Exposing “No one else wants to work”
I hear all the time, “Nobody wants to work anymore.”
US Chamber of Commerce, Corporate America the biggest lobbying group claims to have more than 10 million vacancies right now in the US for which employers cannot find workers.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the US is dealing withstructural labor shortage“This will not be resolved any time soon.
But here’s the truth: there is no shortage of labor.
There is a shortage of jobs with sufficient wages to attract workers to fill them.
When a problem is described incorrectly, the proposed solutions often turn out to be just as incorrect.
For most Americans, inflation-adjusted real wages keep falling. Any payment increases workers may have earned over the past few years were actually wage cuts because wages lagged behind rising costs of basic necessities such as housing, food, child care and health care..
You don’t have to be a financial wizard to understand why some employees might not care.
So, what to do about the difficulties employers face in finding workers?
Simple. If employers want more workers, they should pay them more.
Many corporations even raking it in they can clearly afford it right now.
Of course, Jerome Powell and his Fed colleagues don’t want to hear that. They seek to cope with the so-called “labor shortage”. economic slowdown so that employers can find all the workers they need without increasing wages.
But raising interest rates by the Fed to slow the economy will prevent millions of people from getting their much-needed raises and cause millions more To lose a job – disproportionately low wage workers, women and people of color.
Meanwhile, Republicans and some corporate economists blame the “labor shortage” on overly generous unemployment benefits. They say the way to get more people to work is to make their life outside of work less bearable.
Garbage. Most of the unemployed are already in a difficult situation.
The pandemic benefits even long goneand even before COVID, the American unemployment system was already least generous any wealthy nation.
Taken to its logical extreme, the corporate Republican argument only holds up if you don’t give a damn about workers.
Of course… you can eliminate all social safety nets, and at some point people without work will be so hurt that they will have to take any job available, for any salary, whatever it requires.
But do it, and we’ll have an even more brutal economy than today’s.
Look, if we want more people to get jobs – And we want to live in a moral society where people can lead a decent life – the answer is to pay people more.
Instead of saying “no one else wants to work”, we should say “no one else wants to be exploited”.
(Source: youtube.com)