I had a thought this morning
Has anyone noticed that humans are being used more as resources in jobs than they really are being used as skilled workers?
I have worked retail, medical, and food service. All three industries, seem to burn through people without care for the individual. You may find one or two locations that truly are based in employee retention, but, it seems for the most part that a business is willing to burn through people as long as there is turnover. I'm not certain if I want to say I feel this started at COVID; because even in 2014 I was working a dead end retail job, that had me working 8+ hours a day, often “taking lunch on the clock” (corp speak for eat while customers complain that you're eating instead of helping them). This job would not let us sit. At one point as management, I brought folding chairs and was given a dressing down for not following policy of no sitting. I let them know that I would continue to bring a chair to sit on during the lunch hour. I also had told them at that time, that because my store was highest selling in the district, that perhaps this change improved morale such that, employees actually didn't mind working as much (imagine that).
Perhaps someone more versed in statistics then me, can provide a sort of outlook on how employee retention works?
Sure there are 20,000 people in my town, and even more in the surrounding counties, but certainly there must be a point at which the labor “market” is tapped out and there is no more employees to roll over. We interviewed at least 60 people at the height of each season, and each season we'd only take 8 total people anyways. There has to be a point at which there is no one willing to work at the salary provided right? Have we seriously gotten to the point where people are just in minimum wage jobs because they feel they have no other skills to offer and are willing to burn themselves out on it?
That same job as mentioned above, almost every employee I had had at least 2 jobs. When I first started, I was told by the upper-management that I should not hire anyone who has another position because they will not be “focused on this one”. What a load of garbage, and fairly illegal to say too. Considering EVERYONE who applied had a second job, there wasn't much of a choice. It is completely unreasonable to expect someone to give up their life for a minimum wage retail job with no potential of moving up, and some of those people were my hardest working employees.
Have employees turned into a resource like coal? That we're just supposed to burn up and use until there's nothing left?
tl;dr – Is there a point at which the population is tapped out and no longer willing to deal with sub par employment and wages? Why haven't we hit it yet considering the “labor shortage” or in your opinion is the “labor shortage” artificial because wages have stagnated?