I'm seeing more and more posts about how people had very suddenly started having a nearly impossible time finding a job, despite having the right looking amount of credentials, and having the attempts happen with cash flush companies.
My own little conspiratorial take:
We actually hit the bottom line, with so many of us having 'career reevaluations' during covid, and that put the controlling wealth on notice. They've already responded with a fake recession, using the optics of online only business ventures coming back down to earth to try and stoke panic. That didn't work very well, with “2 jobs for every 1 eligible worker” showing up in major media headlines, so now we're just not hiring. Make people think that jobs are more scarce than they are, but this time in a way that actually effects INDIVIDUALS' bottom line. The corps are already stretching staff like taffy, so it's not too far from business as usual, and hey, they might even be able to condition that skeleton crew to embrace the Stockholm syndrome, if they can get everyone in the area to collude, a thing we know for a fact happens in all sorts of industries. Let's get qanon latching into this kind of conspiracy theory.