Workers Don’t Want Their Old Jobs on the Old Terms

"The pandemic disrupted many our work lives. Some of us — generally highly educated white-collar workers with relatively well-paying jobs — were able to shift to remote work. Millions of other workers, especially many poorly paid service workers, simply saw their jobs disappear when consumers stopped eating out and traveling.
Now the economy is recovering — a recovery that will probably continue despite the spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus. But many of us don’t want to go back to the way things were before. After a year and a half of working from home, many don’t want to return to the stress of commuting. And at least some of those who were forced into unemployment have come to realize how unhappy they were with low pay and poor working conditions, and are reluctant to go back to their previous jobs.
To be honest, when businesses began complaining about labor shortages, I was skeptical. These kinds of complaints always surface when the economy begins to recover from a slump and often mean only that job applicants have gotten a bit less desperate. Some of us also remember how, seven or eight years ago, Very Serious People insisted that we faced a major “skills gap” and would never be able to get unemployment down to the levels that prevailed before the financial crisis. (Spoiler: We did.)
At this point, however, it seems clear that something really is going on. You can see this from the data on vacancies: There are far more unfilled job openings than you would normally expect to see, given the current level of unemployment, which is still fairly high.
You can also see it by looking at what’s happening in the sector hit hardest by the pandemic, leisure and hospitality (think restaurants and hotels). Employment in that sector is still well below its prepandemic level; but to bring workers back, the sector has had to offer big wage increases, significantly above the prepandemic trend.
In other words, some workers really don’t seem willing to go back to their old jobs unless offered substantially more money and/or better working conditions. But why is this happening? And is it a bad thing?

Perversely, the pandemic may have given many of us a chance to figure out what really matters to us — and the money we were being paid for unpleasant jobs, some now realize, just wasn’t enough."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/opinion/workers-wages-recovery.html