"It's not in our blood to just love work."

Nobody told that to Picasso.

also, idle hands are the devil's playground.

Picasso never even had a day job.

Wonderful thoughts, Charles. There's more meat on this bone, of course.

Increases in productivity not passed on to workers in the form of wages . . . or time.

The introduction of two-worker families as a wage-suppression measure.

What if we changed that to 1.5 workers and split it .75 - .75, with more time for families?

Just a few ideas. Anyway, I've been explaining to people about something like time-being for years, and during the pandemic watching them struggle against their conditioning or . . . adjusting their mindset.

I'll depart with this thought: Do people spend more money to support an economy when they are at work . . . or off work?

The old saying, "some people work to live; others live to work" seems applicable here. What has been exposed during the past 15 months of this global pandemic - and which I suspect most of us intuitively recognized, despite the efforts of our Capitalist task masters to suppress such heretical thoughts - is that there are far, far more of the former than of the latter. And yet we allow that small minority to dictate the terms, because in a Capitalist system those with the capital make the rules (including rules they themselves feel it is their right to bend or outright ignore), even if it's at the expense of the overwhelming majority, who have little or no tangible power to change them.

All work and no play yadda yadda

One quibble Charles:

The survey is a "check all that apply" format, not a "check only one response" format. So you can't simply add up all those who selected specific responses and say "86% of those in the survey are refusing to return to the labor market because they have other things to do with their time" because it's likely some, or a lot, of those people selected many of those responses (i.e., it's the same person being counted twice). The true percentage could be as high as 86% or as low as whatever the highest single survey response was (13%?)

I think your point is still valid regardless, people ARE valuing their time more, but as a statistician and survey creator I had to call that out.

I've been on unemployment before, and in all the states I've used it, I was not allowed to turn down any reasonable* job offer or I'd lose my unemployment. And I was required to apply for a minimum number of jobs per week and report all jobs applied for and all outcomes of those applications.

So the people selecting that response are likely saying they turned down jobs that were both under what they'd been making previously AND under their current unemployment benefits.

Which is fine by me. If a business can't afford to pay its employees more than fucking unemployment benefits pay? Then that business doesn't deserve to survive. Capitalism's a fickle bitch.

*By reasonable, the job had to offer hours and pay similar to my previous job, or at least hours and pay that were "livable." E.g., if someone offered me a "job" raking leaves for 3 days a week, 1 hour a day, I could turn it down and not forfeit my unemployment.

Something that hasn’t yet been asked is whether the number of people taking on multiple jobs is also decreasing. Chaz brings up the 40-hour work week, but hasn’t mentioned the 60-80 hour work week at two jobs that didn’t come with overtime because it was at 2 jobs.

Of course no one ever mentions the over half a million (possibly one million in real numbers) dead. While people on this forum like to bleat on about how COVID only killed the old and nearly dead, these numbers include working people. All of those dead people aren't returning to their jobs. All of the women expected to do everything for everyone during the pandemic are not returning to their jobs. 40% of the children in this country had a parent die from COVID so that's a lot of single parents now (if it wasn't the single parent that died). Restaurant workers are in one of the cohorts of workers that died in high numbers. Same with medical professionals (EMTs, nurses, doctors, and caregivers). And since intelligent people have gotten vaccinated - the unvaccinated are now being hospitalized and dying in droves. And their children and other people's children are suffering, too, because we've got children getting sick and being put in ICUs and they will die, too, unable to be vaccinated and forced to be around anti-science assholes who don't care who they kill.

I do not feel bad for any employer who can't find employees.
Pay people more. Treat people better. Give people flexibility and options, especially if they are parents or caregivers or disabled.
The so-called "job creators" made BILLIONS in tax perks and other money funneled directly into their pockets under Trump and during the pandemic. They chose to give the money back to themselves. Jobs were not created. Wages were not increased. They sure did get obscenely wealthy, though.

If employers can't find people to work for them, then they need to shut down their businesses. White businesses, big businesses, wealthy businesses got a SHIT TON of stimulus money. All of the crying and whining and complaining about how no one wants to work is total and complete bullshit. No one wants to work for YOU at YOUR BUSINESS. That's it. Full stop.

Guaranteed all of these xenophobic Republican motherfuckers who can't force Americans to go back into wage slavery will soon change their tune on immigration demanding that anyone willing to be exploited and forced to work for next to nothing be allowed into the country since Americans are lazy and don't want to work.

@12, where do you get the stat that 40% of children have lost a parent to COVID? 80% of deaths are from folks 65 yrs and older, and the death toll is around 600k. There are around 350 million people living in the US....your figures are not at all possible.

This is a long-tardy comeuppance of the Reagan Restoration. Management and the 1% have had it going their way for half a century, half a century of repudiating the social compact, of union-busting, of zero-hour contracts, of last minute, uncertain scheduling, of disdain, of contempt, of looting, of gangster capitalism and vulture capitalism, of offshoring, of private equity corruption, of Steve Mnuchin, of Mitt Romney, of the return of the robber barons, of treating labor as an abstract budget line item, of eliminating most any semblance of management loyalty to workers ("the employees will still be cowering..."). And now comes the bleating, "Where are our workers, our serfs?! The plantation ethic? Where is the love, where is the loyalty? Where is the gratitude?! We are the job creators!! Bow down! What's wrong with you?!"