On today’s show we are talking about what impacting labor markets and how that can affect real estate.
In the food and beverage industry we’re seeing a massive shortage of workers. The question is, where did they all go? We saw in the most recent statistics for the past month a trend that has been underway for much of the past six months. In November, the US enterprise employment report shows that 263,000 new jobs were created and that unemployment remains at a low 3.7%. A large percentage of jobs hired were in the travel, leisure and hospitality industry.
What does that mean?
It means hotel staff, restaurant staff, retail staff, flight attendants have been hired in record numbers.
While we have seen major job losses in the tech sector at with 10,000 google, 11,000 at Facebook, Twitter of course, and major layoffs at Amazon.
In the past week alone some of the more notable announcements have been layoffs of 400 people at reverse mortgage funding, 1500 at H&M, Doordash, 1250, Global Foundries 800, Wireless Advocate, up to 1800 inside Costco Wholesale stores, Morgan Stanley, 1600, Blue Apron Holdings, 10% of corporate workforce. Intel corporation let go 300, 100 at corporate headquarters and 200 in Santa Clara. Hewlett Packard is expected to lay off 4000-6000.
I’ve only listed a handful of more notable layoff announcements in the past week. There are certainly many, many more. But frankly, having me list layoffs for five minutes will get boring. I think you get the point. So are these people showing up as unemployed? Well no, they’re not. Almost all of these will have received a severance package and they won’t appear on the unemployment rolls for months.
Many of the job losses are higher paying corporate jobs. Some of the job losses are in retail with H&M and Wireless Advocate. But most are high paying white collar jobs. The hiring is also happening in ways for restaurants to stay in business.
We spoke with a hotel owner this week who said that applicants for the role of dishwasher in the hotel kitchen were asking for $30 per hour.
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Host: Victor Menasce
email: podcast@victorjm.com
