In 1975, I graduated from college with a B.A. degree -- the first in my working-class family to get a degree followed by my brother and younger cousins. My older cousins went straight into the workforce after high school.
If not for CUNY (the NYC Public University System) offering free tuition to city residents in the 70s, my widowed mom couldn’t have helped me pay for college. Even with free tuition, I had to work waiting tables part time to pay for books, transportation and the clothes on my back. I lived at home because I couldn’t afford an apartment and I helped mom out with $20 a week toward groceries.
I held a double major in Creative Writing and English Literature with a minor in Secondary Education. Plan A was to get a job teaching at a city high school and write the great American novel on the side. As luck would have it, New York City was going broke in 1975. In addition to laying off public school teachers there was a hiring freeze. I left school with a freshly-printed college diploma and no Plan B.
Publishing seemed like a good idea and, as I continued to wait tables at night, I went on a few interviews. As a newbie the only positions available were for peon-level editorial assistants to the assistants. And the salary was less than I was making as a waitress working six hours a night. I told them this. With an eye roll the woman informed me, “It’s an employers’ market. Many of our juniors get help from their parents.” That’s the first time I realized how the odds are truly stacked against the children of the working class.
The next logical step: advertising agencies. Still a hippie at heart I resisted becoming a cog in the consumerism wheel. But I went on a few interviews anyway to check it out. At each ad agency I was told to get a couple of years of experience elsewhere and come back with a portfolio of my work. Then I heard through the grapevine this was the case at every agency. The phrase, Employers’ Market, echoed once again. Ad agencies had no need to train baby writers with zero experience when so many people were vying for these positions. It looked like I would be waiting tables for a long time.
I was venting to a friend who had graduated the same year and he was also striking out on interviews. He made an excellent point: in New York, a city with more colleges and universities per square mile than any other, there was a glut of graduates in the 70s. Especially since college attendance had spiked with the free tuition offered by CUNY. There were hundreds of applicants per each job opening and those getting their foot in the door at low salary, entry positions were often being subsidized by their wealthy families.
This friend had an in-between job working the night shift on Wall Street processing the day’s stock market trades. In the pre-computer era, they needed people to sort the paperwork by hand. He offered to put in a good word for me. The hourly pay plus the night differential wasn’t that bad. The challenge was commuting home to Queens from Wall Street at midnight. I made the switch because I was done with waiting tables and all the restaurant drama that went with the job.
Interviews during the day, working at Wall Street at night, and partying on the weekends: this was my life going on a year after graduation. Then I got a call from a friend who had been in my college writing program. She had landed a junior writer position in the advertising department at JCPenney on 6th Avenue. She put in a good word for me and I went for the interview. The good news: they liked me and wanted to hire me. The bad news: I had to wait until there was an opening. I continued working the night shift on Wall Street and got the call a month later.
Finally, a year after graduating, my foot was officially in the door. I had a writing job. I made peace with being a cog in the wheel of consumerism because a girl has to do what she has to do. Fast forward 15 years (and three job switches to work my way up the salary ladder) and I was a senior writer at a Florida ad agency. (How I landed in Florida is another story.) While on staff, I started taking freelance projects on the side and I made more on average than my salary for the same amount of work hours. At age 38 I took the plunge into self-employment and never looked back.
One of my freelance gigs was providing writing services for a two-man design shop. They took me along for a meeting at AAA for a big project: the company’s new website. During the meeting the marketing director offered me a staff job as senior writer at a ridiculously low salary. I bluntly told her she’d never hire a senior at that pay rate. And then she said, with a smug smirk I’ll never forget: “It’s an employers’ market. I’ll find someone.”
That damn phrase again: Employers’ market. It’s the reason the fat cats have kept salaries low for the peasants since the Reagan era.
I did get a shot at revenge with that woman at AAA. A few months after the project with the design shop was completed, she gave me a call. She had hired someone to take the senior writer position at the low salary. But she needed a history of AAA written and the staff writer simply wasn’t giving her the quality she wanted.
She wanted to hire me on contract because, “I love your writing.” Then she asked for an estimate. After getting the particulars about the project scope, research, word count, etc., I thought to myself, ‘This is a $500 job.’ With a smile in my voice I doubled it: “One thousand dollars.” In my head I said: ‘Screw you and your employers’ market.’
