The latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics backs up what many operators are already feeling.

Employers reported 7.3 million open positions in July, a slight uptick from June. But actual hiring fell, from 5.3 million from 5.1 million. That's the slowest hiring pace since February, and before that, you'd have to go back to the depths of 2020 to find hiring this slow. The number of workers who quit fell too, from 3.2 million to 3.1 million. In leisure and hospitality, job postings dropped by 42,000, one of the steepest declines of any industry.

Read one way, this looks like stability. Read from the perspective of a restaurant manager, it looks different.

When hiring slows like this, workers have fewer places to go. Leaving for something that actually fits your life gets harder. So people stay in jobs they don’t really want because the alternative is worse. That's not a labor market getting healthier.

I've spent time in restaurants where eight out of ten hourly workers had a second or third job. Not by choice. One employer couldn't offer enough hours to live on. Their schedules collided constantly. People got written up for being late to job two because job one ran long. Nobody designed it that way. The system was just never built to see a worker's whole week, only the slice that belonged to one employer.

The real fix isn't hoping fewer people quit. It's building schedules and systems that see how people actually work now, across more than one job, with a lot less room to walk away.

That's the problem we started Ando to solve.