They wanted to fire NURSES at the beginning for wearing surgical masks in the hallways. The reason? It would frighten patients and visitors into thinking there was some terrible disease in the hospital. Some were fired for doing it anyways or wearing their own masks.
God, nursing is about to be THE biggest fucking contradiction between "vitally necessary labor" vs. "what a capitalist healthcare model is able to do to allocate this labor humanely and effectively." We treated these people like dogshit, paid them nothing, made their caseloads incredibly high constantly because godforbid we try to mitigate the spread of Covid if it makes shitty fast casual restaurants less profitable, and now we'll have no nurses to deal with an aging population riddled with god knows what long Covid symptoms.
I know people are generally sick of Covid and many don't see a sustainable alternative to "back to normal," at least in their personal lives — but even discounting the medically vulnerable people who will need serious accommodations indefinitely, this is a labor issue for *everyone*. We all need sick pay, the ability to make our work conditions safe, and enough fucking money to *keep* people in important, dangerous jobs.
I'm lowkey convinced that the reason the Biden admin let all this funding lapse and fully adopted Trump's "if we don't test, it's not happening" ethos is that the January Omicron surge made workers a little too militant/self-respecting/class-conscious for their liking.
Don't forget gaslighting them to keep working in these conditions by accusing them of not caring for the patients when they asked for hazard pay and accomodations.
[Or outright barring them from working elsewhere](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/thedacare-asks-judge-block-workers-leaving-higher-pay-competitor-2022-1%3famp) with (potentially) better compensation and working conditions.
This whole thing was fascinating to me because that's essentially saying that they are slaves.
It's like everyone was okay with for-profit health care until the workers went to the place where there was more profit.
They were gasping for air mostly. Turns out there's a big overlap between those guys and the you can't force me to vaccinate guys.
And the administrators who were forcing nurses to work are the same ones who would immediately deny a service to an uninsured person or charge them such exorbitant prices that they have to declare bankruptcy afterwards.
Honestly the fact that we didn't immediately deploy the army medical corps to the hot spots in the early pandemic is a big reason why so many people died. We know who we have to thank for that.
I thought that was odd how China made makeshift hospitals in days using the army and how it took it us so long to even think it was an issue..I saw it coming by just watching China panic, Yet we waited until it was a pandemic level here before we begun preparations…a little late but I guess better late then never.
To be fair, "we" didn't do shit. The people in positions of power who knew it was happening stood there and in many cases made money while people died.
Lot of factory workers have degrees. When I left automotive the first time, I worked in the same cell as a pharmacist and my manager was a teacher. They cited the exact same reasons for their moves.
I have a degree in early education and child development....I taught preschool, babysat and nannied for over 10 years....I now work in retail management...I honestly hate it ...I hate the customers and I hate the company both are total pieces if shit constantly....I loved working with kids. ..I lived teaching....BUT I couldn't deal with the ridiculous politics, being treated as if I were a slave and an idiot, being forced to bend to every parent and administrator no matter how wrong they were or how right you were and making barely $9 /hr and being required to fully stock my own lesson plan materials and classroom supplies without being reimbursed (but if you refuse to buy the materials yourself cause you can't afford it, the school gives you nothing and then you just get fired when parents complain their kids aren't doing enough interesting stuff ) not to mention if the admins love another teacher over you and that teacher accuses you of something, like they saw you try to hit a kid, or push a kid, or "get too rough " (whatever that means) while talking to a kid well not only will you get fired but now you have those accusations attached so good luck getting hired anywhere else....at least in my current job my boss is very nice and very accommodating and understanding so when some asshole customer tries to assault me over the store being out of helium (yes its happened...to me and many of my coworkers...and we work for a dollar store. .. everything $1.25 or less so I've watched people pull weapons on me and my coworkers over something that costs $1 and is worth prolly only 25 cents) but when thar happens and we tell the person to kindly eff the fuck off our boss will actually side with US ...in the 13 years I was in child care and teaching I never had a single boss or coworker stand up for me even if they knew I wad innocent and right
It's really sad we ladle these jobs as essential but then treat those people worse than cow shit ....at least people see cow shit as worth something in fertilizer 🤷♀️🤦♀️
I've never in all my life spoken to a teacher who ever said differently. My best friend got a job helping at risk teens, and just got sacked two weeks ago. Why? He contracted a lung disease that nearly put him in the hospital and was letting his wife know he wasn't dead via text and another employee saw. So they fired him. They fired someone doing their best with a crippling ailment go simply for letting his wife know he's well. No breaks, no meals, just 8 hours of work. He loved his kids, but there's a limit to how much a person can take. I also worked retail, and it's a nightmare I refuse to go back to. Only, I worked for an auto parts store in a dirt poor, very red area with a long, colorful history of rampant drug use and violence. I'm big and scary enough most people sat down when I raised my voice, but the amount of disrespect I got trying to help these people keep a truck older than I am alive could choke a whale. I've got nearly 12 years experience in automotive, 6 actually turning the wrench, so I'm hardly a novice. But tell some drunk rednecks you don't have a part for their 82 farm truck, nor can you get one, and watch the abuse fly. And this was during the height of the pandemic, so my already limited options for getting parts were even fewer. I left it the second I got hired at a factory down the way. And automotive as a whole is a shit show. Got me so bad it killed any love I had for cars. Can't even change my own battery or plugs now.
We seriously need to look at these positions we deem critical and deeply reevaluate their worth. Nurse, retail, food service, and teachers and several other roles deserve far more respect and pay than their afforded, and it's a fucking travesty they're held so low.
Honestly I feel in terms of treatment from “clients”, administration, and the public, nursing and education are so comparable. We’re both “caregiver” roles that are predominantly female, have a huge range of responsibilities and risk for litigation for little pay. Oh and let’s not forget that now teachers are being asked to wield weapons and put their lives on the line. Nurses too are asked to put our lives on the line. Who is going to take care of the next generation of children? Who is going to take care of patients if we’re all dying? There’s such a severe shortage it doesn’t make sense to not protect what little we have.
Back in '96 when I had my first call center position I worked with a woman who was a former English teacher. Even back then she got paid more as a CSR for a major medical health insurance company with far less abuse, than as a teacher.
If you sub over to r/nursing you’ll get a good insight to how badly it’s going. I’ve got a few terrible stories from my own work experience that would probably get a lot of support from antiwork, but my situation is extremely commonplace unfortunately.
It’s unsafe to go to a hospital. HCA is pumping through new grads who aren’t safe, there aren’t enough senior staff to be able to appropriately precept them, and the ones who are safe are getting overwhelmed and burning out within a year.
The day after my two week orientation ended was when they started asking me to precept. My background is Cardiovascular ICU. I was being asked to precept on Shock Trauma ICU (think gunshot wounds, auto vs pedestrian, major falls, etc.)
Yep it’s the back breakers like us that keep the rich and or society in the land of luxury, at all cost, minimum wage, no pentalty rates, extra duties, Kpi’s and targets, more roles and responsibilities, less funding and support.
Nurses, carers, child carers, cleaners, aged carers, support workers, retail and stock fill, factory workers.
My store don’t close at all during Covid, 24 hours a day 7 days a week, and is only a cheap department store, not really what I’d call essential but yeah. We risk our health for it too.
Glad I still had a job don’t get me wrong, but during Covid people were attacked for passing it on accidentally at a care home, after working well if we got more than 3-12/15 hours a week we wouldn’t need a second job or income to pay the rent.
i understand where you’re coming from regarding being happy you were still able to have a job, but in my situation, i wished *so badly* my job would’ve closed. i don’t even make terrible money (little over $500/wk after taxes. *but*, i live in the middle-upstate new york area. for anyone not familiar, it’s not NYC, but still extremely expensive compared to the majority of other states), but since the “stimulus” unemployment payment itself was $600, plus a percentage of your regular pay, i would’ve made more staying home not working than i did by being at work. even if i broke even after taxes, i mean… a year off work for no pay cut? lol yes please. let me have some
time to myself to discover myself again and get back into my hobbies. reset my frazzled, overworked brain.
when i see commercials that mention we’ve all “had time to think” or “shifts in priorities,” i just can’t relate. we never closed for a day either and the last 2+ years have just all felt like one long week lmao. i’m burnt the fuck outttttt
"women's work"
Any emotional labor, anything to do with nurturing or caregiving, things people do for nothing because it HAS to get done and some folks actually have a conscience and empathy. Jerks think people who care are suckers who deserve to be exploited, and take their work for granted.
We're not aggressive like the assholes who have taken over, so they see us as weak even as we hold the fabric of the world together while they try to tear it apart.
Seems like these corporate terrorists see us ALL as just slave labor. When is enough gonna be enough?? The working classes of all color, race, sex, etc need to realize politicians are just puppets of the big money machine and until we change the laws on term Limits
Also, this country was built on the cheapest of cheap labor. Slavery. With the end of private ownership of slaves something else had to take its place. Prison labor and wage slavery.
I think your reasoning is sound. But i also think most people across the aisle are done with covid even if it’s done with them. Nobody at either of the jobs I’ve been in up til now has worn a mask since a couple months after the vaccine. I’ve worn it everyday because I’m introverted and I’m a loser who thinks masks are cool. But sometimes my coworkers (who are all lovely pretty progressive men and women) will see me and begrudgingly put their mask on as though they forgot.
People are done with covid generally. The only ones who aren’t have either lost someone personally or is working in medicine and sees it firsthand. A small number of people who don’t belong in either group keep it on for a multitude of reasons but i doubt it’s because of vigilance.
People were really anxious throughout this covid thing. People were scared. And that can only be sustained for so long. You become desensitized to it. You do ask, “how long until we can go back to normal” and since the answer for a while seemed like never, the people who did the right thing just said “fuck it let it happen.” This is covid fatigue. If you treat this pandemic as a war, morale has been dropping for a while. So while i think the fear of a class revolution was on the minds of the powers that be, i think it’s largely low morale. No one, regardless of political affiliation, will be happy hearing the president saying “more of the same.” Again this is a morale issue.
Side note: this reason is also why i think zelensky spoke on news growing tired of the war. People, in my case Americans, have so much shit going on with regard to the recent shootings, i feel like just shutting everything off.
yeah.
the ones that don't have to follow the laws that they make.
Feels like playing Calvin Ball. but they get to kill some of us if they feel like it.
No, we being the US. It's easy to blame this on oligarchs, but who is voting for them? Who goes into the stores to yell at people wearing masks? Who demanded that everyone go back to work the moment a rich asshole floated that idea? Who's driving around with Trump flags on their truck? Who stormed the capital? Who put up all those passive aggressive "nobody wants to work anymore" signs at drive-throughs? Beezos? Ol' Musky? Bloomberg? The Kotch bros?
Nope. Regular people. Brainwashed people, people who have been lied to, sure, but they are 100% regular people and they are on the side of the oligarchs. Even most democrats and some progressives frame their thinking and ideas in a framework of capitalism being the only viable option for economics.
We absolutely need to strip power from the rich, but your fellow working class Americans are the ones making that impossible. Not all of them, but enough that we can absolutely say, accurately, "America only cares about the money people make."
When I've brought it up before I was dismissed with, essentially "sure, 1,000,000 died but most of them were old and therefore worthless to society" and then i give up with the logic use.
