It is probably among the least desirable work. Volatile hours, busiest times are holidays, literally cleaning up anything from bodily fluids to garbage and dealing with smells.
No one outside of large unionized hotels in big cities is offering a decent salary with predictable schedule. The small franchise hotels have less than 50 employees, so they have no employer subsidized benefits either like access to 401k, public transit credits, or other tax advantaged accounts.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
Just 1 percent, 63% to 62%, which could just be aging demographics since a greater and greater proportion of people in America are going to be too old to work, especially for hard labor work like cleaning hotel rooms.
Also, hotels (and other low pay to quality of life at work ratio employers) were already struggling before COVID. COVID just accelerated the inevitable.
Table A on page 5 has one breakdown. Table B on page 6 has employment by industry.
Of course, prices are set at the margin, and so if hotels (and other businesses like restaurants and retail) were used to paying the lowest pay to quality of life at work ratio, then I guess it would be accurate to say their problem is a couple million people decided to no longer work, because presumably a greater proportion of those who decided to no longer work would have been from these least desirable to work in businesses.
By comparison, during the 2008 recession (Dec 2007 to June 2009, approx 18 months long), about 1 million people exited the labor force.
The main factor in choosing a job is pay in the end and that's also the main variable when choosing to work or not imo.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
Another portion is no longer able to work those jobs (especially service sector jobs where one is required to show up for a shift or get fired). New data shows long Covid is keeping as many as 4 million people out of work - https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-data-shows-long-covid...
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
> The number of persons not in the labor force who currently want a job was little changed at 5.6 million in November and remains above its February 2020 level of 5.0 million. These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the 4 weeks preceding the survey or were unavailable to take a job.
> Among those not in the labor force who wanted a job, the number of persons marginally attached to the labor force held at 1.5 million in November. These individuals wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months but had not looked for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. The number of discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached who believed that no jobs were available for them, was 405,000 in November, little changed from the previous month. (See Summary table A.)
Which is exactly as it should be. ~Half the country doesn't want them. If that results in hotel stays being absurdly expensive (or perhaps changing laws so that hotel rooms don't need to be cleaned between guests), then so be it. America is democratic, and the people have spoken, so now let them suffer the consequences.
I do not think there are any laws requiring this. It probably just has not been price competitive enough to hand a customer the housekeeping cart at check in.
The number of places in the US that you can get a 2BR home, rental or owning, on minimum wage is basically non-existent.
We're on the verge of large swaths of the US population effectively becoming serfs. Housing is being snapped up by corporations, banks are jacking their fees and making more and more people "unbankable" forcing them into non-bank situations like payroll-company-run quasi-debit-cards where withdrawing their wages costs money.
Consider this: Elon Musk at peak of his wealth had more money than all the residents of Massachusetts (itself quite a wealthy state) combined, by a significant margin.
We're at a stage where we have what amounts to feudal lords in all but name, complete with their own private security forces going around roughing up people.
There is no way this is true. Just this list alone is probably $100B, and there are 7M people in Massachusetts, and including many with net worths in the millions.
https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/these-are-the-16-riches...
This is statistically untrue, though a very popular misconception. Median wages have increased slightly after adjusting for inflation over the past few decades [1]. Minimum wage has wavered a bit since then, but most people are not employed at the federal minimum wage [2].
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0203127200A
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0102M
I mean if suddenly a competitor arrives in your industry selling the same product, with near zero marginal costs, and half the time they cannot price correctly and are happy to see "any" income there might be issues for your industry.
Edit: oh Ok - structural in the supply of labour. In the UK that is hugely labelled Brexit, but it is interesting to see a problem elsewhere - As others say Covid shock is most likely as people re-evaluate what they are willing to tolerate.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/inflation-hasnt-been-bad-f...
https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profits-have-contributed-...
etc
The Fed is hard-selling a lie that inflation is due to supposedly skyrocketing labor costs and low unemployment. It's not. It's the ultra-wealthy jacking prices, squeezing the shit out of their workforces, converting everyone they can to "gig" or "contract" workers, and cheapening their services and products like they're trying to get blood out of a stone. The pandemic caused a stunning jump in concentration of wealth.
That's why we have historic numbers of open job positions. The jobs are there, but people don't want them because a)the pay and benefits have been squeezed down to the barest minimums b)the conditions suck c)employers are exceedingly demanding in terms of qualifications.
A perfect example would be the status quo in IT and development. Everyone and their mother and cousin wants to hire a Senior DevOps engineer with three pages worth of skills and two decades of engineering or development skills. Forget "ground floor" opportunities, companies aren't even interested in offering 2nd or 3rd floor opportunities, like bringing in traditional IT infrastructure folks and training them in the transition to cloud-based stuff and devops methodologies.
Go pop open Indeed and surf a bunch of low-level support positions and look at the CVS-receipt-length list of required skills/technologies and the huge list of responsibilities for a position that probably pays $40k in a lower income rural area to $60k if you're lucky in one of the higher COL metropolitan markets.
Many industries seem to prefer going bankrupt than pay their lowest level employees well.
Think about it, in the current environment, the choice becomes: 1. Invest in a low margin business or 2. just call it a day and buy Treasury bills at historically high interest rates and make a guaranteed state tax free return without having to work.
Some studies on minimum wage increases have compared businesses across state lines, where one state has increased the minimum and the other has not. At least some of the time, the increase appears to benefit businesses, as they had high employee turnover, and hiring does cost money.
25% of minimum wage isn't much.