Farrah Anderson / for CU-Citizen Access
Daniel Krause, owner of the restaurant Cracked near the University of Illinois campus, said he went into debt to stay open during the pandemic after student workers left to go home and customers stopped coming.
Ashlee Rhodes, the general manager of Jarling’s in Champaign, said she was forced to reduce the business’s hours every week after struggling to find enough staff.
Pedro Heller, owner of Black Dog Smoke and Ale House in Champaign, had to close his second location in Urbana because many employees found other jobs or had to stay home with their children.
Running a business is never easy, but it’s gotten a lot harder during what’s been dubbed the “Great Resignation” – the nationwide pandemic-induced labor shortage.
Champaign County’s unemployment rate climbed to 11% in April of 2020, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This was just three months after the first reported case of COVID-19 in the United States.
Over 10,000 workers left the workforce between March and April of 2020, according to the data.
Statewide, the unemployment rate shot up to over 16% in April of 2020 – the highest unemployment rate in April since 1976. The rate was 4.1% in April 2019.
Since then, statewide unemployment numbers have decreased to about 4.7%, but that’s not the only indicator of problems with labor. Prices on consumer products in Illinois continue to rise because of a lack of workers in industries like manufacturing and shipping, according to an interview with US Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh with the Chicago Tribune.
But the current labor shortage isn’t just because of the pandemic.
“There was already a tight labor market prior to the pandemic,” Andrew Weaver, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s School of Labor and Employment Relations, said. “The U.S. unemployment rate in Dec. 2019 was 3.6%, which is among the lowest the U.S. has experienced since WWII.”
That tight labor market was worse in “low-quality jobs” like leisure, hospitality and retail jobs, Weaver said.
When COVID-19 hit, people working in places like restaurants, retail stores and childcare were the most vulnerable to the virus.
Often, Weaver said, jobs in service industries lack flexible hours, child care assistance and healthcare benefits.
“The sectors that face the biggest challenges are the ones frankly, with the lowest job quality,” he said. “[Those employers] really haven’t had to offer a lot of flexibility or benefits to their workforces in the past to recruit them and at some level, that’s coming back to bite them.”
Over 200,000 workers left the state of Illinois between 2013 and 2019, according to a 2020 report from the Illinois Department of Employment Security. Combined with an aging population who retired, the current labor market has led to huge issues with staffing for business owners, according to the same report.
Locally, many business owners aren’t sure that they’ll ever be able to bounce back.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to what it used to be before COVID,” Pedro Heller, the owner of Black Dog, said. “But we’ll just see.”
Cover Photo by Taylor Ramirez