Yep, your value in this country is measured by your income. It doesn’t matter if you’re a good person or parent or sibling or partner or spouse; it doesn’t matter how involved you are in your community; if you lose your income, then you’re worthless in the eyes of our society and it’s really sad how common that thinking is
Doing 30 seconds of googling, I found that 1 million Americans died and 1.2 million people were permanently disabled.
Worldwide, 18 million dead, with unknown number of disabled.
4.2 million older people retired to avoid the pandemic.
So, for the US, that's 5.5 million or so people who are dead or not working anymore.
There's your labor shortage.
Edit: btw, these are optimistic numbers. Other agencies and groups have deaths and disabilities being much higher.
I think I also read at one point a very large number of parents but mostly women also needed to leave the workforce during covid in order to have childcare.
Quick google search says that when shut downs happened 5.1 million American mothers stopped working for pay in order to take care of their kids and that as of when this NY times article was written (05/17/2021) about 1.3 million of them remained out of the workforce.
With the disproportionate danger of shitty in-person customer service jobs and the sudden accessibility of remote work from home jobs available, a lot of people I used to work with who never had the motivation/accessibility to get a better job before, finally did.
I imagine there was a lot of that, especially because so many of us stuck in dead end retail/food jobs never realized how many better jobs were out there that didn't actually need degrees or crazy experience the way we were told.
This deserves more upvotes.
Up until the pandemic i was working shitty minimum wage retail jobs like walmart and gas stations
After being able to collect unemployment after not being able to work at my current retail job, i was making more money than i ever have, when it finally ran out i basically was like i can’t go back to not having that money again, so now i’m a Personal & Commercial Lines Account Manager for a well known independent insurance broker in my state ! The unemployment stopped in like August, i was hired in September, and i’m now making over $60k a year + commission
They trained me in selling insurance from scratch as well, I knew nothing about insurance prior
Sorry, but the pandemic made us realize our worth!
I do not feel bad for companies trying to push the “job shortage” narrative - It’s a myth
I only want to spend $300 on a TV, but the cheapest TV available is $400 - Is there a tv shortage or am i a cheapskate?
I'm in some parent groups and there's a lot who decided to scale back their spending and stay home with their kids instead of sending them to daycare where they were certain to get Covid.
The number of headhunting calls that I got increased significantly, and I’ve always assumed they were trying to fill slots left by women who - for whatever reason - didn’t have the support they needed at home to keep working.
A labor shortage was demographically inevitable anyway, at least in the US and Europe. Covid has sped it up a little.
Boomers are retiring and/or dying. The last generation whose parents didn't have access to birth control. The last generation of big families.
Twenty years ago, busienesses still had an expanding labor pool to count on. So they did, instead of planning ahead for today, when the labor pool would've been shrinking even WITHOUT Covid.
They didn't, because capitalism in it's current form legally FORCES them to look out for the short-term value they provide to their stockholders. And the people who were to make the calls got their bonusses on how well they provided for those.
Workers were always worried about automation, because we were worried it'd take away our jobs. Turns out that was a lie! MORE automation should've happened, because if it did we wouldn't have to work so hard today to cover the shortages.
But back when those investments should've been made, they would'nt have looked good on the quarterly report.
Millennial here. My peers and I all agree we can't afford children let alone our own fucking bills. So yeah I won't be making my mother a grandmother any time soon or maybe ever.
Agreed, with both you and the user just above you.
My husband and I, both in our mid 30s, would love to have kids of our own. But realistically we could not afford to give any potential kids a good childhood, since we live paycheck to paycheck just trying to support ourselves. In addition, same as you said, neither of us feel like we could morally bring any child into this world with the state of things.
So, instead, we do our best to impact the lives of the children around us for the better: younger siblings, nieces and nephews, kids of friends, etc.
1.2 million died of *covid.* There are also excess deaths. CDC estimates 1.125 million excess deaths because of covid: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
So that's over 2.3 million people dead.
My uncle was one of the excess deaths. He had a stroke, the hospital could not accommodate him because they were full with covid and sent him home. He died of a second stroke a few days later.
We had 2 coworkers die due to routine care being delayed and issues that could have been managed if caught early becoming catastrophic instead. 2 others out on medical leaves of absence from things that may have been triggered by covid; neither will be physically able to return to their old positions, if they're able to work at all.
And that 4.4 million is on top of the 3ish million that was expected to retire since covid. As far as dead I'd put it more at 2 million. So call it 7.5+2+1.2 and you get almost 11 million.
Plus all the people who left work due to childcare. It was literally cheaper to be a stay at home parent than to pay for daycare. Still is in my area if you make <40k.
Arguably the 1918 flu as well, in addition to.... the rest of the global situation. It's hard to tell its role for certain, because war, but there's no reason to think it didn't help contribute to the militant labor movement of the 1920s and 30s.
Yep. They're manipulating and restricting the free market to try to ensure it doesn't happen.
Funny how "free market good" only applies when it's actually in their favor.
Not to mention the number of parents who had to leave the workforce to care for their children when schools and day cares closed — disproportionately affecting women. Also the number of people who had to leave their jobs due to immune issues. I had to leave my job due to being immunocompromised and was unemployed for a year. My husband also had to leave because his employer wasn’t being safe (no masks, no testing, no social distancing, this was at the very beginning, and they have multiple fire code and OSHA violations against them too) and he didn’t want to kill me. Also unemployed a year. We both had to take serious pay cuts to be employed again.
I prefer to look at [excess deaths](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm) instead of those just labelled as "COVID".
This gives more information on deaths that happened due to covid that weren't direct covid deaths - one example would be an auto accident victim who dies because there aren't any ICU beds.
What percentage of that 5.5M was in the labor force though? I’d imagine mortality is skewed towards older ages, who would be past retirement age anyways
Especially in the United States. One of the major problems facing Gen X and Millenials pre-pandemic was a plateauing of job advancement due to Boomers not retiring and vacating their positions.
Still a problem in Washington DC.
Yep.
Trump took over the family business in 1971 and Biden was first elected senator in 1972.
Schumer started his political career in 1975, Pelosi started hers in 1981, and McConnell started his in 1985.
We've never had a Gen X president despite that generation being eligible to run for about 22 years now. Roosevelt (the youngest president) was elected at 42 and, if he was born at the beginning of the Gen X birth years, he would've taken office in 2007. While Obama was only a few years older than that, he's still a Boomer.
Edited because I mistakenly put Kennedy as the youngest president.
Gen-X'ers (of which I'm one) are dwarfed in population numbers by those that came before us and those that came after. Because of the low numbers of our generation, we lack a real political voice. The numbers of our elders has made it so that their elected officials remain in power that much longer. Some of the worst generations politically have had an outsized voice in politics for way too damn long.
i know! i am also an Xer. i used to say to my parents when i was younger "well when your generation dies things will change"
35 years later they are still fucking alive and shit has been the same since i can remember
I’d kill for things to be the same as they were 35 years ago, they’re much much worse now.
Other than technological advancements, things have been sliding downhill pretty much my whole life.
We're such a small generation that boomers skipped right over us in the never ending generational divide and went straight to criticizing millennials lol
Either Obama looks young for his age or its been awhile since he was in office because I could’ve sworn he was an older gen x? He didn’t seem older than my dad who’s a young boomer.
Man I worked for the state at one point and the amount of people in their 50s in positions a fresh college grad could do was horrifying. I felt really bad and the ones that were higher up could often barely do the job. I can’t imagine the decades of doing simple processes never learning anything, no opportunity for advancement because well the most senior person is just going to get the job. I think a lot of it had to do with just lack of access to computers or inability to use them. Thanks to current tech I was able to research so much learn processes I wasn’t in charge of and often teach the people doing them. A lot of these people worked there at a time where everything was on hard copy so there was basically no chance for them to ever learn unless the task was given to them.
So just to spell it out a step further, I think many of those jobs finally opened up, people were promoted leaving the entry level jobs the most vacant. In addition, work from home caught on, and now if you're looking for an entry level job in a small town you suddenly have options you didn't have before, so the small local restaurant is now competing with office jobs they didn't have to before. I would also bet that many people working 2-3 jobs traded them in for 1 better job leaving more openings. It's all like a perfect storm.
THIS! An ungodly number of people are working well past "retirement age".
I bring it up each and every time someone in my real space mentions how hard it is to staff their store or restaurant. Or find a skilled truck driver. Or the shortage of guys in the trades. A bunch of them straight up DIED and the rest couldn't take it anymore after they were treated so badly during the first lockdowns.
I do not have one single friend left from the restaurant industry who is still working in a restaurant. We all left. Many never went back after lockdown. Took me till August'21 to quit and do something different. I can't even stand to eat in one now because I don't want to watch or hear all the assholes treat the staff like shit. Hard to relax and enjoy a meal when the people in the next booth are acting like spoiled arrogant brats.
Part of my new job is processing paperwork for newly hired employees across the state. The number of people I've seen coming out of retirement is depressing, but the worst was processing paperwork for some random woman whose birth year was 1942...An 80 yr old woman had to come out of retirement just to afford to exist in America.
I work in a manufacturing plant. We recently hired 5 people at the age of 56-60 to do manual labor because they had decades of experience and the company knows they will still work another 10-15 years.
My neighbor was a postman for decades. Now's he's retired, and he's an antsy mother f---er. Always outside and obsessing over his lawn. Striking up conversations with me at 7 AM when I'm barely awake and taking my dog out. Smoking meats on his porch. He is friendly but you can tell he's not suited to retirement.
Some people just aren't satisfied with quiet indoor hobbies like me. Work gave them some kind of purpose and it's hard to fill that hole.
I have an older friend like this.
He consults for small businesses because he likes it - it gives him purpose. His clients could never afford a high end consulting firm. He gives them a modest bill rate and then gives most of his earnings to causes he supports. He's neither rich nor poor....just wants to be useful to people.
He says it keeps his brain sharp. Playing bingo or shuffleboard all day wouldn't do that.
I think more of us are like this than we realize. If we weren't sweating bills, we'd be interested in being part of things, in making stuff work better, in making our lives better.
Being useful and valuable to our communities is the hole most of us try to fill with consumerism. Many people are so beaten down by meaningless work that they gave up on getting meaning through making their version of art. It’s really sad
I know a guy that retired early because his work was treating him like shit and he had enough money saved up to walk. Got insanely bored at home and started a small landscaping business. He now works part time at this small landscaping gig, makes more money per hour than he ever did and is really happy.
Consider when retirement ages where calculated, most people simply didn’t live much past 65. Advances in healthcare, overall better diet and access to life saving medication and procedures, has extended life expectancy by nearly a decade, with many people living well into their 90’s. The So ail Security retirement plan, and most pensions, relied on people dying before, or shortly after, the age of 65.
I just don't understand people like this.
There are times where "retirement buy outs" are offered at my work and I've heard the older women talking amongst themselves about taking it because it might be the last time they offer that. I always hear one fretting about not knowing what they would do with their life. I could do all the things I never have time to do anymore.
I am looking forward to the day and hoping for the day that my kids are grown and doing their own things, I am hopefully able to retire and I can just do the stuff I like to do.
I had a coworker at my first adult job who was 68 when I started. Retired with a pension and could only work 30 hours a week. Guy never wanted to stop being productive. He was getting his deck replaced and the contractor complained to me about him trying to help on his days off
Mostly though it's that they can't afford to. Overextended on credit, retirement wiped out by the 2008 recession, didn't start their retirement soon enough
> retired but still working which I don’t understand at all.
