7 Minutes Read by WASHINGTON/SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (Reuters) – Karl Rice had no intention of spending his summer loading riders onto the Giant Dipper, California’s oldest roller coaster and the star attraction of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. People walk by the Giant Dipper rollercoaster attraction at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk on June 28, 2021, in Santa Cruz, California, United States, amid the coronavirus illness (COVID-19) outbreak. Nathan Frandino/Reuters Rice, whose family owns the amusement park in Northern California, got a later-than-usual start hiring workers after reopening in April after a year-long closure caused by the coronavirus outbreak. So far, he’s only been able to recruit nearly half of the 1,900 people needed to handle the hectic summer season. Customers are celebrating their post-lockdown freedom at the 114-year-old amusement park, and with the season’s largest crowds yet expected for the July 4 holiday weekend, “it’s sort of all hands on deck,” Rice said. This summer, all of the executives work at least once a week at attractions or food stands, and Rice, the Boardwalk’s president, works two eight-hour shifts a week, frequently assisting passengers in and off of the Dipper, a classic roller coaster. The economy is both back to normal and very far from it, as Rice’s experience indicates, as the United States approaches its Independence Day celebrations, which the Biden administration anticipated would signal the country’s symbolic exit from the pandemic. The last 15 months’ mask-wearing and social separation regulations are mostly gone. Restaurant waiting queues and unrestricted sellout crowds at Major League Baseball stadiums are back in style. However, there is a limit to how quickly the economy can recover. According to IMDB, the top 10 movies in North America grossed $93 million last weekend, the highest performance since Valentine’s Day in 2020, before the outbreak of the epidemic, but weekly revenue is still half or less of what it was before the catastrophe. “Who knew reopening would be such a challenge?” President Thomas Barkin of the Richmond Federal Reserve stated on Monday, as he highlighted a few of the economy’s oddities: Despite rising unemployment, theme parks are curtailing their operating hours, and auto companies are halting output due to supply shortages in an era of record sales. The United States has recovered solely on the basis of output. According to the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model, the economy has already surpassed its pre-pandemic level of $19.3 trillion. However, there are still more than 7 million people out of work, and it will be months before anything resembling a genuine labor market rebound occurs. Graphic: It’s back, and it’s bigger than ever before – People have money to spend, which is rare for a recession, and it comes from an unlikely source: the government. Unemployment insurance payments, child tax credits, and other federal assistance are keeping families afloat. When the aid ceases, it’s unclear when or if private-sector earnings will pick up the slack. Personal income has increased as a result of government spending, and consumers are spending. Services spending, which accounts for the lion’s share of household spending and accounts for 70% of the GDP, has been increasing in recent weeks. Many eateries are overcrowded, and owners are having trouble finding employees. However, the leisure and hospitality business as a whole is still short 15% of the jobs it had prior to the pandemic. Finance positions, on the other hand, are nearly back to pre-pandemic levels, at just over 99 percent. Jobs by Industry Graph – With the incidence of new COVID-19 infections in the United States declining, people are eating out again, according to statistics from OpenTable, with seated diners returning to pre-pandemic levels. Dine-in dining is making a comeback – Farley’s, a San Francisco cafe, is doing well; sales are approximately 70% of pre-pandemic levels, but are projected to increase in July if co-owners Amy and Chris Hillyard employ enough personnel to reintroduce pre-pandemic hours. Sales at Farley’s East in downtown Oakland, their larger location, are only around 40% of pre-pandemic levels. Chris Hillyard anticipates a boost next week when Bay Area Rapid Transit employees return to their Oakland headquarters, which is just around the corner from Farley’s East, for three days a week, but he expects monthly losses until the fall, when he hopes to see a larger number of office workers return. Air travel in the United States has progressively increased, although it is still only around 75% of what it was in 2019, owing to the slow recovery of international and corporate travel. Bookings for air and ground transportation, as well as hotels, have more than doubled since the beginning of 2021, according to TripActions, but are still only 60% of pre-pandemic levels. International business travel accounts for 18% of all travel. Graphic: Air travel retaliates – The labor market hasn’t returned to normal. Despite the fact that there are several million more people unemployed than before the pandemic, employers in the United States are reporting a record number of job opportunities. Companies are desperate for workers, and workers are quitting in droves, presumably to pursue more lucrative opportunities. However, in comparison to the numbers required to return to pre-pandemic levels, net employment growth has been modest. Governors in Republican-led states have blamed sluggish job-to-worker matching on boosted federal unemployment benefits, which they believe encourage workers to stay at home, and have pushed to eliminate the extra payments. A other interpretation, according to William Spriggs, a Howard University economics professor and top economist for the AFL-CIO labor union: Skilled professionals in slower-recovering industries are waiting to resume their careers and are not feeling obligated to take any job that comes their way. Entertainment sector tradespeople, he said, “don’t want to work at McDonald’s,” but are waiting for Broadway musicals, live concerts, and movie production to resume. Analysts who believe that unemployed people can be matched one-to-one with currently available jobs are “wrong compared to where the market is.” Graphic: Job vacancies and available positions – Because of the pandemic shutdown and the lack of early notification about the reopening, seasonal hiring at the Boardwalk began months later than usual this year. Because many of the local firms were ramping up at the same time, competition for workers was fierce. According to Sabra Reyes, the Boardwalk’s director of human resources, applications increased after the park provided a $300 bonus every two weeks for individuals working at least 30 hours each week. She claims that the current limiting element is how quickly she can train and place new workers in their positions. “We’ve been hiring at a breakneck pace,” said Reyes, who operates the amusement park’s Cave Train ride on a weekly basis. “However, it was and continues to be a battle.” Nathan Frandino contributed reporting, while Dan Burns and Paul Simao edited the piece. Continue reading
