Commentary
- A journalist who worked for the mainstream media fired in a political purge;
- A professor who refused the vaccine and gave up his job;
- A nurse furloughed and later injured by a vaccine she took to go back to work;
- A young professional who left the city to get away from crime;
- A doctor driven out of the profession because he prescribed banned antivirals;
- A successful businessman whose company was wrecked by supply-chain breakages.
These are all stories of terrible life disruption over four years. There are millions of them. The demographic movements of the U.S. population—away from coastal cities to the South—reveal the fullness of it. Within those large trends are countless stories of sadness, despair, sickness, and also triumph. But they are real stories and largely ignored.
The upheaval began in 2020 and continued through 2022, as people settled into new jobs, new places, new lives, and, often, new partners and social groups. The conditions created by pandemic lockdowns and mandates had diasporic features. Speaking about them in the mainstream corporate press became something of a taboo. Just drawing attention to all the U-Hauls on the move around the country seemed like an implicit critique of the policy and blue-state governors in particular.
From an industrial point of view, the labor markets too went into a seesawing upheaval. Hospitality and food away from home was in dramatic decline until it became the most lucrative place to work. The corporate bubble in mid-level management has started to pop. The hires and quits on record went through the roof as people scurried from place to place and job to job.
Four years later, trends have changed again as most of the displaced got resettled into a new life. And now recessionary conditions are ever more obvious as people look at the lay of the land and find prices up 50 to 100 percent over what they were just four years ago, and are struggling to make ends meet. Under these conditions, there is only one response: cling to the job you have.
That means a stagnation in the labor markets. The data was revealing this along the way even as we all have stories of people moving about and trying to make ends meet. Now the latest data is in on hires and quits and you can easily observe what is happening. The labor market is clearly freezing up as the dynamism is evaporating in the commercial marketplace. Bankruptcy is on the rise and jobs are being culled from the highly bloated corporate management sector.
(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)
Taken together, the record of existing hires and quits is now below pre-lockdown times, and even approaching that which occurred during the depth of the summer and fall of 2020. Total nonfarm hires are now back down to the lowest levels in 11 years excluding 2020, which strongly indicates a further weakening in the labor market. That in turn suggests decaying conditions in industry generally.
Labor participation and worker/population levels are still below pre-lockdown levels in an economy that has stubbornly resisted full recovery.
Over the weekend, I spent some time going through detailed data on job duration and found some interesting trends. The biggest change in job duration among all groups—and it is down across the board—is among married women under 50 years of age. Here we see dramatic change. It fits with what we know.
Many women with children who are preschool or school-age gave up on full-time work given the lack of accessibility of child care, raging inflation, and the overall frustration of trying to balance kids and work. The number of months and years such people held the same job fell dramatically.
Buried in the data are tales of household woe and domestic pain we’ve not seen in generations, as people look longingly back to the 1950s and are in awe of how an entire household could survive on a single income. Back then, that was the expectation and rule. But after 1985 following the great inflation of the 1970s, it became more common than not for women with kids to work to feed the state’s tax coffers, and advertising celebrated the all-powerful woman who could manage a household and bring home the bacon.
Facing the second great inflation since World War II, households do not have anyone else to put to work to pay the bills. So this time, we are seeing the opposite: a reversion to staying home with the possible blessing of a remote job. Such jobs tend to be less secure so people come and go. That alone might account for the disproportionate instability of jobs among this demographic cohort.
Most of those jobs are part-time. They are the only jobs thriving in the current environment, and that is mostly in non-metropolitan areas. In major cities, unemployment is rising dramatically. As E.J. Antoni points out, “Unemployment rates rose in 81 percent of metropolitan areas Y/Y in Aug, while payrolls increased in only 15 percent of metro areas; growth in the labor market continues to be confined to only a small number of geographical locations w/ all net job growth being part-time work.”
A factor that is limiting labor mobility now is of course the soaring costs of shelter in the price of houses and rents. Owning a house is out of range for anyone earning less than six figures, and, even then, only for those out of debt even to gain approvals.
The core problem of course is inflation itself, which eats away the practical value of all wages and salaries and makes it much more difficult to move to a new position. This creates the feeling of being trapped in one’s job, unable to advance and yet unable to bail out for a new position. This is reinforced by the frozen market for shelter, due to supply restrictions.
The nation is headed towards a population frozen in their jobs, apartments, and homes, hoping this mess will go away before it gets worse.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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