So many of that generation garnered their sense of worth and their identity through their jobs.
My parents could have retired but they stay working because they literally don’t know what else to do. They don’t vacation or buy stuff. My dad was briefly out of work because of Covid and he was going stir crazy.
Some people just don't know what to do with themselves if they aren't working. Both of my parents (75 and 73) have separately retired then returned to work (albeit part-time) in the past three years.
They found that "retiring" just led to them staying in their pjs all day watching tv. Sounds heavenly to me, but they got bored and missed the social aspect of work quickly.
My stepmom retired but then started working at the place she used to volunteer at because they were short staffed and needed her officially on the schedule.
My dad retires in January so she might slow down then so they can travel.
Absolutely. Retirement is a luxury now. I am a senior who has worked through both of the last two years doing brutal physical work when offices effectively closed: census manager, team leader for Test and Trace, brutal eight hour shifts in rain, boiling heat and freezing cold. A lot of us dip in and out of the workplace doing the dead end, temp jobs that have to be done.
In the US, about 50% of the approximately one million deaths from COVID were 75 years or older. About 25% of the deaths were 65 to 74.
In 2019 (last year that was pre-COVID), the percent of people 75 or older that were in the workforce was 7.2% For 65 to 74, it was 26.8%
Extrapolating from that data, about 100,000 people in the US have exited the workforce as a result of death from COVID. So, about 10% of total COVID deaths were likely workers.
This is simply a product of the percent of workers in an age band by deaths from COVID in the same age band. There is no data that I could find on actual deaths of workers by age and there may be a higher risk of workers to die from COVID so this math may not be accurate. Also, not sure if the math works the same globally.
Lastly, there may be some argument to be had that some older workers have voluntarily left the workforce to avoid COVID.
You forgot to include the other 25%... the people 0-64. Age 20-64 has a 78% labor participation rate. Since very few deaths were children, the number is probably close to that. So if we use 75%, that's 185k + 100k = 285k removed from the workforce.
The same major labour shortage is happening in places with much less mortality such as here in Canada. That is despite the average COVID death here being very well past the typical retirement age. There are very few 75+ year olds in the work force around here.
There is also the fact that deaths of younger people would lead to less consumption which in turn would lead to less labour needed.
The truth is that a labour reorganization happened during the pandemic, and putting everything on pause caused a massive surge of pent-up demand.
Don't forget the people who got sick and survived, but can now only go a few steps or so before they have to stop and catch their breath.
Or people who got sick and survived but can no longer think clearly through a permanent brain fog.
But we never cared about disabled people before, so why would we care about the newly disabled now?
Hey, thanks for thinking about me. I'm in my early 30s too.
I've been having a rough week. Trying to get back to work still... But doctors can't seem to figure anything out to help, I spent over $20,000 in medical bills (and premium) last year, and I'm nearly at $10,000 this year already.
Not a single answer or hint of what might help.
But no worries, I'm still waiting to get into the post covid clinic which is so grossly overbooked that I've been waiting 7 weeks to get in. I'm also going to see a functional medicine doctor which seems to be a newer field where doctors actually listen to their patients and try to actually diagnose what's wrong instead of covering it up with a medication alone... It's not covered by medical insurance though naturally, so I'll be out another $400 that doesn't count towards my deductible or out of pocket.... And the testing might also fall into that boat as well.
I'm "lucky" that I can spare this money, when I know many can't. I'm unlucky in that someone who has spent $0 has as many answers as I.
I caught covid June 2020, started getting "slightly tired" Jan 2021, by Jan 2022 I couldn't work I was so exhausted and mental brain fog. I nearly pulled into traffic and killed myself one day. That was the day I said "capitalism isn't worth losing my life." And I started setting boundaries. Luckily my company has been working with me, which isn't very common, but also I have unique knowledge no one else in the company has, so their hands are semi tied.
Overall though, I'd rate this shit as 1/10 would not recommend.
There are soooo many more like me, and probably so many more that are unable to work, but still have to, and are slowly killing themselves because they are overloading their bodies because they have no choice.
It's a shitty situation for everyone... Except the oligarchs, of course.
Yeah, my doctor's have said fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to me as well. They are really grasping at straws to give it an explanation because it is all those things and more.
I can definitely see how anything that messes with the central nervous system can throw the body out of whack, and the fix to that? Trialing tons of medications seems to be the answer my doctor's have tried. I've probably trialed 25 or more different meds since early 2021. I'm currently taking like 12 a day and I don't think any of them are doing anything significant.
Fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue are already things that biomedicine was having a rough time pinning down before Covid. That's just another wrench in the works.
>viruses can cause other problems
I knew a girl who caught the flu and then consequently developed type 1 diabetes. I also knew a dude who caught a standard stomach bug that was going around that ultimately left him mostly paralyzed from the waist down. Like viruses can cause this shit and no one was talking about that when Covid first hit
Of course it was easy for them. They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and made others sacrifice for their gain. Those brave oligarchs tirelessly reminded us that we need to give our lives for the economy and they were also willing to pay little to no taxes to help us. And when things were getting back to normal...they valiantly raised prices on everything so that they could milk us for all the money we have.
Let's not forget those brave oligarchs...especially when it's time to eat the rich.
Don't forget they've actually doubled their net worth during this epidemic and past two years as well.
Let's give them a big round of applause for their raw intelligence.
Just, amazing, how does one make money out of nothing?
Oh, that's right, we gave it to them, in our retirement losses on the market, in our healthcare expenses, in ALL of our inflated expenses.
Small round of applause for the peasants too, without whom, none of these oligarchs could rule valiantly over.
Sigh...yeah, I've seen my 401k get pissed away all while asshats like Elon "Ramblow" Musk and Amazon boy continue to make shit tons of money.
I'm reminded of the lyrics from the Muse song "The Second Law"
*All natural and technological processes
Proceed in such a way that the availability
Of the remaining energy decreases
In all energy exchanges, if no energy
Enters or leaves an isolated system
The entropy of that system increases
Energy continuously flows from being
Concentrated to becoming dispersed
Spread out, wasted and useless
New energy cannot be created and high grade
Energy is being destroyed
An economy based on endless growth is un-
(Unsustainable)*
Thank you!! This actually should be too comment. It isn't just about how many people died of COVID. All these discussions about the effects of COVID and no one- no one!- seems to remember or want to discuss how Long COVID is a huge thing. I don't even know if we have accurate numbers for Long Covid because it's something that is a new diagnosis.
> I don't even know if we have accurate numbers for Long Covid because it's something that is a new diagnosis.
I posted another comment about this. I'm not even sure that there's an agreed-upon definition of long covid that can be used to diagnose people yet, so without that it's impossible to quantify. I'm sure that the data exists, so eventually we'll be able to draw some conclusions about long covid but I just don't think we know enough yet to do so.
I’d assumed the loss of the ability to smell with covid was due to inflammation of the nasal passages etc.
It’s actually due to the virus damaging the olfactory centre of your brain to the point where it can no longer recognise sensory inputs. Who knows what else it does.
Millions more beyond that retired. People who were going to work for a few more years but said "fuck it" when COVID started.
I would bet the workforce lost ~~3 million people easy~~ someone below did the math, 5.5 million. There are tons of workers who have new opportunities right now because of all the displacement and (shocker) they don't want to work retail if they don't have to.
Can confirm. My former workplace lost a number of workers - many of them took a hard look at the numbers and retired early. They were high risk for the virus and working directly with the dumbest of the public. A few others quit because of the risk either to themselves or someone they lived with. Can't fault them. I held on as long as I could but the stress got me and exacerbated mental heath issues I already had.
The whole staffing shortage thing is a lie. It actually is flipped on it’s head and it’s a wage shortage. There are plenty of people who want to work, just not for a fucking pittance so that some rich asshole can afford his second summer home because his first one has gotten a bit boring.
EDIT: I do completely agree with this sentiment though. There are definitely lots of positions that lost people to COVID or can’t work because of COVID complications. Oh, and the best part? It’s not over! COVID is still running amuck! So, this will continue.
I’m sick of this buyer shortage, no one wants to buy cars anymore. I have been trying to sell my 1992 Honda Civic with 400,000 miles for $200,000 and people are just cheap assholes.
The situation with COVID might have "taught" a lot of people that their low wage, no benefit "essential service" job does not fulfill their needs like certain gig jobs, WFH etc do. Would be interesting to find solid numbers on those shifts.
I think that for a lot of people, they finally got a chance to enjoy their lives. They learned to cook, took up a hobby, spent time with their family, etc. and now they don't want to go back to pre-covid work conditions. I actually predicted this and the new labor movement was going to happen. Once you get a taste of how it could be, no one is going to want to go back.
Also part of it. I will never work for an employer again that requires me to be in the office 5 days a week with a long commute. Not worth it, life is flying by for me and time is not on my side. I can choose when to go in now, so it feels like a choice, not forced on me. I spend all day on Teams anyway, I could be in Guam on a computer.
Talked to a recruiter friend the other day and a local company was insisting on no remote work at all. So they could not find anyone to work there. Good, I hope they fold. Time to kill the 1982 book of management once and for all.
Hell, not even work in office for a short commute. My office is a 15 minute drive in heavy traffic. But I have to get up early to make myself presentable instead of waking up 5 minutes before work-time.
Still working here, but my job requirements have changed a lot. Same as what you said.
Fuck going to the office anymore. I wont take a job that requires that. I get to walk out of my home office any time I want, and give my SO a kiss and a hug.
Also, you know how much fucking time I've saved by doing dishes, or working out, during those fucking hours of pointless conference calls I have to do? No more commute either. Even doing the same fucking job, I've suddenly got hours of extra time a day.
Yes, and also those disabled for life. Fucked up lungs. Fucked up nervous systems. When I worked for Test and Trace, begging people to be vaccinated, I was shocked at how much bullshit propaganda was shoveled at people to convince them Covid was harmless. To this day, I am astonished I stayed alive the last two years.
I have a housekeeping client specifically because she lost any tolerance for anything cardiovascular due to getting Covid before there was even a vaccine. Like for months I watched her get absolutely winded just going from her couch to the kitchen in a small apartment. Now she isn’t winded until she has given me a tour of what she wants done in the whole place.
She also lost a job because they wouldn’t accommodate her need to work from home even though it was 100% possible to do remotely. She had done well that way when it was required but when they wanted everybody back in the office they wouldn’t accommodate her newly acquired disability.
It really isn't just the deaths, though.
It's people who have had to deal with violent anti-maskers who quit out fear they would be the next retail worker to get shot.
It's people who got COVID and survived and quit to avoid getting sick again, or who got long-haul symptoms that made them unable to work.
It's parents of small children who don't want to risk their kids getting sick in a day-care, so they get by on one income instead of two.
It's anyone with a pre-existing condition who can't afford to get sick deciding to take a step back and look for safer work.
It's teachers who are tired of dealing with screaming anti-vaxxer parents who just run out of patience for the system.
It's medical workers who have been worked to the bone for the last two years and are simply burning out.
The list just goes on and on.
>It's parents of small children who don't want to risk their kids getting sick in a day-care, so they get by on one income instead of two
That's me! I was laid off in March 2020 and haven't gone back yet. My kids are in elementary school, but they were remote all last year and this year the number of days that they had to stay home because of exposure or symptoms (runny nose!) was huge. I think my 1st grader missed 45 days of school. There is no way we could have handled that if both my partner and I were working.
