1. Jobs That Don’t Pay Enough#

This is a big one. These are jobs paying way below what’s considered the going rate, especially considering the experience needed or the location.

• You can’t expect to hire a senior full-stack developer in a super expensive place like Silicon Valley for just $50,000 a year plus a tiny bit of ownership in a risky startup. But believe it or not, companies still try!
• Even entry-level jobs paying just minimum wage in places where the cost of living is incredibly high are tough to fill. In cities where even people in finance have to share apartments, minimum wage just doesn’t cut it.

Now, here’s a bit of a controversial take: Just like there are tons of bad businesses and managers who want amazing skills for almost no pay, there are also lots of workers who expect top-tier pay even if they have very little experience or skills that the market actually wants.

Interesting Data Point: Salary Expectations Survey

One really insightful piece of information comes from a recent survey. It asked different Americans what they thought was the minimum salary they would need to feel “financially successful.”

• A lot of the talk about this survey focused on the Gen Z folks just starting out. People laughed because some thought needing almost $600,000 a year was a realistic goal. For most jobs, that’s just not going to happen unless you’re in a super specific, high-demand career path, and even then, you need a crazy amount of luck.
• You could blame young people for not knowing how the world works yet, or maybe social media showing off fake rich lifestyles. But that misses the more interesting point.
• The survey also found that the average Boomer thinks financial success is possible with a salary just under $100,000.
• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, $100,000 is still almost double the national median salary.
• BUT, in most big cities where you could actually find jobs paying that much, $100,000 doesn’t really give you a lifestyle of “financial success.”

This shows a huge gap in what people starting out expect and what the people doing the hiring think is necessary. They both agree nobody wants to work, but for different reasons about pay and what it means to be successful.

2. Jobs With Bad Workplaces#

The second kind of job people avoid are those where the work environment is just terrible. This includes places that:

• Push their staff too hard.
• Demand unreasonable amounts of overtime.
• Have management that is pointlessly abusive.

You’d be shocked how many businesses across the country are like this. Even if you’ve been lucky enough to avoid a boss who thinks yelling motivates people, you’ve probably still worked overtime just because you were scared of getting fired or in trouble.

According to a 2023 workplace survey, the average full-time worker they looked at across the country is now putting in an average of 9.2 hours of unpaid overtime per week!

These kinds of jobs often don’t have trouble finding people to start, but they have a major problem with high staff turnover. People take the job, see how bad it is, and leave as soon as they can.

3. Jobs That Don’t Actually Exist#

Finally, some “jobs” that nobody wants to work are simply jobs that were never real in the first place. You’ve probably heard about ghost jobs by now. Even if you’re really trying to find work, there’s a good chance many of your applications are just being used to build up a list of potential candidates for later, not for an actual job opening right now.

The Age Factor#

If you look at the labor force participation numbers and take out the youngest workers (just entering the workforce) and the oldest workers (getting close to or in retirement), guess what? Participation is actually near all-time highs for everyone else!

This makes a lot of sense when you think about it. It’s totally normal now for both men and women to work full-time, and for most families, it’s simply necessary to make ends meet. So yeah, even if these folks don’t want to work, they’re pretty much stuck doing it anyway.

The reason the overall labor force participation number has dropped is because the average is being dragged down by lots of young workers and old workers.

• Older Workers: This group is easier to explain. For a while, as people lived longer, retirement ages got pushed back, and more older people stayed in non-physical jobs. So, a bigger share of people over 55 stayed working. But that’s started to change. Things like having their own retirement savings, and general increases in the price of assets (like houses or stocks), have made it possible for a lot of people over 55 to step back from working. This happened even faster after COVID, when many people got severance packages and decided retiring early looked better than going back to the office.
• Young Workers: The participation rate for young people just starting out (either after high school or college) is also pulling the average down, but for different reasons.
  • More people than ever are getting a college degree, which means they start looking for full-time work later in life.
  • Fewer young people are working part-time jobs while they study. For many, the debt they’ll have after graduation is so huge that working a low-wage part-time job while studying just doesn’t feel worth the effort.

