We're talking past each other. You're talking about retaining people already hired or simply rehiring people.
I'm talking about the ability to get a job in the first place. Employers are spoiled for choice since 2008, and their requirements genuinely are hard unless you happen to know someone. Your experience in tech is an outlier. Your experience outside of tech in your state and your city is vastly different from my state and my city.
> How is it possible to get any blue collar job at all without extensive training and certifications on your own time and with your own money in that very specific field?
People do. And sure you can find lots of fields as counter examples. I guess people do because they do not insist on these fields.
I was not talking of re-hiring. In the case of retail, you have store managers with lots of candidates who end up having to "hire" one after the other because they still can't fill their schedule with people who actually show up. They hire enough at random so that eventually they do have people who stick.
Parts of Los Angeles, specifically, now, specifically, are filled with entertainmnent industry hopeful for small part time industry jobs. Meanwhile they make do with day jobs that require no particular training or certification. Besides actually showing up, which is not to be taken for granted when many people will outright say it aloud "why should I care?"
The Ghost Ship in Oakland, SF Bay Area, an artist coop kind of thing until it burned to the ground was "charging about 25 resident artists rent ranging between $300 and $600 per month. The monthly rate for a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland at the time typically exceeded $2,000." They are not the only place like that in the Bay Area - they were cheap though.
I'm not talking tech jobs. But actually I do have examples as tech jobs also! Some startups are fairly desperate in their hiring - and may not pay all that much but certainly enough to survive. In one crazy example, they paid room and board, and not much more. And they worked out perfectly fine on that person's resume for their next job.
I'm talking about the ability to get a job in the first place. Employers are spoiled for choice since 2008, and their requirements genuinely are hard unless you happen to know someone. Your experience in tech is an outlier. Your experience outside of tech in your state and your city is vastly different from my state and my city.