by It became an instant meme: a sign on the door of your local fast food restaurant proclaiming, “We are short staffed, please be patient with the staff that did show up, no one wants to work.”
Republican lawmakers, like the governors of Arkansas, Montana, and South Carolina, have laid blame at the feet of the $300/week extra unemployment benefit, saying that people who have been receiving unemployment are now unwilling to go back to work and would rather just stay on the dole. Those states, as well as the US Chamber of Commerce, are now launching efforts to cut the enhanced federal benefits in a bid to force laborers back into the market. But is it really true that the expanded pandemic unemployment benefits are discouraging people from returning to work?
Quite simply, no. There may be a slim margin of people who genuinely do want nothing more than to just collect unemployment for the rest of their lives, but most people do want to have some sort of work. The last year has illuminated the shadowy corners of the reality of work in the US, and there are many reasons why few people are ready to jump on the bandwagon back to the pre-COVID status quo.
The pandemic unemployment benefits were calculated not based on wage information, but on the cost of living, meaning that the $600/week benefit is what the federal government deduced was needed for the average person in the US to live. The fact that the unemployment benefits far outstrip the federal minimum wage and the real wages of many US workers is not an indictment of the unemployment benefits; it is an indictment of the miserably low $7.25 minimum wage and the poverty wages that many employers nationally deign to pay their employees. It’s no wonder that people who can might choose to continue receiving unemployment benefits than return to work for 40 hours a week and make far less doing so.
Additionally, with schools and daycares not fully opened yet, many people have child-rearing and care-taking responsibilities that they must contend with. Women especially have been impacted by the lack of external child care facilities and, as a result, make up a disproportionate amount of the population who are not re-entering the workforce.
As the Guardian points out, people may also be using their pandemic unemployment benefits to make a career change. This is old Conservative wisdom: “If you don’t like your job, get another!” yet they seem to react with a collective shocked Pikachu face when workers actually do so.
Add to this that the pandemic is still ongoing—and despite the growing numbers of those who have been vaccinated, 46% of the US population still hasn’t received a single vaccine dose. Many people do not feel safe enough to take a job in sectors that demand close working quarters, face-to-face customer interaction, and other potentially hazardous tasks, especially when these jobs often have poor benefits and little to no sick days allowance. Why would anybody choose to put themselves at further risk for a job where they would be making a fraction of their unemployment benefits?
On May 10 Biden addressed this issue, saying on one hand that he expects, “that as our economy comes back, these companies will provide fair wages and safe work environments… And if they do, they’ll find plenty of workers.” But on the other hand, he announced that any worker who is offered a “suitable job” must take it or lose their unemployment benefits. General concerns about COVID-19 are not sufficient to turn down a job, according to a White House fact sheet.
It feels fairly typical of good ole reach-across-the-aisle-Joe to simultaneously criticize companies for not taking care of their employees as well as laborers for “gaming the system.” On one hand, his administration has been forced to tack to the left, pass a major stimulus package, and make promises of expanded child care and paid sick leave. On the other hand, the Democratic Party controls the White House and a majority of Congress, and yet so far they have failed to pass a $15/hour minimum wage, the PRO Act, and other programs that would strengthen workers’ rights.
This situation, and the reaction from employers and lawmakers, has made the reality of the US economic system disturbingly clear: employers rely on exploiting workers to turn a profit. They depend on the threat of poverty to trap people into jobs they would otherwise not take. A genuine and robust welfare state would threaten the hegemony of coercion that employers need to continue to give themselves 29% pay raises. Corporations push many workers beyond healthy limits and prefer that workers be constantly anxious about the precarity of their livelihood so that they will concede to work for whatever pittance is thrown at them. Real wages have barely risen over the last 40 years, while the 660 billionaires in the country have amassed a fortune of $4.1 trillion according to the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness. It’s not that people don’t want to work, it’s that they finally recognize how exploited they’ve been, and many are refusing to submit to it any longer. Everybody deserves to make a living wage, even if they “only” work in fast food, or retail, or another low-wage position. Clearly, we need people to do those jobs; we want people to do those jobs. Employers and politicians need to end the shameful posturing of on the one hand desperately needing people to work in typically low-wage jobs and on the other hand denigrating the people who do them. It’s time we treat our essential workers as such, treat them with dignity, and pay them living wages. These big businesses make billions of dollars of profit off the backs of their employees, clearly they can afford to pay their workers living wages, and many workers in this nation are finally beginning to open our eyes to that fact.