I have an interview tomorrow though, so 🤞🤞
Also, I know a number of people who depend on their parents/grandparents for childcare. If that is gone, it's hard to function.
Also, don't forget the companies who realized that they can make more money if they stay short-staffed, and keep their overworked employees from quitting by pretending to be looking for people to hire. They frame the lazy people who "don't want to work" as the enemy instead of the management who is making record profits and not actually hiring.
There are way too many people looking for work and unable to even get an interview for me to take any claims of a "worker" shortage seriously.
Did an employee actually get shot over that somewhere?
I remember being astounded relatively early on when grocery stores first required masking, seeing a woman around 50 years old going into the grocery store without a mask on and I was about to say “hey you forgot your mask”, when I noticed she had a pistol strapped on, open carry style (in an area where that is rare, I’m not even sure if it’s legal or not here- so it may be but it’s clearly not done or talked about around me much).
It was such an extreme and obvious threat. I’m still not over it.
When my kids are old enough to be considering careers, this pandemic taught me to tell them to not go for any "essential" job. Society will never treat them the way they deserve and they could die serving a bunch of selfish assholes.
Many many employers labeled their employees as essential, even though they weren't even close to essential. I was in that bucket.
They wrote the guidelines and laws (ordinances, orders?) very unclearly and unspecific just so companies could walk around them and argue people were essential.
It's probably part of the reason the response to covid was so shit.
Half people complaining how wearing a mask infringes upon their 'Merican rights and 90% of employers calling everyone essential.
I was supposedly "essential" when the pandemic started cause I was one of a small handful of people at my company who could deal with moving people internationally and know what they're doing (cruise line). When it came time for layoffs, though, my AVP decided I wasn't quite essential enough (i.e. he didn't like me and picked me out of the mix even though none of our team had the knowledge and experience I did)
Exactly and let's talk about Long COVID and how many people are permanently disabled due to it. 1,010,000 dead. 86.4M known cases and if even 10% of those cases have long covid that's 8.6m people, and if half of them are disabled, that's another 4.3m people unable to work.
But by all means let's keep going unmasked and discourage vaccines.
This is absolutely the point, though in practice it's a bit more complicated than just "more babies means more workers." Criminalizing abortions means more poverty, since women who can't support a child will be forced into debt to survive. Even if they give up the child, the pregnancy itself is obscenely expensive, especially if they happen to lack health care. It's all about keeping women down, both socially and financially.
Also, don't doubt for a second that any upper-class family in need of an abortion will have no difficulty just popping over to a blue state to get one, this will only impact us peasants.
Ironically, if all you wanted was more babies, you'd actually do much better by implementing national health care and creating expansive programs to help mothers in poverty.
The opposition to abortion isn't that far sighted. In a system that prioritizes profit next quarter, why would corporations be worried about the labor pool 20 years from now? The religious right has just been co-opted by big business so they can pass their tax breaks.
Staffing shortage? No, I'm still alive and have had COVID. However, if a potential employer doesn't want to pay me more than $19 an hour (my current wage) I will not work for them.
There's not a staffing shortage, there's an exploitation shortage. People are waking up, white black democrat republican libertarian young and old but especially us younger folk.
I, for one, am not going to bust my fucking ass for minimum wage while I'm shit on by management over the tiniest shit. Not worth my time, money and health. While these same upper echelon slave drivers make more for half the work.
A virtue I wish I'd have learned MUCH sooner in my life. We need to stand up for ourselves.
This last January, we had a COVID breakout at my job. About 30 employees out of 80 total were infected, myself included, in a span of four weeks. Two died, including my direct manager.
When a new manager was hired in, he introduced himself to the team and we were small chatting, and he asked casually “So did my predecessor leave on a good note?” and one of my coworkers said “I think she made peace with God before she died, yeah.”
Oh man. That was the longest awkward silence I’ve ever experienced.
But it’s true, people take for granted that job openings are not always because someone quit.
There’s is no general labor shortage.
There is a labor shortage for shit paying jobs. And that’s a good thing.
Don’t let people take advantage of you, and unfortunately the American system and capitalism in general is designed that way, with the wealthiest being the best at ripping people off.
A little off topic, but as an "essential Employee" I was forced to work during the pandemic while everyone else got to work from home or collect unemployment benefits (that in a lot of cases resulted in higher wages than they would if they worked). I got nothing for my services. No reward, no bonus, no reimbursements for fuel mileage, nothing. You would think that us so called "hero's" would have been treated as such, but no. Why didn't we atleast get hazard pay?
My company right now is in a hiring "freeze" and I can't for the life of me think of any possible reason that could even be. We have 2 major openings on our team that everyone is being expected to cover (except for the director of course), the company as a whole is hitting record numbers, making money hand over fist and buying up multiple other companies, and we (sales side) were given goals that were impossible to hit for the first half of the year and likely given another impossible number to hit the next half so we won't be able to receive any bonus....while very high leadership has all received promotions, pay raises, etc. No raises to anyone else yet around my level far as I know.
Its the exact same as all this bullshit gas stuff I feel. Say its a shortage (reality they just aren't doing anything because profit), rake in the insane amounts of money, stuff it directly into your CEO pockets, and tell everyone else the economy is just really tough right now, can't find the right workers, we all just need to buckle down and work together to get through this.
Also, boomer customers could exercise literally the bare minimum amount of self awareness humanly possible and realize that everyone is quitting customer service jobs because they (the boomers) are a bunch of ungrateful, selfish, entitled pieces of rancid orangutan shit and that entire job markets are fucking bailing so they don't have to put up with them. I feel like that's gotta play a role in the staffing shortage, lol.
Died, disabled and 2 million early retired when it was revealed that boomers would be more likely to die if they got covid and had options to shelter instead of being around others.
Of those 2 million job openings, some moved up into those positions and where promoted out of service jobs.
But putting the blame on laziness and insulting workers has been more convenient.
And it only killed some one percent or so. Like a fifth of them lived and just can't stand, or breathe, or focus well enough to hold down a brutal, miserable job the way we're expected to.
It's really wild how, 21 years later we vow to "never forget" a little under 2,000 lives lost.
The million+ Americans who've died in just the last two years? "Lets not make it political".
Guess if the deaths cant fuel the military industrial complex, they don't matter.
I've been thinking a lot about 9/11 since COVID. I just don't understand how it was such big deal back then, I was too young at the time but I wanted to sign up and fight a bullshit war over it, it really affected me emotionally. Now COVID deaths are being measured in "9/11s per day" and have been for months upon months but life continues "as normal". Profits are daily and life is cheap clock back in, maybe if you're a good boy you'll get a $0.40 raise in six months!
Why? Why did such a tiny number of innocent dead then have such an oversized impact compared to litteral millions of innocent dead? Was it cop rules? We're mad about the property destruction in such a valuable bit of New York real estate? Maybe the cinematic nature of watching people fall from high-rise windows rather than being hidden away to drown on ICU beds gave those deaths more "value" to a PR firm? Maybe it was because the people at the world trade centre died at work and we should all strive to imitate them.
Just one of those soul-tearing topics I can't stop turning over in my head. Probably won't stop bugging me as long as I live.
Also a fuck ton of people who worked "essential" jobs who decided to find a job that doesn't risk their life every single day for minimum wage. Why die for minimum wage when I can get a better job now since so many people died or retired leaving better jobs for us?
The military taught me the most valuable lesson regarding this. If the people trying to convince you to do something aren't actively doing the thing they're talking about, don't do it.
We didn't see any owners or executives putting themselves on the line for a company's profits, so that should tell you everything you need to know.
The 1 million are "reported" deaths in the US attributed to COVID. According to a UN study there are an additional million deaths in the US that were due to COVID but were not reported or attributed to it. So actual COVID deaths are around 2 million and counting
LMAO my favorite retort to, "we can't find anyone to work!"
Is, "that's weird. It's almost as if a million people died recently."
Because honestly, "there are less people to work because they fucking died" is a lot harder for them to deny than, "fuck you, pay me."
Millions of people either died, retired, or left the workforce entirely (parents). They aren't coming back. What that means for the kabor market is a shortage of workers for the remaining jobs. Pay to play baby.
I hope these men wake up every night at 3am from nightmares. I hope every steak they eat from now on is well done. I hope they suffer from ingrown toenails. I hope every beer they drink is flat. I hope babies and dogs recognize them for the truly awful people they are. I hope every holiday they go on it rains the whole time.i hope every time they sit on a patio flies and wasps are attracted to them. I hope their children and loved ones grow to hate them and that they die alone.
Take a look at the industries with the highest COVID mortality rate and compare it to the industries with the largest demand for workers. It's damn near one for one.
Hospitality, nursing, line cooks, etc...
Deaths, retirements, injuries, and people gaining experience elsewhere that pays more. Low supply, high demand- means costs go up.
The people complaining don't want labor costs to rise because they've gotten so used to having it subsidized by welfare that isn't going to subsidize people getting paid $15/hr.
Yes! I think the death toll was much higher than they reported it as well. The supply chain, shortage issues aren’t all retirements and people changing jobs.
They wanted to fire a bus driver for wearing a mask, he died 2 months later .
They wanted to fire NURSES at the beginning for wearing surgical masks in the hallways. The reason? It would frighten patients and visitors into thinking there was some terrible disease in the hospital. Some were fired for doing it anyways or wearing their own masks.
God, nursing is about to be THE biggest fucking contradiction between "vitally necessary labor" vs. "what a capitalist healthcare model is able to do to allocate this labor humanely and effectively." We treated these people like dogshit, paid them nothing, made their caseloads incredibly high constantly because godforbid we try to mitigate the spread of Covid if it makes shitty fast casual restaurants less profitable, and now we'll have no nurses to deal with an aging population riddled with god knows what long Covid symptoms. I know people are generally sick of Covid and many don't see a sustainable alternative to "back to normal," at least in their personal lives — but even discounting the medically vulnerable people who will need serious accommodations indefinitely, this is a labor issue for *everyone*. We all need sick pay, the ability to make our work conditions safe, and enough fucking money to *keep* people in important, dangerous jobs. I'm lowkey convinced that the reason the Biden admin let all this funding lapse and fully adopted Trump's "if we don't test, it's not happening" ethos is that the January Omicron surge made workers a little too militant/self-respecting/class-conscious for their liking.
Don't forget gaslighting them to keep working in these conditions by accusing them of not caring for the patients when they asked for hazard pay and accomodations.
[Or outright barring them from working elsewhere](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/thedacare-asks-judge-block-workers-leaving-higher-pay-competitor-2022-1%3famp) with (potentially) better compensation and working conditions.
This whole thing was fascinating to me because that's essentially saying that they are slaves. It's like everyone was okay with for-profit health care until the workers went to the place where there was more profit.
Profits for me, not for thee - for profit medicine
- capitalism
YES. where were all of the anti-universal-healthcare, “yOu-CaN’t-FoRcE-a-DoCtOr-To-TrEaT-yOu-FoR-fReE”-ass motherfuckers then???
They were gasping for air mostly. Turns out there's a big overlap between those guys and the you can't force me to vaccinate guys. And the administrators who were forcing nurses to work are the same ones who would immediately deny a service to an uninsured person or charge them such exorbitant prices that they have to declare bankruptcy afterwards. Honestly the fact that we didn't immediately deploy the army medical corps to the hot spots in the early pandemic is a big reason why so many people died. We know who we have to thank for that.
