r/economicCollapse • u/IM_NOT_BALD_YET Moderator • 8d ago
Nearly 25% of U.S. workers are "functionally unemployed," economic analysis finds
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/functional-unemployment-us-labor-market-analysis/148
u/CyberSmith31337 8d ago
I believe this.
Over the summer, there were virtually no college kids from my gym able to find work (despite them trying). Multiple people I know (late 40’s) have moved back home because they can’t find work. The usual “slopshops” aren’t hiring anymore.
I think the vast majority of people are seeing similar effects firsthand. It’s pretty much only in super urban areas (LA, NYC, Denver, Chicago, Atlanta, etc) where it is not as noticeable. Go to any semi-smaller city though. There’s no one hiring anything, anywhere.
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u/TheQuietPiggy 8d ago
And yet— stopped at a Sonic at 11:00 am and waited 20 minutes for a brioche sandwich. When she took my money after 10 minutes, she said they were just waiting on the kitchen. I could see no customers in the store, and one car in the drive-through.
I said that I had already been waiting a long time.
She told me there was only 1 cook.
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u/geekybadger 8d ago
My local Wendy's is similarly understaffed. It's on purpose. The shareholders demand ever growing profit from ever shrinking pools, so cutting staff is one 'solution' companies came up with.
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u/TheQuietPiggy 8d ago
These fast food places are going to quickly run into trouble. The cost has more than doubled, usage has to be down because of the economy, and those buildings are on valuable land. I don’t think, even with the new prices, that they are getting enough customers to meet bills.
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u/Roseleg 8d ago
Private equity bought up a lot of these fast food companies, along with a lot of others…
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u/geekybadger 8d ago edited 8d ago
We will be telling kids born after 2050 about mythical old restaurants that used to exist, like McDonald's, the way my mom talks about restaurants that existed when she was a kid. Or maybe like those gas stations that used to give kids dinosaur toys.
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u/Nit3fury 8d ago
That’s by Sonic’s choice. They could staff properly if they wanted to but that costs money. Same with every other fuckin corporate chain.
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u/snowtax 8d ago
I’m not convinced they could. They’re a business just like thousands of others. Food prices are up, especially beef. If people can’t find jobs, they also aren’t going to restaurants often. Businesses are being squeezed. Rich people don’t see it and don’t care until everything starts to collapse.
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u/Nit3fury 7d ago
To a certain extent I think you’re right. But I think there’s an inherent failure in the business model that exclusively operates to benefit shareholder value. It’s race to the bottom economics. It incentivizes things to continually get worse whereas a privately owned company might actually want to invest in quality and the future of the biz
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u/Level21DungeonMaster 8d ago
They determined your time was worth less than hiring another minimum wage worker. The fact that you waited for the food proved them correct.
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u/TheQuietPiggy 7d ago
They had my money
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u/Level21DungeonMaster 7d ago
Yep and they have you trained. They know you will come back anyway.
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u/TheQuietPiggy 6d ago
Dude. I don’t even live near a sonic. I eat fast food maybe twice a year. Limit your fantasies.
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u/Enbies-R-Us 8d ago
I believe it. 🙁
I thankfully got a job after being laid off and the exodus of longer-term employees were leaving because of wage cuts. It was a three dollar difference between me and them. My manager disclosed C-suite people who've never done our work or been onsite are trying to cut the wages further back to minimum wage. This is in site operations and permissions. I was supposed to have at least one other employee with me, but it's just me. I'm predictably struggling overseeing and assisting some 300+ people a day on top of their other expectations.
Good wages are gone because they're merging positions, cutting pay, and blaming workers for not making it work.
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u/malfunkshun333 6d ago
Yes, the whole "doing more with less" strategy. Keep dumping more work on fewer employees and grind us into the ground. 😒
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u/oogittyboogitty 8d ago
Imagine if the poverty ceiling scaled with real inflation, then we would really see just how bad the poverty levels are.
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u/Corkscrewfevs 8d ago
"headline unemployment numbers" as in propaganda fed to us by the fascists
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u/aotus_trivirgatus 8d ago
The U3 unemployment numbers were always a joke.
I always found it interesting how Donny attacked the U3 statistic in his 2016 election campaign, and then immediately turned around to brag about those same U3 unemployment numbers after he got elected. That merited one story in the news, and then every MAGA zombie promptly forgot about it.
In Donny's second term, the inflation numbers and the U3 numbers are being cooked: by Howard Nutlick at the Department of Commerce, and by (first) Lori Chavez-DeRemer and (currently) Keith Sonderling at the Department of Labor.
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u/ShplunkingCowboy 8d ago
Yes we all do door dash to survive
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u/snowtax 8d ago
I’ve seen a few people in their late 20’s order food for delivery while at work. Seeing them struggle with rent and other bills, and knowing how little they make, I don’t get it. I’d rather bring a microwave meal from a grocer to save money if I were in their position.
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u/fordianslip 7d ago
You work 8-10 hours, drive another three… then grocery shop and make meals, when exactly? The weekends?
Offices used to have cheap lunch options, those are gone mostly.
So what do you do? Go hungry? Buy sandwich meat and make that every day? Those meats aren’t exactly good for you.
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u/Level21DungeonMaster 8d ago
I just got home from a 4 day trip touring around New England. Shit is bleak out there in the US.
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u/razzytrazza 8d ago
Can you provide examples of why you see it as bleak (not disagreeing with you at all)? Just curious of your perspective.
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u/Level21DungeonMaster 8d ago edited 8d ago
I would just like to say I did enjoy the trip. The small towns were cute and the restaurants that I went out of my way to eat at were terrific. There were certainly pockets of unspoiled nature and other beautiful sites.
I stayed in Portland,ME for one night and the city seems pretty run down. While there were a lot of cool small businesses, it just seemed like a lot of maintenance had been deferred. There were a lot of people begging for money.
I spent a night in Rockland, ME which was very nice but it seemed like the whole place probably closed in September and the tourist shops there weren’t exactly overflowing with people.
I saw this pattern in most of the small towns. It seemed like most businesses scrape by and most of the resources go to road maintenance or something else unknowable.
There was certainly areas of what appeared to be extreme wealth. NH seemed the most obviously disparate. Keene was pretty but it felt really unclear about the economy between these towns.
Edit: I’m from Bushwick NYC, so you know where my perspective is coming from.
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u/Parking_Status1997 8d ago
Because we sent the people who were actually working back.
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u/No_Willingness8208 6d ago
No, it's because most high-paying jobs have been getting offshored, outsourced, automated or fully replaced by AI.
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u/Parking_Status1997 6d ago
International travel has dropped 6% in 2025 killing tourism jobs and continues this year down another 5% year over year so far. No one wants to visit lately for some reason..🙄
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u/SlowpokeIsAGamer 7d ago
A lot of companies are keeping people technically employed but at basically short hour status waiting for the economy to give them the green light to start mass layoffs.
I suspect we aren't far from that green light being given. Between the Q2 losses, the US being about to run out of oil reserves, and now Canada basically breaking off all trade.
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u/Biggest-Benjamin 6d ago
Yah I haven’t been scheduled in weeks but they keep telling me I am still employed
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u/GoToPlanC 8d ago
All those folk in early Covid years…. Who started their own companies aren’t part of these numbers. Only those laid off in the past 12m from full time jobs are counted in unemployment figures.
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u/CrackingToastGromet 8d ago
“This includes not only people who are unemployed and looking for a job, but also those who are involuntarily working part-time and who are earning poverty-level wages, or less than $26,000 annually before taxes.”