San Francisco’s labor disaster is actual
With the rise of COVID variants, job changes or early retirements, and the mismatch between the cost of living and wages in San Francisco, labor shortages are hurting the city.
French Tulip Flowers on 24th St. in Noe Valley recently put up a sign that read, “We’re hiring anyone who shows up.” The store told ABC7 that one of their employees retired during the pandemic and they are the Position not yet filled. “Right now we’re taking anyone who’s willing to learn and stay with us,” shop owner Andrei Abramov told the outlet.
Over in SoMa, Square Pie Guys, an upscale pizza joint, gave up after months of trying to fill an assistant manager position. Co-founder Danny Stoller told The Wall Street Journal that after raising his salary from $55,000 to $70,000 and changing his job title to general manager, he was able to find a qualified applicant.
Elsewhere in California, hotels have turned away guests due to the labor shortage.
The Hampton Inn in Folsom has 147 rooms, but general manager Enid Baldock was only able to rent 117 of them recently because she didn’t have enough workers to clean them.
“I turned people away with 30 rooms (available). Ridiculous,” she said while tucking sheets into a laundry chute to help her skeletal housekeeping staff.
At the Palladio, a nearby mall with 85 stores and restaurants just off a busy freeway, businesses seemed more focused on attracting workers than customers as the “Hire Now” signs during the Thanksgiving break marked the Number of Black Friday flyers exceeded.
Experts point to a number of factors at work, including high childcare costs, more generous government benefits and lifestyle changes that are making workers less willing to accept the salaries and conditions of their old jobs . That has boosted wages for some retail and restaurant jobs, but not enough to close the gap.
The labor shortage has had surprising repercussions throughout California, the nation’s most populous state of nearly 40 million people, which, were it an independent nation, would have the world’s fifth-largest economy.
California has added an average of about 100,000 new jobs each month since February, but despite this blistering pace, the state still has the nation’s highest unemployment rate with Nevada.
The state lost 2.7 million jobs in March and April 2020 after Gov. Gavin Newsom issued the first statewide stay-at-home order. Since then, California has reinstated about 1.8 million of those jobs, or just over 67%.
“It’s changing people’s behavior the longer COVID lasts,” said Roy Kim, associate director of human resource development at the Sacramento Employment and Training Agency. “The longer humans can survive and adapt that way, the more life-changing it becomes.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
