The Covid bumps to unemployment benefits makes it hard to hire someone for routine work.

I had an employee I liked, she got a better job an we wished her well, I couldn't offer a matching raise in fairness to my other employees.

That was February 2020. Two months later she was out of work (and we were paying for her unemployment since she had worked with us recently) With her additional $15 an hour on top of her unemployment she was making more than the new job.

I would have offered her job back, but I couldn't compete with unemployment wages,

In 2007, for the first time in my very long working career, I applied for unemployment fees. A big rich lawyer from Baker, Botts law firm had the audacity to intervene to keep me from collecting it. The representative from the Texas Employment Commission listened patiently to his tirade and then granted me full reimbursement of benefits. Sore looser.

Yeah, I mentioned this here recently. It's tough to get any contractors to sign on to work. Even contractors are impacted by this new lethargy. I immediately thought of Atlas Shrugged when I noticed this.

Could some former employees be suddenly realizing that their employment was nothing more than serfdom with little hope for learning or advancement because government has crippled entrepreneurship and destroyed competition ?
Have they realized they have been lied to by corrupt government propagandists from the time they we sent to kindergarten until they left "high" school (and that their parents had the same "education")?