Astonishing - the people I know that have been looking for a job for the last year have a different experience.

There are a lot of people that discovered that there is more to life than work, so they're not going back.

There's no labor shortage... there's a shortage of people that want to sell their life energy for shit wages.

Unemployment rate only counts people "actively" looking for work. If a person has not looked for a job in the past 4 weeks then they are not included in the unemployment rate. The Labor Force Participation rate will tell you how many people out of the total working population are actually working. About 40% of adults are unemployed. There a lot of people that have just dropped out or are working under the table.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm