Where did all the workers go? That is a great mystery that continues to be unsolved. All over America, businesses are literally hiring anyone with a pulse and there are “help wanted” signs all over the place.
But the number of people that are actually working is still close to four million below the pre-pandemic peak. What happened to all of those extra workers? They certainly aren’t on unemployment, because claims for unemployment benefits are the lowest that we have seen “in decades”. So where are they? It is almost as if millions upon millions of people have disappeared from the system completely over the past couple of years.
Needless to say, this lack of workers is having a dramatic impact on the delivery of basic services all over the country.
For example, some of the biggest banks in the U.S. are “temporarily” closing lots of branches due to a lack of staff…
Big banks are temporarily closing branches across the nation as they cope with labor shortages and ongoing complications from Covid-19, including the arrival of the more contagious Omicron variant.
It mirrors widespread branch closures at the start of the pandemic in March 2020 when many thought the economic lockdown would be measured in weeks. The new round of temporary closures — sometimes occurring sporadically — are sparking anger, confusion and angst among customers.
If your local bank branch is now closed, it may be quite a while before it opens again.
In fact, Bank of America is telling their customers that some branches may be shut down “for an extended period of time”…
Even more alarming is what staffing shortages are doing to hospitals all across the nation.
Without enough qualified personnel, many hospitals are having a really difficult time delivering basic services right in the middle of this pandemic, and the cost of hiring replacements has even pushed some facilities into bankruptcy…
The U.S. health-care profession is suffering its own Great Resignation, pushing more hospitals into financial distress just as a winter surge of the coronavirus hits.
Across the country, hospitals are buckling under the strain of nursing shortfalls and the spiraling cost of hiring replacements. For Watsonville Community Hospital on California’s Central Coast, those costs became too much to bear, and contributed to the facility’s bankruptcy this month, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Meanwhile, patients just continue to pour into our hospitals at an alarming rate. At one hospital in Ventura County, large numbers of people are coming in complaining of “unexplained heart problems, strokes and blood clotting”, and this has pushed the patient census at that hospital to the highest level ever…
Dana, another ICU nurse, says the number of sick, critically ill people in her Ventura County hospital has become “overwhelming,” pushing her facility’s patient census to the highest levels she has ever seen.
“It has never been this busy, and none of it is Covid-19,” Dana says. “We don’t normally see this amount of strokes, aneurysms and heart attacks all happening at once. … Normally we’ll see six to ten aortic dissections a year. We’ve seen six in the last month. It’s crazy. Those have very high rates of mortality.”
Similar scenarios are playing out at countless other hospitals all across America.
And staffing shortages are likely to continue to intensify because one recent survey found that a lot more nurses plan to leave their posts in the months ahead…
I run a cleaning servicce and am struggling to staff numerous open positions. It's the worst I've seen in 43 years of business. We are turning down opportunitities because of the lack of available workers. We have gone from paying $10 an hour to between $12-$14 an hour dependinng on the area. We operate in four states. It's depressing. It is burning out the good loyal staff we have left.
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