Labor is such a mess right now, and I'm loving it

Just dropping in to share an anecdote...

I live in a very high CoL area, and was dining out at what I'll call an "upper middle class" restaurant last night - the type that you can't call average, but isn't nice enough to be called fine dining, if you will. It's the type of place that would previously have been considered one of the "good" places to work as far as restaurants go and always pulled high-quality candidates as far as staff went.

Due to COVID I haven't been out to eat in the current labor market but was at the tail end of a long drive from a relative's with no food at home and I finally got a taste firsthand of what I've been reading about. What a mess. I was seated outside and could observe the five other outdoor tables, and our waitress got every single table's order wrong in some way shape or form, often on multiple occasions. Forgot to put in more than half of her orders. Brought the wrong thing for several orders. Didn't bring plates/napkins/silverware, etc, etc.

The beautiful thing was...nobody blamed her? I could overhear the conversations at the three tables nearest me on the subject, and nobody at the other three tables made a scene about it either. Among people who largely are well-off enough to never have worked a retail/restaurant job post-college who are generally accustomed to a high level of service, there seemed to be universal understanding that the waitress had more tables than was ideal even for an experienced staff member, and had very very clearly never been trained properly for her job. She was probably extremely new and had been thrown onto a Saturday night dinner shift with almost no preparation. I also imagine that she never would have been hired by this restaurant under other circumstances, and the fact that they did hire her to do something she was potentially unqualified for wasn't her fault.

We were all, in a sense, learning what the value of well-trained and good labor is in those positions by having it taken away, and while people weren't happy with the situation, more so than ever before, the opinion didn't seem to be this was a problem with the specific server, or that "Millennials/Gen Z don't have a good work ethic" or that it was fair to demand that she perform as well at her job as her predecessors and magically just be better because she was letting us down and we were the customers and she wasn't allowed to do that. Like, they understood that the labor market had let her and countless other people down and that was the problem. Perhaps she was never meant to work in a restaurant - she certainly wasn't a natural. But this is what you should get if you are paying people poverty wages - people who for personal or training reasons aren't equipped to do the job.

On another happy note, in a casual conversation with a former boss of mine, a fully-embraced-my-life as a bland 60 year old suburban white pre-Trump mildly conservative upper middle manager type, without him knowing my opinions on the matter, he openly began advocating the revolt of the masses to me and was adamant that eventually "the oppressed will rise up"...and then went on to clarify that he wasn't associating himself as part of that class, but got into the trade-offs that he had to personally make and wished he didn't because there wasn't much alternative besides "haha live in suffering and die destitute then, I guess?"

I hope this means real change is possible. I'm hedging my bets personally, but among people who have historically been hesitant to change what seemed like it was "working" for them and who have a lot to lose, I'm starting to see opinions shift in a non-trivial way. It's not just "oh well it would be nice if it was possible but...". There's a real recognition that it should be possible.