Workers are more open to making demands
Zella Roberts was one of the highest-performing waitresses at the Sonic drive-in in Asheville, N.C., her manager told her. But there were days during the pandemic when Roberts questioned whether she could continue her job. The customers were unruly and often unmasked; the base pay was $5 an hour. Then last November, a man coughed in her face as she served him a hot dog. Roberts went home and cried.
Some of her colleagues were quitting — often walking out midshift — and Roberts, 22, could tell that the managers were “sweating” in trying to figure out how to staff the restaurant. Instead of leaving, she wrote a petition. She asked that Sonic make it easier for customers to tip their carhops. Weeks later, her manager pulled her aside to say the Sonic app was being changed to allow credit card tips.
“Workers are fed up, and restaurants are desperate,” Roberts said. “We’re scarce, we have higher standards and that gives us more power than we’ve had before.”
With the country’s labor force down by more than 4 million people and resignations at a high, employers are desperate to make hires. The share of job postings on ZipRecruiter offering retirement plans is up 30 percent since before the pandemic; posts advertising flexible scheduling grew threefold; the share offering signing bonuses went from 2 percent to 12 percent.
Still, the flood of people leaving their positions has kept rising. In August, 1 in 14 hospitality workers quit their jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a quit rate more than 50 percent higher than before the pandemic.
Today, job seekers find nearly 50 percent more openings than they had pre-COVID, and many can expand their search beyond their hometowns because of newly flexible workplace arrangements across industries.
Flush with options and frustrated after laboring through lockdowns, workers are feeling a sense of possibility. Some are resigning. Some are waiting for a prime gig. Others are flexing their muscles — requesting raises or remote work options — while still clocking in. Employers are noting the jump in demands and in some cases are catering to it, during a shift in power they realize may be longlasting.
“People don’t realize the scale of what has changed,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. “If you take even one chair away in musical chairs, it changes the entire dynamic of the game. That’s what we’re seeing now, where the 50 percent increase in job openings has given job seekers dramatically more leverage.”
Businesses are scrambling to offer new benefits, including bonuses and family insurance plans; some hospitality companies are promising managers “stay bonuses” as high as $75,000 to prevent poaching. Workers, meanwhile, are taking the chance to make bolder requests of their bosses.
Adam Ryan, 33, who works at a Target in Christiansburg, Va., has been trying to organize his co-workers, who are not unionized, to ask for better pay and conditions since he started at the store in 2017. Before the pandemic, Ryan used to see a look of fear creep over his co-workers’ faces when he asked them to sign his petitions.
But in recent weeks, Ryan’s colleagues have been eager to hear his ideas. When he approaches them, many agree to join his campaign requesting $2 hourly in hazard pay for working during the pandemic.
“Folks feel that they’ve been through a lot and have less to lose,” Ryan said. “With the labor shortage, people feel more valuable and harder to replace.”
Last month, Target announced that it would pay employees an extra $2 hourly during peak days of the holiday season, which Ryan saw partly as a response to the pressure employees like him put on the company. He calculated that the bonus could earn his co-workers at most $180 extra for the season, so it has invigorated him to continue making larger demands.
Target is part of a swell of companies facing employees who want higher pay, better benefits or more flexible working arrangements. There have been strikes against 178 employers this year as of mid-October, according to a Cornell University
School of Industrial and Labor Relations tracker.
Even in what economists have christened a “workers economy,” many tech and service workers are at-will employees and can be fired with little warning. And when workers have managed to sustain wins, the improvement they see in working conditions or earnings is often marginal. Weekly wages for restaurant workers, for example, have increased as the hospitality industry struggles to find staffing. But that has brought annual earnings for nonsupervisory workers up to roughly just $22,000 as of September.
“There’s a lot of momentum right now, but there are some very serious obstacles toward workers actually acquiring sustained levels of power,” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, noting that less than 11 percent of U.S. workers are represented by unions.
“Employers are trying on for size this idea that the pandemic has been hard on everyone,” Shierholz added. “It’s a window for them to claim they don’t have power.
But we absolutely know that employers hold the cards.”