said he needed temporary visas to fill jobs at Maralago and hundreds of US citizens lined up for job applications? That got a fleeting mention on tv, then it was on to the next Trump crisis & Trump got his foreign workers.

There’s a shortage of slave laborers, that’s the real truth. People are tired of working shit jobs that the owners of these places wouldn’t even do.

R11 excellent post.

[quote]This hurts employers and helps workers get a higher wage.

Doesn't seem to be how it works anymore. "Capitalism" in America only works in one direction and that's in favor of employers and the rich.

It's always great to see the Evil power elite in a terrified panic that the unwashed masses might be revolting.

Fuck them! If you want people to come work for, you have to pay they a living wage and benefits first. You have to make sure there's something in it for them too and not just about making the business owners Richer!

This hurts employers and helps workers get a higher wage

Nope.

You don’t get it.

US employers have been CHOMPING AT THE BIT to do what Trump does…hire EB 3 visa foreign workers to do jobs for less than minimum wage by providing foreign workers with shit housing. They’ve been doing this for years in tech, hospitals and Disneyworld…… plus in my neck of the woods where they hire Eastern European girls for the summer season instead of offering jobs to local black kids & providing transportation.

This is what the rightwingers call a false flag….a sham in order to divert attention from the real problem. There’s no shortage of workers. There are plenty of Americans who want to work steady hours, especially full time hours, same days of every week and same shift every day.

This article is funny because last week I was contacted twice randomly for jobs in fields that I haven't worked in for an eternity now, and I was wondering why they were emailing me. Now it all makes sense.

R16 I absolutely get that and it’s what I was trying to say. Sorry if I didn’t express that well.

I have a folder of eternal job openings - jobs advertised for more than a year that require specific experience and education.

Now, I'm receiving responses to letters of interest I sent out four years ago. And I've moved across country. And none of these positions justify relocation incentives.

I bore you with this just to say HR is coming out of covid in the most willfully stupid passive aggressive manner.

90% of the hiring process seems to be recruiters looking for warm bodies so it looks like they're making an effort.

Any examples besides fast food?

[quote]We don’t have a “labor shortage.” We have a tight job market, and that is a good thing.

It's mainly that "Employers have BUNGLED hiring practices!" That has been their singular problem!

"Hi! Please come work for us for $9 an hour, no benefits, no set schedule or guaranteed hours!"

[bold]Not a true story[/bold] in the article.

This is pure propaganda by businesses to get people to return to low paying dead end jobs. We are still in the middle of a pandemic. Nobody is going to die for $9 an hour. Good for people. Force them to pay living wages.

[quote] 90% of the hiring process seems to be recruiters looking for warm bodies so it looks like they're making an effort.

True. Rather than contacting local people with skills or interest in the jobs, they’re digging up old resumes so they can say “See? We sent out thousands of job offers and nobody wants the jobs! We need to bring in Albanians and Senegalese on foreign work visas. Of course, we can pay them lower wages by claiming we’re “housing them” when we stick them in cheap motel rooms or worker dorms that have a lobbyful of vending machines. Lazy Americans simply don’t want these jobs we’ve been trying so hard to fill (by contacting people 1500 miles away who applied here 8 years ago.)”

Mmmm, paywall! Thanks, OP!!