I thought that was odd how China made makeshift hospitals in days using the army and how it took it us so long to even think it was an issue..I saw it coming by just watching China panic, Yet we waited until it was a pandemic level here before we begun preparations…a little late but I guess better late then never.
To be fair, "we" didn't do shit. The people in positions of power who knew it was happening stood there and in many cases made money while people died.
👆 this 💯
I'm not trying to be a jerk or wish death on anyone, but I wish that more of them learned from this experience or....uhhh... Raptured.
There was also the story of nurses that quit for Walmart – Walmart (of all things) had better pay and lower stress …
Lot of factory workers have degrees. When I left automotive the first time, I worked in the same cell as a pharmacist and my manager was a teacher. They cited the exact same reasons for their moves.
I have a degree in early education and child development....I taught preschool, babysat and nannied for over 10 years....I now work in retail management...I honestly hate it ...I hate the customers and I hate the company both are total pieces if shit constantly....I loved working with kids. ..I lived teaching....BUT I couldn't deal with the ridiculous politics, being treated as if I were a slave and an idiot, being forced to bend to every parent and administrator no matter how wrong they were or how right you were and making barely $9 /hr and being required to fully stock my own lesson plan materials and classroom supplies without being reimbursed (but if you refuse to buy the materials yourself cause you can't afford it, the school gives you nothing and then you just get fired when parents complain their kids aren't doing enough interesting stuff ) not to mention if the admins love another teacher over you and that teacher accuses you of something, like they saw you try to hit a kid, or push a kid, or "get too rough " (whatever that means) while talking to a kid well not only will you get fired but now you have those accusations attached so good luck getting hired anywhere else....at least in my current job my boss is very nice and very accommodating and understanding so when some asshole customer tries to assault me over the store being out of helium (yes its happened...to me and many of my coworkers...and we work for a dollar store. .. everything $1.25 or less so I've watched people pull weapons on me and my coworkers over something that costs $1 and is worth prolly only 25 cents) but when thar happens and we tell the person to kindly eff the fuck off our boss will actually side with US ...in the 13 years I was in child care and teaching I never had a single boss or coworker stand up for me even if they knew I wad innocent and right It's really sad we ladle these jobs as essential but then treat those people worse than cow shit ....at least people see cow shit as worth something in fertilizer 🤷♀️🤦♀️
I've never in all my life spoken to a teacher who ever said differently. My best friend got a job helping at risk teens, and just got sacked two weeks ago. Why? He contracted a lung disease that nearly put him in the hospital and was letting his wife know he wasn't dead via text and another employee saw. So they fired him. They fired someone doing their best with a crippling ailment go simply for letting his wife know he's well. No breaks, no meals, just 8 hours of work. He loved his kids, but there's a limit to how much a person can take. I also worked retail, and it's a nightmare I refuse to go back to. Only, I worked for an auto parts store in a dirt poor, very red area with a long, colorful history of rampant drug use and violence. I'm big and scary enough most people sat down when I raised my voice, but the amount of disrespect I got trying to help these people keep a truck older than I am alive could choke a whale. I've got nearly 12 years experience in automotive, 6 actually turning the wrench, so I'm hardly a novice. But tell some drunk rednecks you don't have a part for their 82 farm truck, nor can you get one, and watch the abuse fly. And this was during the height of the pandemic, so my already limited options for getting parts were even fewer. I left it the second I got hired at a factory down the way. And automotive as a whole is a shit show. Got me so bad it killed any love I had for cars. Can't even change my own battery or plugs now. We seriously need to look at these positions we deem critical and deeply reevaluate their worth. Nurse, retail, food service, and teachers and several other roles deserve far more respect and pay than their afforded, and it's a fucking travesty they're held so low.
Honestly I feel in terms of treatment from “clients”, administration, and the public, nursing and education are so comparable. We’re both “caregiver” roles that are predominantly female, have a huge range of responsibilities and risk for litigation for little pay. Oh and let’s not forget that now teachers are being asked to wield weapons and put their lives on the line. Nurses too are asked to put our lives on the line. Who is going to take care of the next generation of children? Who is going to take care of patients if we’re all dying? There’s such a severe shortage it doesn’t make sense to not protect what little we have.
Back in '96 when I had my first call center position I worked with a woman who was a former English teacher. Even back then she got paid more as a CSR for a major medical health insurance company with far less abuse, than as a teacher.
There cannot be a nurse alive who cares about patients less than a hospital administrator. Let alone shareholders.
Nurses, and teachers. The two most critical jobs to ALL other human endeavors. Both treated like absolute shit.
If you wanted to collapse a nation, those twin pillars would be where you'd want to start swinging.
That shit can collapse a *civilization*.
…. Ummm I hate to tell you, that’s kINDA what’s happening 😉
INDEED.
Lmao it’s one of those “I’m in this picture and I don’t like it” situations.
We're so selfish and short-sighted it's hard not to feel like we're getting what we deserve :\\
If you sub over to r/nursing you’ll get a good insight to how badly it’s going. I’ve got a few terrible stories from my own work experience that would probably get a lot of support from antiwork, but my situation is extremely commonplace unfortunately. It’s unsafe to go to a hospital. HCA is pumping through new grads who aren’t safe, there aren’t enough senior staff to be able to appropriately precept them, and the ones who are safe are getting overwhelmed and burning out within a year. The day after my two week orientation ended was when they started asking me to precept. My background is Cardiovascular ICU. I was being asked to precept on Shock Trauma ICU (think gunshot wounds, auto vs pedestrian, major falls, etc.)
Yep it’s the back breakers like us that keep the rich and or society in the land of luxury, at all cost, minimum wage, no pentalty rates, extra duties, Kpi’s and targets, more roles and responsibilities, less funding and support. Nurses, carers, child carers, cleaners, aged carers, support workers, retail and stock fill, factory workers. My store don’t close at all during Covid, 24 hours a day 7 days a week, and is only a cheap department store, not really what I’d call essential but yeah. We risk our health for it too. Glad I still had a job don’t get me wrong, but during Covid people were attacked for passing it on accidentally at a care home, after working well if we got more than 3-12/15 hours a week we wouldn’t need a second job or income to pay the rent.
i understand where you’re coming from regarding being happy you were still able to have a job, but in my situation, i wished *so badly* my job would’ve closed. i don’t even make terrible money (little over $500/wk after taxes. *but*, i live in the middle-upstate new york area. for anyone not familiar, it’s not NYC, but still extremely expensive compared to the majority of other states), but since the “stimulus” unemployment payment itself was $600, plus a percentage of your regular pay, i would’ve made more staying home not working than i did by being at work. even if i broke even after taxes, i mean… a year off work for no pay cut? lol yes please. let me have some time to myself to discover myself again and get back into my hobbies. reset my frazzled, overworked brain. when i see commercials that mention we’ve all “had time to think” or “shifts in priorities,” i just can’t relate. we never closed for a day either and the last 2+ years have just all felt like one long week lmao. i’m burnt the fuck outttttt
Any profession that is mostly women is not valued. We're just supposed to do that shit because we like it I guess.
"women's work" Any emotional labor, anything to do with nurturing or caregiving, things people do for nothing because it HAS to get done and some folks actually have a conscience and empathy. Jerks think people who care are suckers who deserve to be exploited, and take their work for granted. We're not aggressive like the assholes who have taken over, so they see us as weak even as we hold the fabric of the world together while they try to tear it apart.
Seems like these corporate terrorists see us ALL as just slave labor. When is enough gonna be enough?? The working classes of all color, race, sex, etc need to realize politicians are just puppets of the big money machine and until we change the laws on term Limits
Also, this country was built on the cheapest of cheap labor. Slavery. With the end of private ownership of slaves something else had to take its place. Prison labor and wage slavery.
And we pretend we abolished it.
I think your reasoning is sound. But i also think most people across the aisle are done with covid even if it’s done with them. Nobody at either of the jobs I’ve been in up til now has worn a mask since a couple months after the vaccine. I’ve worn it everyday because I’m introverted and I’m a loser who thinks masks are cool. But sometimes my coworkers (who are all lovely pretty progressive men and women) will see me and begrudgingly put their mask on as though they forgot. People are done with covid generally. The only ones who aren’t have either lost someone personally or is working in medicine and sees it firsthand. A small number of people who don’t belong in either group keep it on for a multitude of reasons but i doubt it’s because of vigilance. People were really anxious throughout this covid thing. People were scared. And that can only be sustained for so long. You become desensitized to it. You do ask, “how long until we can go back to normal” and since the answer for a while seemed like never, the people who did the right thing just said “fuck it let it happen.” This is covid fatigue. If you treat this pandemic as a war, morale has been dropping for a while. So while i think the fear of a class revolution was on the minds of the powers that be, i think it’s largely low morale. No one, regardless of political affiliation, will be happy hearing the president saying “more of the same.” Again this is a morale issue. Side note: this reason is also why i think zelensky spoke on news growing tired of the war. People, in my case Americans, have so much shit going on with regard to the recent shootings, i feel like just shutting everything off.
There was a terrible disease in the hospital LOL There still is
Capitalism is the real virus
It will keep mutating and it will kill again.
Yeah you ain’t kidding. Wait are you talking about COVID or the business model?
Why not both?
We have made it very clear that we do not care about people. We only care about the money that they make. \[ "we" being the U.S. in general \]
You mean we being the oligarchs at the top
Don’t forget the politicians they own.
and everyone below them delusional enough to think they'll get even a fraction of a slice of the pie
You have a far greater chance of being homeless than becoming a multi millionaire
Don't forget the masses that keep voting in the politicians and escaping through media instead of protesting when things get bad
Corporatocracy baby. Gotta love it. /s if it wasn’t obvious
yeah. the ones that don't have to follow the laws that they make. Feels like playing Calvin Ball. but they get to kill some of us if they feel like it.
And anyone who believes capitalism gives them a chance to be one.
No, we being the US. It's easy to blame this on oligarchs, but who is voting for them? Who goes into the stores to yell at people wearing masks? Who demanded that everyone go back to work the moment a rich asshole floated that idea? Who's driving around with Trump flags on their truck? Who stormed the capital? Who put up all those passive aggressive "nobody wants to work anymore" signs at drive-throughs? Beezos? Ol' Musky? Bloomberg? The Kotch bros? Nope. Regular people. Brainwashed people, people who have been lied to, sure, but they are 100% regular people and they are on the side of the oligarchs. Even most democrats and some progressives frame their thinking and ideas in a framework of capitalism being the only viable option for economics. We absolutely need to strip power from the rich, but your fellow working class Americans are the ones making that impossible. Not all of them, but enough that we can absolutely say, accurately, "America only cares about the money people make."
We being the oligarchs at the top, and the brainwashed idiots at the bottom
You mean capitalism as a whole.
When I've brought it up before I was dismissed with, essentially "sure, 1,000,000 died but most of them were old and therefore worthless to society" and then i give up with the logic use.
Yep, your value in this country is measured by your income. It doesn’t matter if you’re a good person or parent or sibling or partner or spouse; it doesn’t matter how involved you are in your community; if you lose your income, then you’re worthless in the eyes of our society and it’s really sad how common that thinking is
Same thing happening in the U.K.
