Today I overheard a couple of early 20’s people talking about “back in the good old days” when they went to bars and clubs. Apparently they had 6 very good months of doing things after they hit legal drinking age, before the apocalypse started.
I feel for them. Also, they are utter infants and I am so old.
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This. As the creator of this thread, this is a place for cynical humour and devastating realisations about the nature of life and our place in the world delivered by meme.
At best we should skim the surface of tough topics through humour.
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I saw a thing a while ago that broke out a lot of reasons that I thought was interesting:
*deaths directly from covid
*long covid
*becoming a caretaker for someone suffering from long covid or for someone who would otherwise be in a long term care facility
*Care for/home school children
*Taking college classes or extending their time in college
*Trump put a lot of effort into discouraging immigrants so some of the immigrant labor force is missing
*Cost of living vs. wages plus student loans have been an issue for a long time, so people 15-20 years ago deciding not to have kids means few 15-20 year olds now than there would otherwise be.
*(Less of a thing now than when I read this originally) The stimulus checks allows people some breathing room to return to school or start their own businesses instead of being someone else’s employee
That was about half of what was on the original list I saw, but obviously this is a complex thing with a lot of different factors. But “folks don’t wanna work” is nowhere on that list!
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Oh man, as a nurse who is about the let my license expire: BURNOUT too. Especially in healthcare, people are dropping out of the industry like crazy. I think there’s a non zero number of people who as a family are reducing their participation in the labor market. Obviously that’s a position of privilege thing, but part of why we moved to another state was to reduce costs too, and give us the flexibility for me not to go back to work long term.
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Okay, I find this discussion really interesting despite its morbidity.
Tangentially related: Yesterday one of the people I ice dance with who is in his late 50s said that he and his wife provide childcare several days a week for his daughter, who is a pediatric doctor as is her husband.
So…her two toddler-aged-kids got covid from (likely) the PLAYGROUND, which then resulted in her and her husband getting covid. They all had to self-isolate for a total of 14 days - this also meant that there was NO childcare help available to them because grandparents couldn’t come over for 10 days.
So even the possibility of working remotely, which is already a bit of a stretch in pediatric primary care, was not possible for the mom who didn’t have symptoms because no childcare.
So like… this childcare dance - that’s with two full vaxxed grandparents and two fully vaxxed parents.
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And I just had something pop up in my feed about how many subs our county needs for teaching positions, with the subtext of teachers quitting because of burn out from the last two years (plus, y’know, all the bullshit they were dealing with before already).
Subs make around $69/day (depending on various factors). Or those same people could work for Target or Amazon and get over $100/day instead.
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YUP. I just discovered this while thinking that subbing might be a good use of my down time. Turns out it would be less than $10/hr and I would have to possibly cover recess/cafeteria/bus duty as well. Why on earth would anyone want to take on all the risks associated with being in a school full of likely unvaxxed kiddos and staff who have no masks mandate because Florida?
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It gets even better. I have a friend who is a high school teacher in California and they are really suffering for subs. When they can’t get enough subs, other teachers are assigned to cover classes, thus taking away their “free” (I use the term loosely, they use this time fully, they aren’t lounging around) periods to do things like prepare for other classes, eat, use the bathroom… It’s a big problem.
I would argue it is a lot less work than working at Target or Amazon (because apparently they don’t really get lesson plans and teach anymore (especially the emergency subs), it’s more like busy work). But it is peanuts for pay for sure.
ETA: So this will directly result in even more burnout from accredited teachers who will then leave the field causing an even worse teacher shortage.
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I looked into it in our school district for about 1 second after they sent yet another email begging for people to become subs, and they require 5 references! And two must be from former supervisors. Like WTF, that’s a lot to ask of people I used to work with, all for a subbing job. If they’re so desperate they ought to make their application process a little less ridiculous. Like, background check, personality interview, show me your college diploma, ok we’re good to go.
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In the article a sub was talking about a class she took as a long term sub and she had to be out a day, the kids just sat in the library all day because there was no teacher available.
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Yup, for me to be a sub I would have had to provide official college transcripts (sent at my expense) and pay the equivalent of an entire day’s pay for a background check.
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Me: asks on a local group about if there’s a way to get an mRNA vaccine when you’re immunosuppressed and got J&J, particularly because I have international travel coming up
Internet Person: WhhhY would You Travel If You Are High Risk!?
Me: Let me tell you about all the countries I go to with malaria and TB circulating, despite being high risk. And I don’t even have a vaccine for those!
shakes head apparently we are never, ever supposed to do anything if we don’t have a perfect immune system. no matter how many precautions we take. And covid is the only infectious disease out there.
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my friend who had a masters in teaching was a sub in portland public schools for years, and she ran a side business selling cat bowties. She made more selling cat bowties then she did as a sub.
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I think our school district is experimenting with 4 day a week school because there are so few teachers.
At least, I can’t figure out why else my daughter’s preK class has 2nd and 3rd graders in it once a week, or why my friends say their kids don’t go to school on Monday.
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I think there’s a sort of ripple effect where a small disturbance in the labor market spreads and spreads.
For one thing, there are a lot more people in their 60s and 70s who still work, whether full time or part time or unpaid. They do childcare and an enormous amount of volunteer work - which makes up quite a bit of the social services available in some areas.
Plus, even a few deaths can have a big impact in a local market. Several staff members in the Youngstown City Schools died early in the pandemic last year, and it was a big factor in why the schools didn’t reopen there last fall even though that system is under direct state control, and it caused a ripple effect of retirements without a great pool of new people to hire.
I think a lot of economics PhDs are going to come out of this whole gloomy experience.
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One of my DD’s’ teachers sold stuff on eBay during study hall. LOL
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We’re seeing this with the bus driver shortage. It’s having a HUGE effect on transit agencies - we work with mostly smaller and mid-sized transit agencies, and a lot of them had drivers pass away from covid since they were front line/essential employees, or they were high-risk so they decided to stay out of the line of work when service came back. Many small agencies completely ended service for almost a year.
Bus drivers have been older workforce, even more so in rural areas. So now that agencies are bringing back service, there quite simply are fewer bus drivers to hire. And bus drivers are not an immediate skill you can fill, they require licensing and training.
Many many agencies are cutting entire days of service from their schedule until they can hire. So that’s small towns where now no buses are running at all on the weekends or sometimes just on…wednesdays. Makes it harder to hire other low-wage workers who rely on transit.
We had one who got a little desperate last week when I asked if they still were extending their reduced service
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Yup, I just went to look this up for Portland Public schools. The full day rate for subbing here is $224.05.
And to get the emergency sub license “There is a $182 license application fee, $61 background check and a $15 e-licensing fee” Plus the official college transcript cost.
So… you can’t even pay for the licensing with a day’s wages. The wages are high though comparatively.
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My neighbor is considering becoming a volunteer school bus driver because there is a shortage!
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This discussion is interesting. To be a sub teacher in Australia you have to actually be a licensed teacher. Pay is determined somewhat by time in the system/ “seniority”, and my mum gets $400/day last I checked, after being in the system about 20 years. You have to keep up with your ongoing professional development too. The idea of hiring people who aren’t licensed teachers, and also paying them so little, is an interesting idea when you want kids to learn.
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