She went silent for a few heartbeats then remarked, “Isn’t that on the high side?” I answered, “Isn’t that really relative?” Another few heartbeats, “Okay,” she said, “send me your proposal and I’ll put it through.”
Frankly, I was surprised she went for it. Then it hit me: they can afford to pay people more. With the cards forever stacked in their favor, they simply wanted to squeeze the life out of employees for as little as possible and expected gratitude for the opportunity to be exploited.
Fast forward to 2021 and a funny thing happened on the way to economic recovery after COVID. The tables have turned: it’s an Employees’ Market.
People simply aren’t coming back to work. And it’s not just hourly retail and restaurant jobs going unfilled. Middle management Boomers are retiring early.
A Friday note from Goldman Sachs researchers led by Jan Hatzius finds that 3.4 million of the people who left the labor force — meaning they're not working or aren't actively looking for work — are over 55. Roughly 1.5 million of them were early retirements, and 1 million were normal retirements. Those two groups of retirements "likely won't reverse," meaning that, out of the five million workers Goldman estimates are still missing from the labor force, about half may not ever return.
… Those 2.5 million retirees abstaining will probably be acutely felt for now. The number of workers quitting their jobs just reached yet another record high. That's good news for workers, who continue to switch into new roles and push wages higher, but it means that labor shortages may stick around for a little while longer. www.businessinsider.com/...
The Teacher Exodus: Teachers are also retiring early or simply quitting.
The big picture: Demand for teachers is drastically outpacing supply. Many teachers are retiring or quitting the profession due to pandemic-era stress, and universities aren't minting new ones fast enough.
By the numbers: Nationally, there were 575,000 fewer local and state education employees in October 2021 than in February 2020, according to the latest jobs report.
- And while health concerns and the stress of flitting between virtual and in-person education drove teachers, school support staff and administrators out in 2020, they're not coming back to school even as the pandemic subsides.
- A net 65,000 public education employees left the industry between September and October alone, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- The effect: Schools — and students — are suffering. When teachers take days off or have to enter quarantine due to COVID-19, districts can't backfill them. "Finding substitutes has been a tremendous problem," Fryer says.
- In some cases, it pays more to work at McDonald's than be a substitute teacher in the U.S., Bloomberg reports. On top of that, substitute teachers are often older, retired instructors, who are understandably fearful of entering high-risk areas like classrooms amid a pandemic.
www.axios.com/…
More good news: efforts to unionize workers have increased in 2021:
In cities across the US, and between the walls of some of the world's largest enterprises, there is a swelling of union organizing activity that has been propelled by the pandemic and the recession.
Frontline workers — nurses, teachers, meatpackers, grocery-store clerks, delivery drivers and produce workers — protested for workplace protections and paid sick leave. In Big Tech, where multibillion-dollar companies have benefited from stay-at-home mandates, trailblazing unionization efforts are accelerating at Amazon and Google.
… Generally, economic downturns are bad for union organizing. "For a long time, economists have argued that workers are less likely to go on strike and push for things like unions in bad economic times," said Ileen DeVault, a professor of labor history at Cornell University's ILR School. "Employers could fire you and replace you with another worker. Workers had more power when unemployment rates are low."
However, that hasn't always been the case. During the Great Depression, unemployment reached as high as 25%. With the economy that bad, many workers assumed they'd likely lose their jobs anyway — so they figured they might as well come together and potentially gain protections via unionization, DeVault said.
www.cnn.com/…
(I hope Ronald ‘Union Buster’ Reagan is spinning in his grave.)
The labor shortage is a global phenomenon. Working stiffs around the world are telling employers: Take this job and shove it.
I’ve read a few articles with “experts” predicting everything will go back to normal in 2022. Early retirees and teachers will come back to work. Kids graduating high school will take those service industry jobs. In other words, it will soon be an Employers’ Market again.
Yet I got the distinct feeling the fat cats are whistling past the graveyard. As people demand the livable wages they deserve, as they unionize, how are the fat cats going to put that genie back in the bottle?
We are living in interesting times. Stay tuned.
I’ll close with the 1977 country song that inspired the title. Take This Job and Shove It, by Johnny Paycheck, who passed away in 2003 at the age of 64. RIP.