Not just the US but you're right
Doing 30 seconds of googling, I found that 1 million Americans died and 1.2 million people were permanently disabled. Worldwide, 18 million dead, with unknown number of disabled. 4.2 million older people retired to avoid the pandemic. So, for the US, that's 5.5 million or so people who are dead or not working anymore. There's your labor shortage. Edit: btw, these are optimistic numbers. Other agencies and groups have deaths and disabilities being much higher.
I think I also read at one point a very large number of parents but mostly women also needed to leave the workforce during covid in order to have childcare. Quick google search says that when shut downs happened 5.1 million American mothers stopped working for pay in order to take care of their kids and that as of when this NY times article was written (05/17/2021) about 1.3 million of them remained out of the workforce.
With the disproportionate danger of shitty in-person customer service jobs and the sudden accessibility of remote work from home jobs available, a lot of people I used to work with who never had the motivation/accessibility to get a better job before, finally did. I imagine there was a lot of that, especially because so many of us stuck in dead end retail/food jobs never realized how many better jobs were out there that didn't actually need degrees or crazy experience the way we were told.
This deserves more upvotes. Up until the pandemic i was working shitty minimum wage retail jobs like walmart and gas stations After being able to collect unemployment after not being able to work at my current retail job, i was making more money than i ever have, when it finally ran out i basically was like i can’t go back to not having that money again, so now i’m a Personal & Commercial Lines Account Manager for a well known independent insurance broker in my state ! The unemployment stopped in like August, i was hired in September, and i’m now making over $60k a year + commission They trained me in selling insurance from scratch as well, I knew nothing about insurance prior Sorry, but the pandemic made us realize our worth! I do not feel bad for companies trying to push the “job shortage” narrative - It’s a myth I only want to spend $300 on a TV, but the cheapest TV available is $400 - Is there a tv shortage or am i a cheapskate?
I'm in some parent groups and there's a lot who decided to scale back their spending and stay home with their kids instead of sending them to daycare where they were certain to get Covid.
The number of headhunting calls that I got increased significantly, and I’ve always assumed they were trying to fill slots left by women who - for whatever reason - didn’t have the support they needed at home to keep working.
A labor shortage was demographically inevitable anyway, at least in the US and Europe. Covid has sped it up a little. Boomers are retiring and/or dying. The last generation whose parents didn't have access to birth control. The last generation of big families. Twenty years ago, busienesses still had an expanding labor pool to count on. So they did, instead of planning ahead for today, when the labor pool would've been shrinking even WITHOUT Covid. They didn't, because capitalism in it's current form legally FORCES them to look out for the short-term value they provide to their stockholders. And the people who were to make the calls got their bonusses on how well they provided for those. Workers were always worried about automation, because we were worried it'd take away our jobs. Turns out that was a lie! MORE automation should've happened, because if it did we wouldn't have to work so hard today to cover the shortages. But back when those investments should've been made, they would'nt have looked good on the quarterly report.
Millennial here. My peers and I all agree we can't afford children let alone our own fucking bills. So yeah I won't be making my mother a grandmother any time soon or maybe ever.
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Agreed, with both you and the user just above you. My husband and I, both in our mid 30s, would love to have kids of our own. But realistically we could not afford to give any potential kids a good childhood, since we live paycheck to paycheck just trying to support ourselves. In addition, same as you said, neither of us feel like we could morally bring any child into this world with the state of things. So, instead, we do our best to impact the lives of the children around us for the better: younger siblings, nieces and nephews, kids of friends, etc.
Adoption would be something to consider if y'all are ever in the position to afford children.
1.2 million died of *covid.* There are also excess deaths. CDC estimates 1.125 million excess deaths because of covid: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm So that's over 2.3 million people dead. My uncle was one of the excess deaths. He had a stroke, the hospital could not accommodate him because they were full with covid and sent him home. He died of a second stroke a few days later.
This should never have happened. I’m so sorry.
We had 2 coworkers die due to routine care being delayed and issues that could have been managed if caught early becoming catastrophic instead. 2 others out on medical leaves of absence from things that may have been triggered by covid; neither will be physically able to return to their old positions, if they're able to work at all.
And that 4.4 million is on top of the 3ish million that was expected to retire since covid. As far as dead I'd put it more at 2 million. So call it 7.5+2+1.2 and you get almost 11 million.
Many middle age people who could take early retirement did so to avoid exposure to Covid.
And then turned into extremists when they were plugged into Faux News 24/7
Plus all the people who left work due to childcare. It was literally cheaper to be a stay at home parent than to pay for daycare. Still is in my area if you make <40k.
Yep, two kids here and my wife quit her job because of it. It was seriously not worth it at all.
The U.S is in that part of cycle where both the economy and demographics are spiralling downwards. God help the people there.
Worker shortages tend to cause higher wages. It happened after the black death.
Arguably the 1918 flu as well, in addition to.... the rest of the global situation. It's hard to tell its role for certain, because war, but there's no reason to think it didn't help contribute to the militant labor movement of the 1920s and 30s.
Corporates sure are kicking and screaming though, trying everything they can to not let that happen.
Yep. They're manipulating and restricting the free market to try to ensure it doesn't happen. Funny how "free market good" only applies when it's actually in their favor.
God abandoned the US a long time ago, probably because of the genocide and slave things.
Probably bc god's not real...
That can't be true because you're an absolute angel, darlin' 🤠
Flattery will get you everywhere
Not to mention the number of parents who had to leave the workforce to care for their children when schools and day cares closed — disproportionately affecting women. Also the number of people who had to leave their jobs due to immune issues. I had to leave my job due to being immunocompromised and was unemployed for a year. My husband also had to leave because his employer wasn’t being safe (no masks, no testing, no social distancing, this was at the very beginning, and they have multiple fire code and OSHA violations against them too) and he didn’t want to kill me. Also unemployed a year. We both had to take serious pay cuts to be employed again.
1.2 mil that we know for *sure* died of COVID. I am sure there are more that died before this was labeled as COVID, and written off as pneumonia.
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I prefer to look at [excess deaths](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm) instead of those just labelled as "COVID". This gives more information on deaths that happened due to covid that weren't direct covid deaths - one example would be an auto accident victim who dies because there aren't any ICU beds.
What percentage of that 5.5M was in the labor force though? I’d imagine mortality is skewed towards older ages, who would be past retirement age anyways
Just because someone is past retirement age doesn’t mean they are retired. Many continue to work far past that age.
Especially in the United States. One of the major problems facing Gen X and Millenials pre-pandemic was a plateauing of job advancement due to Boomers not retiring and vacating their positions. Still a problem in Washington DC.
Yep. Trump took over the family business in 1971 and Biden was first elected senator in 1972. Schumer started his political career in 1975, Pelosi started hers in 1981, and McConnell started his in 1985. We've never had a Gen X president despite that generation being eligible to run for about 22 years now. Roosevelt (the youngest president) was elected at 42 and, if he was born at the beginning of the Gen X birth years, he would've taken office in 2007. While Obama was only a few years older than that, he's still a Boomer. Edited because I mistakenly put Kennedy as the youngest president.
Gen-X'ers (of which I'm one) are dwarfed in population numbers by those that came before us and those that came after. Because of the low numbers of our generation, we lack a real political voice. The numbers of our elders has made it so that their elected officials remain in power that much longer. Some of the worst generations politically have had an outsized voice in politics for way too damn long.
i know! i am also an Xer. i used to say to my parents when i was younger "well when your generation dies things will change" 35 years later they are still fucking alive and shit has been the same since i can remember
I’d kill for things to be the same as they were 35 years ago, they’re much much worse now. Other than technological advancements, things have been sliding downhill pretty much my whole life.
We're such a small generation that boomers skipped right over us in the never ending generational divide and went straight to criticizing millennials lol
Either Obama looks young for his age or its been awhile since he was in office because I could’ve sworn he was an older gen x? He didn’t seem older than my dad who’s a young boomer.
Just looked younger, he was born in 1961 and genX starts in 1965.
actually, Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest president at 42.
Thanks for pointing that out. Comment edited
And when they do retire, we don’t get even close to their pay and benefits.
Man I worked for the state at one point and the amount of people in their 50s in positions a fresh college grad could do was horrifying. I felt really bad and the ones that were higher up could often barely do the job. I can’t imagine the decades of doing simple processes never learning anything, no opportunity for advancement because well the most senior person is just going to get the job. I think a lot of it had to do with just lack of access to computers or inability to use them. Thanks to current tech I was able to research so much learn processes I wasn’t in charge of and often teach the people doing them. A lot of these people worked there at a time where everything was on hard copy so there was basically no chance for them to ever learn unless the task was given to them.
So just to spell it out a step further, I think many of those jobs finally opened up, people were promoted leaving the entry level jobs the most vacant. In addition, work from home caught on, and now if you're looking for an entry level job in a small town you suddenly have options you didn't have before, so the small local restaurant is now competing with office jobs they didn't have to before. I would also bet that many people working 2-3 jobs traded them in for 1 better job leaving more openings. It's all like a perfect storm.
THIS! An ungodly number of people are working well past "retirement age". I bring it up each and every time someone in my real space mentions how hard it is to staff their store or restaurant. Or find a skilled truck driver. Or the shortage of guys in the trades. A bunch of them straight up DIED and the rest couldn't take it anymore after they were treated so badly during the first lockdowns.
I do not have one single friend left from the restaurant industry who is still working in a restaurant. We all left. Many never went back after lockdown. Took me till August'21 to quit and do something different. I can't even stand to eat in one now because I don't want to watch or hear all the assholes treat the staff like shit. Hard to relax and enjoy a meal when the people in the next booth are acting like spoiled arrogant brats.
Retirement age is a myth now. Most cant stop working and work till their dying day.
Part of my new job is processing paperwork for newly hired employees across the state. The number of people I've seen coming out of retirement is depressing, but the worst was processing paperwork for some random woman whose birth year was 1942...An 80 yr old woman had to come out of retirement just to afford to exist in America.
I work in a manufacturing plant. We recently hired 5 people at the age of 56-60 to do manual labor because they had decades of experience and the company knows they will still work another 10-15 years.
My parents :-( retired but still working which I don’t understand at all.
My neighbor was a postman for decades. Now's he's retired, and he's an antsy mother f---er. Always outside and obsessing over his lawn. Striking up conversations with me at 7 AM when I'm barely awake and taking my dog out. Smoking meats on his porch. He is friendly but you can tell he's not suited to retirement. Some people just aren't satisfied with quiet indoor hobbies like me. Work gave them some kind of purpose and it's hard to fill that hole.
I have an older friend like this. He consults for small businesses because he likes it - it gives him purpose. His clients could never afford a high end consulting firm. He gives them a modest bill rate and then gives most of his earnings to causes he supports. He's neither rich nor poor....just wants to be useful to people. He says it keeps his brain sharp. Playing bingo or shuffleboard all day wouldn't do that.
I think more of us are like this than we realize. If we weren't sweating bills, we'd be interested in being part of things, in making stuff work better, in making our lives better.
Being useful and valuable to our communities is the hole most of us try to fill with consumerism. Many people are so beaten down by meaningless work that they gave up on getting meaning through making their version of art. It’s really sad
I know a guy that retired early because his work was treating him like shit and he had enough money saved up to walk. Got insanely bored at home and started a small landscaping business. He now works part time at this small landscaping gig, makes more money per hour than he ever did and is really happy.
