Closed: The Great Resignation and Workforce Development
by Jennifer Rachel Baumer
In August, 4.3 million U.S. workers quit their jobs, according to Department of Labor (DOL). Food services lost 892,000 workers, 721,000 employees quit the retail industry and even more workers left education and healthcare. The start of the pandemic saw record high unemployment and by July 2021 the United States hit another record high – 11.1 million jobs available.
“Certain sectors have really been hit hard,” said John Restrepo, principal, RCG Economics. He added that one area particularly affected is low-wage, high-touch occupations, like retail and restaurants. “There’s a shortage of those kinds of workers. It’s a combination of fears of COVID, combined with relatively low wages and high costs of daycare or the shortage of daycare workers.”
Without daycare, some parents can’t work and the costs of working—day-care, transportation—must be balanced against low wages and fear of COVID.
Pre-pandemic there were approximately 1.5 million people in the Nevada workforce. During the shutdown, Nevada’s unemployment rose to 30 percent. It was expected that approximately 500,000 would remain unemployed after businesses reopened, and that’s what happened.
“Since March of 2020 we’ve been recovering jobs and so we’re now at about 7.5 percent unemployment,” said Elisa Cafferata, director, Nevada Department of Employment, Training & Rehabilitation (DETR). That leaves around 117,000 Nevadans unemployed. “We’re not quite back to pre-pandemic levels, which were at a record low unemployment, but we’re recovering,” Cafferata added.
Jobs actually came back faster than the people to fill them. Most employers expected when supplemental federal weekly unemployment benefits ran out, workers would return, but there hasn’t been a surge of returning workers even after supplements ended. Even states that stopped supplements to encourage individuals to return to work didn’t see large numbers returning.
Read the entire article at Nevada Business Magazine: https://www.nevadabusiness.com/2021/12/closed-the-great-resignation-and-workforce-development/