San Francisco’s labor disaster is actual
With the emergence of COVID variants, people changing careers or taking early retirement and the disparity between cost of living and wages in San Francisco, the labor shortage is hurting the city.
French Tulip Flowers on 24th St. in Noe Valley recently put up a sign that read, “We are hiring anyone that shows up.” The shop told ABC7 that one of their employees retired during the pandemic and they haven’t yet been able to fill the position. “Right now, we’ll take anyone who are willing to learn and stay with us,” store owner Andrei Abramov told the outlet.
Over in SoMa, upscale pizza spot Square Pie Guys gave up on filling an assistant manager position after months of trying. Co-founder Danny Stoller told the Wall Street Journal that after raising the salary from $55,000 to $70,000 and changing the job title to general manager, he was able to find a qualified applicant.
Elsewhere in California hotels have been turning away guests due to the labor shortage.
The Hampton Inn in Folsom has 147 rooms, but general manager Enid Baldock could only rent 117 of them recently because she did not have enough workers to clean them.
“I was turning people away with 30 rooms (available). Ridiculous,” she said while stuffing bed sheets down a laundry chute to help out her skeleton housekeeping staff.
At the Palladio, a nearby shopping center with 85 stores and restaurants just off a busy highway, businesses appeared more focused on attracting workers than customers as “now hiring” signs outnumbered Black Friday fliers over the Thanksgiving break.
Experts point to a number of factors being at work, including the high cost of child care, more generous government benefits and lifestyle changes that have made workers less willing to accept the salaries and conditions of their old jobs. That has pushed up wages for some retail and restaurant jobs, but not enough to overcome the gap.
The labor shortage has played out in surprising ways across California, the nation’s most populous state with nearly 40 million residents that, were it an independent nation, would have the fifth largest economy in the world.
California has added an average of about 100,000 new jobs each month since February, but despite that blistering pace the state is still tied with Nevada for the nation’s highest unemployment rate.
The state lost 2.7 million jobs in March and April 2020 after Gov. Gavin Newsom issued the nation’s first statewide stay-at-home order. Since then, California has added back about 1.8 million of those jobs, or just over 67%.
“It changes people’s behavior the longer that COVID persists,” said Roy Kim, deputy director for workforce development with the Sacramento Employment and Training Agency. “The longer people can survive and make adjustments that way, it becomes life aging.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