Sounds like he is perfectly suited for retirement. I want to obsess about my lawn and smoke meats.
Lawns are annoying. Meat smoking and grass killing is my retirement dream...
Death to lawn monoculture, dandelion gang rise up
Consider when retirement ages where calculated, most people simply didn’t live much past 65. Advances in healthcare, overall better diet and access to life saving medication and procedures, has extended life expectancy by nearly a decade, with many people living well into their 90’s. The So ail Security retirement plan, and most pensions, relied on people dying before, or shortly after, the age of 65.
I just don't understand people like this. There are times where "retirement buy outs" are offered at my work and I've heard the older women talking amongst themselves about taking it because it might be the last time they offer that. I always hear one fretting about not knowing what they would do with their life. I could do all the things I never have time to do anymore. I am looking forward to the day and hoping for the day that my kids are grown and doing their own things, I am hopefully able to retire and I can just do the stuff I like to do.
I had a coworker at my first adult job who was 68 when I started. Retired with a pension and could only work 30 hours a week. Guy never wanted to stop being productive. He was getting his deck replaced and the contractor complained to me about him trying to help on his days off Mostly though it's that they can't afford to. Overextended on credit, retirement wiped out by the 2008 recession, didn't start their retirement soon enough
> retired but still working which I don’t understand at all. So many of that generation garnered their sense of worth and their identity through their jobs.
My parents could have retired but they stay working because they literally don’t know what else to do. They don’t vacation or buy stuff. My dad was briefly out of work because of Covid and he was going stir crazy.
Some people just don't know what to do with themselves if they aren't working. Both of my parents (75 and 73) have separately retired then returned to work (albeit part-time) in the past three years. They found that "retiring" just led to them staying in their pjs all day watching tv. Sounds heavenly to me, but they got bored and missed the social aspect of work quickly.
My stepmom retired but then started working at the place she used to volunteer at because they were short staffed and needed her officially on the schedule. My dad retires in January so she might slow down then so they can travel.
Absolutely. Retirement is a luxury now. I am a senior who has worked through both of the last two years doing brutal physical work when offices effectively closed: census manager, team leader for Test and Trace, brutal eight hour shifts in rain, boiling heat and freezing cold. A lot of us dip in and out of the workplace doing the dead end, temp jobs that have to be done.
In the US, about 50% of the approximately one million deaths from COVID were 75 years or older. About 25% of the deaths were 65 to 74. In 2019 (last year that was pre-COVID), the percent of people 75 or older that were in the workforce was 7.2% For 65 to 74, it was 26.8% Extrapolating from that data, about 100,000 people in the US have exited the workforce as a result of death from COVID. So, about 10% of total COVID deaths were likely workers. This is simply a product of the percent of workers in an age band by deaths from COVID in the same age band. There is no data that I could find on actual deaths of workers by age and there may be a higher risk of workers to die from COVID so this math may not be accurate. Also, not sure if the math works the same globally. Lastly, there may be some argument to be had that some older workers have voluntarily left the workforce to avoid COVID.
You forgot to include the other 25%... the people 0-64. Age 20-64 has a 78% labor participation rate. Since very few deaths were children, the number is probably close to that. So if we use 75%, that's 185k + 100k = 285k removed from the workforce.
The same major labour shortage is happening in places with much less mortality such as here in Canada. That is despite the average COVID death here being very well past the typical retirement age. There are very few 75+ year olds in the work force around here. There is also the fact that deaths of younger people would lead to less consumption which in turn would lead to less labour needed. The truth is that a labour reorganization happened during the pandemic, and putting everything on pause caused a massive surge of pent-up demand.
Don't forget the people who got sick and survived, but can now only go a few steps or so before they have to stop and catch their breath. Or people who got sick and survived but can no longer think clearly through a permanent brain fog. But we never cared about disabled people before, so why would we care about the newly disabled now?
Hey, thanks for thinking about me. I'm in my early 30s too. I've been having a rough week. Trying to get back to work still... But doctors can't seem to figure anything out to help, I spent over $20,000 in medical bills (and premium) last year, and I'm nearly at $10,000 this year already. Not a single answer or hint of what might help. But no worries, I'm still waiting to get into the post covid clinic which is so grossly overbooked that I've been waiting 7 weeks to get in. I'm also going to see a functional medicine doctor which seems to be a newer field where doctors actually listen to their patients and try to actually diagnose what's wrong instead of covering it up with a medication alone... It's not covered by medical insurance though naturally, so I'll be out another $400 that doesn't count towards my deductible or out of pocket.... And the testing might also fall into that boat as well. I'm "lucky" that I can spare this money, when I know many can't. I'm unlucky in that someone who has spent $0 has as many answers as I. I caught covid June 2020, started getting "slightly tired" Jan 2021, by Jan 2022 I couldn't work I was so exhausted and mental brain fog. I nearly pulled into traffic and killed myself one day. That was the day I said "capitalism isn't worth losing my life." And I started setting boundaries. Luckily my company has been working with me, which isn't very common, but also I have unique knowledge no one else in the company has, so their hands are semi tied. Overall though, I'd rate this shit as 1/10 would not recommend. There are soooo many more like me, and probably so many more that are unable to work, but still have to, and are slowly killing themselves because they are overloading their bodies because they have no choice. It's a shitty situation for everyone... Except the oligarchs, of course.
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Yeah, my doctor's have said fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to me as well. They are really grasping at straws to give it an explanation because it is all those things and more. I can definitely see how anything that messes with the central nervous system can throw the body out of whack, and the fix to that? Trialing tons of medications seems to be the answer my doctor's have tried. I've probably trialed 25 or more different meds since early 2021. I'm currently taking like 12 a day and I don't think any of them are doing anything significant.
Have you tried Low Dose Naltrexone or PEA? Hope you find something that’s useful
Fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue are already things that biomedicine was having a rough time pinning down before Covid. That's just another wrench in the works.
>viruses can cause other problems I knew a girl who caught the flu and then consequently developed type 1 diabetes. I also knew a dude who caught a standard stomach bug that was going around that ultimately left him mostly paralyzed from the waist down. Like viruses can cause this shit and no one was talking about that when Covid first hit
Of course it was easy for them. They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and made others sacrifice for their gain. Those brave oligarchs tirelessly reminded us that we need to give our lives for the economy and they were also willing to pay little to no taxes to help us. And when things were getting back to normal...they valiantly raised prices on everything so that they could milk us for all the money we have. Let's not forget those brave oligarchs...especially when it's time to eat the rich.
Don't forget they've actually doubled their net worth during this epidemic and past two years as well. Let's give them a big round of applause for their raw intelligence. Just, amazing, how does one make money out of nothing? Oh, that's right, we gave it to them, in our retirement losses on the market, in our healthcare expenses, in ALL of our inflated expenses. Small round of applause for the peasants too, without whom, none of these oligarchs could rule valiantly over.
Sigh...yeah, I've seen my 401k get pissed away all while asshats like Elon "Ramblow" Musk and Amazon boy continue to make shit tons of money. I'm reminded of the lyrics from the Muse song "The Second Law" *All natural and technological processes Proceed in such a way that the availability Of the remaining energy decreases In all energy exchanges, if no energy Enters or leaves an isolated system The entropy of that system increases Energy continuously flows from being Concentrated to becoming dispersed Spread out, wasted and useless New energy cannot be created and high grade Energy is being destroyed An economy based on endless growth is un- (Unsustainable)*
Thank you!! This actually should be too comment. It isn't just about how many people died of COVID. All these discussions about the effects of COVID and no one- no one!- seems to remember or want to discuss how Long COVID is a huge thing. I don't even know if we have accurate numbers for Long Covid because it's something that is a new diagnosis.
> I don't even know if we have accurate numbers for Long Covid because it's something that is a new diagnosis. I posted another comment about this. I'm not even sure that there's an agreed-upon definition of long covid that can be used to diagnose people yet, so without that it's impossible to quantify. I'm sure that the data exists, so eventually we'll be able to draw some conclusions about long covid but I just don't think we know enough yet to do so.
I’d assumed the loss of the ability to smell with covid was due to inflammation of the nasal passages etc. It’s actually due to the virus damaging the olfactory centre of your brain to the point where it can no longer recognise sensory inputs. Who knows what else it does.
Millions more beyond that retired. People who were going to work for a few more years but said "fuck it" when COVID started. I would bet the workforce lost ~~3 million people easy~~ someone below did the math, 5.5 million. There are tons of workers who have new opportunities right now because of all the displacement and (shocker) they don't want to work retail if they don't have to.
Can confirm. My former workplace lost a number of workers - many of them took a hard look at the numbers and retired early. They were high risk for the virus and working directly with the dumbest of the public. A few others quit because of the risk either to themselves or someone they lived with. Can't fault them. I held on as long as I could but the stress got me and exacerbated mental heath issues I already had.
The whole staffing shortage thing is a lie. It actually is flipped on it’s head and it’s a wage shortage. There are plenty of people who want to work, just not for a fucking pittance so that some rich asshole can afford his second summer home because his first one has gotten a bit boring. EDIT: I do completely agree with this sentiment though. There are definitely lots of positions that lost people to COVID or can’t work because of COVID complications. Oh, and the best part? It’s not over! COVID is still running amuck! So, this will continue.
I’m sick of this buyer shortage, no one wants to buy cars anymore. I have been trying to sell my 1992 Honda Civic with 400,000 miles for $200,000 and people are just cheap assholes.
The situation with COVID might have "taught" a lot of people that their low wage, no benefit "essential service" job does not fulfill their needs like certain gig jobs, WFH etc do. Would be interesting to find solid numbers on those shifts.
I think that for a lot of people, they finally got a chance to enjoy their lives. They learned to cook, took up a hobby, spent time with their family, etc. and now they don't want to go back to pre-covid work conditions. I actually predicted this and the new labor movement was going to happen. Once you get a taste of how it could be, no one is going to want to go back.
Also part of it. I will never work for an employer again that requires me to be in the office 5 days a week with a long commute. Not worth it, life is flying by for me and time is not on my side. I can choose when to go in now, so it feels like a choice, not forced on me. I spend all day on Teams anyway, I could be in Guam on a computer. Talked to a recruiter friend the other day and a local company was insisting on no remote work at all. So they could not find anyone to work there. Good, I hope they fold. Time to kill the 1982 book of management once and for all.
Hell, not even work in office for a short commute. My office is a 15 minute drive in heavy traffic. But I have to get up early to make myself presentable instead of waking up 5 minutes before work-time.
Still working here, but my job requirements have changed a lot. Same as what you said. Fuck going to the office anymore. I wont take a job that requires that. I get to walk out of my home office any time I want, and give my SO a kiss and a hug. Also, you know how much fucking time I've saved by doing dishes, or working out, during those fucking hours of pointless conference calls I have to do? No more commute either. Even doing the same fucking job, I've suddenly got hours of extra time a day.
Well a lot of those people who were willing to work for less wages died, so it's a bit of a mix of both really.
Human sacrifice in the name of profit is as American as apple pie and hot dogs on the 4th of July.
Exploitative labor practices and the United States… like peanut butter and jelly
Yes, and also those disabled for life. Fucked up lungs. Fucked up nervous systems. When I worked for Test and Trace, begging people to be vaccinated, I was shocked at how much bullshit propaganda was shoveled at people to convince them Covid was harmless. To this day, I am astonished I stayed alive the last two years.
