This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 24, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The difficulty in hiring laborers from any low-wage jobs continues as many states are now opting out of the enhanced unemployment benefits that are

compounding the employer challenge. Cato's Ryanborn details some of the

evidence gathered during this waning

pandemic about what's driving employment hesitancy and how employers are

responding. Having recently been

interesting and I guess a little bothersome to watch and try to have compassion for

The staffs at restaurants who are at least in the case of servers I see are having to serve many more tables than they otherwise would be that sort of lowers their the the happiness they might take in their work and for customers it's certainly not any better

and it might lead some of them to feel like well I'm just I'm going to be a stingy guy here and not tip as well as I might

had the service been better but it's it's definitely a difficult situation for businesses and yet I see in a lot of the reporting about

unemployment there is still broadly a lot of skepticism about the degree to which expanded unemployment benefits or

benefits in general that are given to the unemployed are contributing to the lack of available workers for businesses.

What do we know now that we didn't know a couple months ago about what is actually driving this lack of

uptake given all the jobs that are available right now?

Yeah, that's a great question.

I mean, the restaurant sector, as you say, is a microcosm of what's been going on with the

labor market broadly.

And I would define the situation as essentially, as things are reopening, demand for a whole bunch of activities is surging back and supply is failing to keep up.

And you can see that in some of the kind of micro level data we see for different sectors.

So an example of this, as you say in leisure and hospitality,

if you look at the average hours worked by people who are actually

...