I recently had a conversation over the phone with my dad that has stuck with me. We were discussing his recent trip to Traverse City, Michigan, to celebrate his second wedding anniversary with his wife (my parents are happily divorced). While out to dinner at a high-end restaurant, he remarked at how long they had to wait for service both at the bar and at their reserved table just because there weren’t enough employees working to handle the crowds. That, in turn, led to larger discussion on labor shortage in general.
It was an interesting conversation, one of our milder discussions seeing as we are on different ends of the political spectrum. We had both heard all the theories — we lost 600,000 workers to COVID-19; restrictive immigration policies are hampering the traditional low-income job market; parents are left without child care and cannot return to work; people still have health concerns regarding the virus; and my personal favorite (a little sarcasm here), workers made more on federal unemployment benefits, so why would they want to return to work? The truth may be somewhere in between all of these.