Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages

Re:Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ... by lotsofpulp on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @09:38PM (#34089030)

I do not think it has cratered in the US.

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.

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Re:Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ... by missedthecue on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @09:42PM (#34089053)

Look how much the workforce participation rate has varied over the last 20 years. Only a few percentage points even through massive global recessions. Small percentage changes in this statistic can easily deceive the layman into thinking it's not a big deal.

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Re:Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ... by lotsofpulp on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @09:45PM (#34089081)

I do not understand why a change from 63% to 62% is a sufficiently big deal to be able to claim “millions of Americans decided to stop looking for work”, especially when we know a greater and greater proportion of the population is elderly who cannot work.

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Re:Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ... by echelon on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @09:52PM (#34089138)

I would really love to see these statistics broken down by industry, salary band, age, etc.

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Re:Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ... by shagie on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @09:58PM (#34089189)

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

Table A on page 5 has one breakdown. Table B on page 6 has employment by industry.

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Re:Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ... by acchow on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @11:57PM (#34089982)

Working age population is 207M. So 1% actually translates to millions of people (2 million)

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Re:Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ... by lotsofpulp on Thursday December 22, 2022 @12:06AM (#34090044)

I admit that is technically true, but due to their use of the word “cratered”, I was reading the phrase to mean that relatively large amounts of people have decided to no longer work (outside of those who have decided to no longer work due to aging out).

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.

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Re:Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ... by acchow on Thursday December 22, 2022 @02:07PM (#34097147)

One thing to keep in mind is that 2 million people EXITING THE LABOR FORCE is a really huge deal.

By comparison, during the 2008 recession (Dec 2007 to June 2009, approx 18 months long), about 1 million people exited the labor force.

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Re:Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ... by crooked-v on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @09:49PM (#34089113)

Also, excess deaths during the pandemic account for 0.38% of the entire US population at the start of it.

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