US Employees Say They’re Losing the Upper Hand as Layoffs Mount

While the number of job openings have dropped 11% from their all time high in April, they're still almost exactly the same as this time last year, which is 41% higher than the prepandemic all time high. Unemployment is the lowest its been in 50 years with every gender and race having their lowest unemployment rate in the past 240 months. The total number of unemployed persons is also the lowest in at least 10 years with a 5% drop from last month alone. Initial jobless rates and quits have been holding pretty much constant for the past 12 months. While the quits rate has gone down from its all time high of 3 to 2.8, that's still .4 higher than it ever was prepandemic. YOY Wage growth remains over 10%, a level not seen since the early 80s. Labor still very much seems to have the upper hand in the current market.

It&#x27;s funny because I&#x27;ve never had my own office at the &quot;office&quot; the best I had was a decent sized cubical. The worst was sharing a room with 50 other people. Yet, at home I have an office where I can concentrate when I need to. So, I don&#x27;t see what the big push is to get people back in the office.<p>If you want a better company culture, when I worked for a consulting company we had people all over the city so they way they did it was to have a company meeting once a month at a hotel or restaurant and some kind of after party.

&gt; But in a new survey conducted by the Harris Poll for Bloomberg News, 58% of respondents said they believe companies have more leverage in the job market these days, an increase of five percentage points from January.<p>A Bloomberg poll has a 5% change from January. I won’t say that’s insubstantial, but there’s been a suspicious uptick in “workers are losing power” stories from the corporate mouthpiece pubs. Feels like a narrative is being pushed prematurely.

Anecdotally, I&#x27;ve gotten a lot less recruiter spam over the last few months.

Thanks to the paywall, I can only read the headline and first two paragraphs. From those, here are my thoughts.<p>Many Americans, especially among those calling themselves &quot;patriots&quot;, will loudly proclaim their pride in how free citizens of America are. And at least as many Americans, if not more, will tout the glories of capitalism as the best economic system in existence, and even demonize socialism (which they often conflate with communism).<p>And yet, to summarize the headline and those two first paragraphs: &quot;Capitalist overlords are threatening employees with potential poverty, starvation, and homelessness at such high rates that they are now more scared to disobey or leave said overlords, even if they&#x27;re miserable under them.&quot;<p>Ah, yes. Capitalism in the US: a bastion of freedom, where slavery has been illegal since 1865 (unless it&#x27;s economic slavery as opposed to physical force).

Workers in the US (tech or otherwise) have never had the upper hand. They&#x27;ve just been able to get screwed with lube in the last few months as companies burn through the last of the cheap credit they can get.

Bluff.

Massive hiring slowdowns everywhere. Yet HN seems to not understand what the fuss is about. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32496608" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32496608</a>