With the labor crisis happening, many people are making it known that if they aren’t getting better pay they aren’t going to look for jobs. After the pandemic, many people realized that they no longer can work in such low-paying jobs.
It’s easy to criticize people for not wanting to work but looking at it from their perspective you understand where they are coming from. Many people work paycheck to paycheck and their paychecks aren’t even enough to pay their rent. With this standstill in so many job openings available, it still hasn’t been made clear to the corporate world that people are looking for more pay. Not more pay to make them “rich” but to have a livable wage where it makes sense to work and enjoy their lives. The pandemic had a positive effect in revealing the cruel and unfair conditions of minimum wage and how hard people were working just to survive. Workers were being taken advantage of, overworked, underpaid and they have had enough.
While many main concerns are about pay there is also the worry of getting sick because COVID-19 is still around and has not gone away, many people have no choice but to go to work and risk getting sick. Jobs not being flexible and understanding of everyone’s current situation is just another reason why there are so many job openings and no one is willing to risk their health for low pay. With low-paying jobs, you don’t see the benefit of going to work and taking a risk for the sake of your family, when the pay isn’t good enough to provide for your family. Many families also have kids who sometimes can and cannot attend school depending on if schools are open or closed at the time. That puts their jobs in jeopardy as well because jobs aren’t being flexible with people and their current situations.
“The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey showed that 4.35 million workers left in February, an increase of 94,000 from the previous month.” There is not a problem with not having enough jobs for everyone but a problem in these jobs not paying enough or being livable wages. People are expected to stay at their jobs and not complain about anything but it has clearly shown that they are not staying and quitting to find something better or find better opportunities. Many people are enjoying their break from work because they were not able to have vacations before, which shows that there’s no rush to find work. That is showing how overworked they were with no time for themselves. This is also another problem with these jobs not just because of the low wages but because of how little they care for their workers.
Corporate companies only care about how much money they can make in a certain amount of time instead of caring for their employees. Jobs giving as little as possible to their employees while expecting to get the most amount of work from them partially explains the labor crisis and why so many people are still unemployed. Businesses focusing only on profit and not on their employees have been uncovered with many people realizing that they are not cared for and should find better.
An unemployed woman in California, who wishes to remain anonymous, stated, “It’s harder looking for jobs now than it was before because I now know that I need more pay than what I was getting paid before the start of the pandemic. I understand that many people have bills to pay and families to feed but there is no reason you should be breaking your back and have to struggle still to put food on the table when there is a lot of government help out there”
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