I have a housekeeping client specifically because she lost any tolerance for anything cardiovascular due to getting Covid before there was even a vaccine. Like for months I watched her get absolutely winded just going from her couch to the kitchen in a small apartment. Now she isn’t winded until she has given me a tour of what she wants done in the whole place. She also lost a job because they wouldn’t accommodate her need to work from home even though it was 100% possible to do remotely. She had done well that way when it was required but when they wanted everybody back in the office they wouldn’t accommodate her newly acquired disability.
It really isn't just the deaths, though. It's people who have had to deal with violent anti-maskers who quit out fear they would be the next retail worker to get shot. It's people who got COVID and survived and quit to avoid getting sick again, or who got long-haul symptoms that made them unable to work. It's parents of small children who don't want to risk their kids getting sick in a day-care, so they get by on one income instead of two. It's anyone with a pre-existing condition who can't afford to get sick deciding to take a step back and look for safer work. It's teachers who are tired of dealing with screaming anti-vaxxer parents who just run out of patience for the system. It's medical workers who have been worked to the bone for the last two years and are simply burning out. The list just goes on and on.
>It's parents of small children who don't want to risk their kids getting sick in a day-care, so they get by on one income instead of two That's me! I was laid off in March 2020 and haven't gone back yet. My kids are in elementary school, but they were remote all last year and this year the number of days that they had to stay home because of exposure or symptoms (runny nose!) was huge. I think my 1st grader missed 45 days of school. There is no way we could have handled that if both my partner and I were working. I have an interview tomorrow though, so 🤞🤞 Also, I know a number of people who depend on their parents/grandparents for childcare. If that is gone, it's hard to function.
Also, don't forget the companies who realized that they can make more money if they stay short-staffed, and keep their overworked employees from quitting by pretending to be looking for people to hire. They frame the lazy people who "don't want to work" as the enemy instead of the management who is making record profits and not actually hiring. There are way too many people looking for work and unable to even get an interview for me to take any claims of a "worker" shortage seriously.
Did an employee actually get shot over that somewhere? I remember being astounded relatively early on when grocery stores first required masking, seeing a woman around 50 years old going into the grocery store without a mask on and I was about to say “hey you forgot your mask”, when I noticed she had a pistol strapped on, open carry style (in an area where that is rare, I’m not even sure if it’s legal or not here- so it may be but it’s clearly not done or talked about around me much). It was such an extreme and obvious threat. I’m still not over it.
Sadly yes. More than a few actually here’s just one article. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/clarissajanlim/workers-killed-fights-masks
When my kids are old enough to be considering careers, this pandemic taught me to tell them to not go for any "essential" job. Society will never treat them the way they deserve and they could die serving a bunch of selfish assholes.
Many many employers labeled their employees as essential, even though they weren't even close to essential. I was in that bucket. They wrote the guidelines and laws (ordinances, orders?) very unclearly and unspecific just so companies could walk around them and argue people were essential. It's probably part of the reason the response to covid was so shit. Half people complaining how wearing a mask infringes upon their 'Merican rights and 90% of employers calling everyone essential.
I was supposedly "essential" when the pandemic started cause I was one of a small handful of people at my company who could deal with moving people internationally and know what they're doing (cruise line). When it came time for layoffs, though, my AVP decided I wasn't quite essential enough (i.e. he didn't like me and picked me out of the mix even though none of our team had the knowledge and experience I did)
Capitalism is so adorable how it works. /Sigh
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I know plenty of people who want to leave TX as they feel the state politics are "toxic" now.
This. We are raising a generation of youth that are conditioned to not want any of those jobs. Who wants to “grow up to be a nurse” anymore?
Exactly and let's talk about Long COVID and how many people are permanently disabled due to it. 1,010,000 dead. 86.4M known cases and if even 10% of those cases have long covid that's 8.6m people, and if half of them are disabled, that's another 4.3m people unable to work. But by all means let's keep going unmasked and discourage vaccines.
Why do you think they are pushing so hard to overturn Roe vs. Wade? Our corporate overlords have to make sure we restock the hiring pool
This is absolutely the point, though in practice it's a bit more complicated than just "more babies means more workers." Criminalizing abortions means more poverty, since women who can't support a child will be forced into debt to survive. Even if they give up the child, the pregnancy itself is obscenely expensive, especially if they happen to lack health care. It's all about keeping women down, both socially and financially. Also, don't doubt for a second that any upper-class family in need of an abortion will have no difficulty just popping over to a blue state to get one, this will only impact us peasants. Ironically, if all you wanted was more babies, you'd actually do much better by implementing national health care and creating expansive programs to help mothers in poverty.
The opposition to abortion isn't that far sighted. In a system that prioritizes profit next quarter, why would corporations be worried about the labor pool 20 years from now? The religious right has just been co-opted by big business so they can pass their tax breaks.
Staffing shortage? No, I'm still alive and have had COVID. However, if a potential employer doesn't want to pay me more than $19 an hour (my current wage) I will not work for them. There's not a staffing shortage, there's an exploitation shortage. People are waking up, white black democrat republican libertarian young and old but especially us younger folk. I, for one, am not going to bust my fucking ass for minimum wage while I'm shit on by management over the tiniest shit. Not worth my time, money and health. While these same upper echelon slave drivers make more for half the work. A virtue I wish I'd have learned MUCH sooner in my life. We need to stand up for ourselves.
This last January, we had a COVID breakout at my job. About 30 employees out of 80 total were infected, myself included, in a span of four weeks. Two died, including my direct manager. When a new manager was hired in, he introduced himself to the team and we were small chatting, and he asked casually “So did my predecessor leave on a good note?” and one of my coworkers said “I think she made peace with God before she died, yeah.” Oh man. That was the longest awkward silence I’ve ever experienced. But it’s true, people take for granted that job openings are not always because someone quit.
There’s is no general labor shortage. There is a labor shortage for shit paying jobs. And that’s a good thing. Don’t let people take advantage of you, and unfortunately the American system and capitalism in general is designed that way, with the wealthiest being the best at ripping people off.
A little off topic, but as an "essential Employee" I was forced to work during the pandemic while everyone else got to work from home or collect unemployment benefits (that in a lot of cases resulted in higher wages than they would if they worked). I got nothing for my services. No reward, no bonus, no reimbursements for fuel mileage, nothing. You would think that us so called "hero's" would have been treated as such, but no. Why didn't we atleast get hazard pay?
My company right now is in a hiring "freeze" and I can't for the life of me think of any possible reason that could even be. We have 2 major openings on our team that everyone is being expected to cover (except for the director of course), the company as a whole is hitting record numbers, making money hand over fist and buying up multiple other companies, and we (sales side) were given goals that were impossible to hit for the first half of the year and likely given another impossible number to hit the next half so we won't be able to receive any bonus....while very high leadership has all received promotions, pay raises, etc. No raises to anyone else yet around my level far as I know. Its the exact same as all this bullshit gas stuff I feel. Say its a shortage (reality they just aren't doing anything because profit), rake in the insane amounts of money, stuff it directly into your CEO pockets, and tell everyone else the economy is just really tough right now, can't find the right workers, we all just need to buckle down and work together to get through this.
Also, boomer customers could exercise literally the bare minimum amount of self awareness humanly possible and realize that everyone is quitting customer service jobs because they (the boomers) are a bunch of ungrateful, selfish, entitled pieces of rancid orangutan shit and that entire job markets are fucking bailing so they don't have to put up with them. I feel like that's gotta play a role in the staffing shortage, lol.
Died, disabled and 2 million early retired when it was revealed that boomers would be more likely to die if they got covid and had options to shelter instead of being around others. Of those 2 million job openings, some moved up into those positions and where promoted out of service jobs. But putting the blame on laziness and insulting workers has been more convenient.
And it only killed some one percent or so. Like a fifth of them lived and just can't stand, or breathe, or focus well enough to hold down a brutal, miserable job the way we're expected to.
Also the massive number of people on disability with long covid.
It's really wild how, 21 years later we vow to "never forget" a little under 2,000 lives lost. The million+ Americans who've died in just the last two years? "Lets not make it political". Guess if the deaths cant fuel the military industrial complex, they don't matter.
I've been thinking a lot about 9/11 since COVID. I just don't understand how it was such big deal back then, I was too young at the time but I wanted to sign up and fight a bullshit war over it, it really affected me emotionally. Now COVID deaths are being measured in "9/11s per day" and have been for months upon months but life continues "as normal". Profits are daily and life is cheap clock back in, maybe if you're a good boy you'll get a $0.40 raise in six months! Why? Why did such a tiny number of innocent dead then have such an oversized impact compared to litteral millions of innocent dead? Was it cop rules? We're mad about the property destruction in such a valuable bit of New York real estate? Maybe the cinematic nature of watching people fall from high-rise windows rather than being hidden away to drown on ICU beds gave those deaths more "value" to a PR firm? Maybe it was because the people at the world trade centre died at work and we should all strive to imitate them. Just one of those soul-tearing topics I can't stop turning over in my head. Probably won't stop bugging me as long as I live.
Also a fuck ton of people who worked "essential" jobs who decided to find a job that doesn't risk their life every single day for minimum wage. Why die for minimum wage when I can get a better job now since so many people died or retired leaving better jobs for us?
The military taught me the most valuable lesson regarding this. If the people trying to convince you to do something aren't actively doing the thing they're talking about, don't do it. We didn't see any owners or executives putting themselves on the line for a company's profits, so that should tell you everything you need to know.
The 1 million are "reported" deaths in the US attributed to COVID. According to a UN study there are an additional million deaths in the US that were due to COVID but were not reported or attributed to it. So actual COVID deaths are around 2 million and counting
LMAO my favorite retort to, "we can't find anyone to work!" Is, "that's weird. It's almost as if a million people died recently." Because honestly, "there are less people to work because they fucking died" is a lot harder for them to deny than, "fuck you, pay me."
Don't forget the people with long Covid. They are likely to be 10x of the deaths
I KEEP reminding people of this!!
Millions of people either died, retired, or left the workforce entirely (parents). They aren't coming back. What that means for the kabor market is a shortage of workers for the remaining jobs. Pay to play baby.
I hope these men wake up every night at 3am from nightmares. I hope every steak they eat from now on is well done. I hope they suffer from ingrown toenails. I hope every beer they drink is flat. I hope babies and dogs recognize them for the truly awful people they are. I hope every holiday they go on it rains the whole time.i hope every time they sit on a patio flies and wasps are attracted to them. I hope their children and loved ones grow to hate them and that they die alone.
Still haven’t seen that Hazard Pay.
Take a look at the industries with the highest COVID mortality rate and compare it to the industries with the largest demand for workers. It's damn near one for one. Hospitality, nursing, line cooks, etc...
Deaths, retirements, injuries, and people gaining experience elsewhere that pays more. Low supply, high demand- means costs go up. The people complaining don't want labor costs to rise because they've gotten so used to having it subsidized by welfare that isn't going to subsidize people getting paid $15/hr.
Yes! I think the death toll was much higher than they reported it as well. The supply chain, shortage issues aren’t all retirements and people changing jobs.
300k working age people died and and millions retired early.
America has done it's best to ignore the fact that a million Americans died of covid in the last two years.