It might not shock you either, but it’s gotten really, really tough to find a job right out of college. A few months ago, a post from a professor at Berkeley got a lot of attention. He talked about his top students from a top university who were struggling to find jobs in technology. This is an industry that, just 24 months before, was hiring super smart graduates like these as fast as they could find them.

The professor wrote that previously, a Berkeley computer science graduate (even an average one) would get multiple good job offers – with choices about the type of work, where it was, the pay, and the company. But now, he said, even outstanding students with perfect grades in their major are contacting him worried because they have zero job offers. He suspects this is a long-term trend affecting almost every job sector. That’s pretty grim news coming from one of the best schools in the country.

Maybe it’s not the most logical move, but a common reaction from people who can’t land a job with the degree they just got (which was supposed to make them more employable) is to… go get another degree. The number of people getting Master’s and PhD degrees has grown even faster than undergraduate degrees, because now getting a Bachelor’s is seen as just “normal” to stand out in a super competitive job market.

And honestly, spending another two to eight years in college getting advanced degrees is also a way for people to avoid facing the tough job market for a few more years. But while they’re doing that, they aren’t in the labor force, which makes the average participation number look worse than it might really be.

So, those are the age groups that are making this whole “nobody wants to work” idea stick around. But it’s also highly dependent on where you are.

The Location Factor: The West Virginia Example#

To really see how location matters, you need to look at the place where apparently the fewest people want to work: West Virginia.

This state, part of the old Rust Belt, has the lowest labor force participation rate in the entire country. It also has some really weird things going on statistically.

• The state is quite poor, mostly because its major industries like coal mining and manufacturing either moved away or aren’t used as much anymore.
• This means many areas have been left behind with no big job opportunities, making labor force participation much lower than the national average.
• But strangely, in some parts of the state, the participation rate is much higher than you’d expect.

A recent study by economists from Hamline University, Cornell, and Virginia Tech looked at West Virginia. They found that depending on the specific county, labor force participation ranges from 42% to 77%. That’s a huge gap of 35% between regions! To compare, the average difference between different regions within other US states is only about 17% – less than half of West Virginia’s difference.

It’s not surprising that cities or towns with lots of businesses tend to have more people working, because people often move there specifically for jobs. But this huge difference in West Virginia was shocking. And it showed a bigger trend happening across the whole country:

• The people in areas that still had jobs can’t afford not to work.
• The people in areas with no jobs often can’t afford to move to places with work. Moving might mean leaving behind family who help out, or just paying the high costs of relocating and finding housing somewhere expensive.

A lot of people who had the money to move have already left states like West Virginia. This just makes the problem worse in the areas they left, as they take their potential businesses and money with them.

That academic paper is dense reading, definitely for people who like digging into details. But if you ever feel like complaining that nobody wants to work anymore, I really recommend taking a look at it.

The report also covers specific welfare issues in West Virginia. But just because this state is feeling the pain the worst doesn’t mean it’s only happening there. The trend of a few big cities doing really well while most other places don’t grow much makes national numbers look okay. But it also means people who do want to work have a tough choice:

1. Try their luck for one of the few jobs left in areas with fewer opportunities.
2. Move to a super expensive city to compete with everyone else fighting for a spot in the few places where people can reliably get ahead.

Jobs in Finance and Tech have become one of the last ways people see to make a “deal with the devil” to get out of these areas that don’t have many opportunities.

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Hey, I’m actually writing an article about how even that path into Finance and Tech is becoming harder to get into. It’s going to be in my completely free email newsletter. So, if you’re interested in reading that and other articles that won’t ever become videos, make sure to sign up!

Thanks for watching! And thanks again to My Heritage for helping make this video happen. You can check them out by scanning the QR code or using the link in the description.

Now, obviously, a lot of this could be made better if companies just allowed remote work. Go watch my recent video that explains why companies absolutely refuse to let most people do that, except maybe for their top bosses! And make sure to like and subscribe so you can keep learning how money works.