Hi, NPR. This is Sarah from Upstate New York. I just finished planting over 600

cloves of garlic for next year's harvest. This podcast was recorded at it is 150 pm on

October 27th, 2021. Things may have changed by the time that you hear this, but I'll be

mulching these beds and hoping for a very bountiful harvest next year. All right, enjoy the show!

Well, a good luck with that and hopefully that will protect you from any and all vampires.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm a Yisirasco. I cover the White House.

And today we've got NPR's labor and workplace correspondent Andrea Shoe here with us.

Hey Andrea. Hey Aisha. Andrea, you're joining us today because we are talking about the state

of the job market. Yes, big topic. Yes, and I, you know, obviously when COVID hit, it decimated

the market, put millions of people out of work, but now there's this dynamic where there are more

jobs available than Americans looking for them. And you've been reporting for months about the

different reasons that people may have decided either, you know, not to return to their job or to

try to find something new. Like what have you been hearing from people about why they are like

not looking for work right now? There are just so many reasons. I guess an answer could be all of

the above. That's basically it. You've heard about people leaving their jobs because they're burned

out, especially people who had to work through the pandemic and, you know, jobs that were just really

tough, like nursing, for example, or, you know, working in restaurants and hotels where they had to

deal with customers, you know, in a pandemic where they maybe didn't feel safe. You've heard of

people who had caregiving duties that they just couldn't manage while also trying to work a full

time job. You know, this was more of an issue, I would say, at the beginning of the pandemic,

and all last year, and last in this past spring, when a lot of schools were still closed,

but it's still a problem for a lot of parents. And then I think you may have heard the term,

...