There’s been a culture war going on over the recent disappointing jobs report:
The U.S. economy added just 266,000 jobs in April, a disappointing month of growth that fell well below economists’ estimates despite declining virus caseloads and increased vaccine distribution around the country.
The April unemployment rate remained relatively unchanged at 6.1 percent, although economists caution that the number is misleadingly low, given how many people have dropped out of the labor force in the past year.
The news increased political pressure in Washington amid concerns about whether a labor shortage, reported in some pockets of the economy, is slowing down the recovery. The White House rejected that notion Friday, calling for patience and saying it will take the economy many months to recover from last year’s trauma.
For example, on the fringe-right, which is the only organized component of the right at the moment, Erick Erickson has an opinion:
I think we need to accept, at this point, that the Biden Administration and Democrat willingness to continue subsidizing Americans to stay unemployed is part of a plan to either force an employer-led increase in the minimum wage or try a universal basic income.
At this point, the evidence is too overwhelming that people are staying out of work because the federal unemployment benefit is so big. In fact, right now people do not even have to show proof they are attempting to find work in order to get the federal supplemental unemployment benefit. Nonetheless, as recently as Friday, Joe Biden insisted this was not true.
The Democrats are arguing that if employers just boost their wages, they’ll incentivize people coming back to work. The problem is many employers are already doing that and still cannot get workers to come back to work. Some people are fine making less on unemployment while doing no work and not having to worry about eviction thanks to additional federal policies.
But Adam Chandler disputes that:
The main problem with this line of thinking is that it simply isn’t true and, perhaps, holds less water than it ever has. In the past year alone, study after study has debunked the myth that the emergency benefits and occasional payments provided by the government are disincentivizing people from returning to the labor force en masse. “We find no evidence that high UI [unemployment insurance] replacement rates drove job losses or slowed rehiring,” read one study by Yale economists last summer, back when enhanced federal unemployment benefits were $600 a week — or double the current amount. In a separate study of unemployed workers without a college degree last year, Arindrajit Dube at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, found no evidence thatthe additional pandemic compensation passed under the Cares Act last year “held back the labor market recovery.” [WaPo]
Chandler prefers a more nuanced appraisal:
This is why when we talk about the recovery and the return of the low-wage workers who were disproportionately affected by pandemic unemployment, we should be looking at the jobs on offer and not the people. Before the pandemic, the state of hourly work was fossilized by a federal minimum wage standard that hasn’t budged in more than a decade along with real wages that haven’t moved in over 40 years. Instead of supporting comprehensive benefits, lawmakers in some states introduced ostensibly progressive initiatives such as predictive scheduling, which ensured that some hourly workers could, at least, know their work schedule more than a few hours ahead of time so they could plan their lives and secure child care. In the shadow of an unparalleled public health crisis, the default factory settings for American workers seem even more absurd. And yet, these conditions have only changed in a few cases since the pandemic began and, in many instances, have only gotten worse.
It’s an all-time understatement to say the professional lives of service workers and retail employees grew exponentially less sustainable during the past year. Across the country, hourly workers have been tasked with enforcing mask mandates and have been attacked, harassed and even shot at for protecting themselves and other customers from a public health crisis. (Back in August, Illinois took the extraordinary step of passing a law that would make it a felony for someone to assault a worker for enforcing a mask policy.) Workers have labored long hours through supply shortages and shifting and often lax safety protocols, often without hazard pay or basic benefits like sick leave or health insurance, all in the middle of a pandemic.
Right. When you work crap jobs for long hours, there is an opportunity cost to the employee. Rather than go out and look for new work on your off hours, you recharge your batteries by hitting parties, the bar, snowshoeing, whatever it is that turns your crank – and isn’t work.
My guess there’s more going on than simply refusing to return to crap jobs. I’m guessing that those folks who lost their jobs, or quit out of fear of infection or violence, had time to consider what they really wanted to be doing with a majority of the conscious life.
And it may not be meatpacking, retail, or dealing with sloppy eaters at the restaurant.
The right wants to have a collective tiz-fit because, well, there’s change in the air, and that threatens the status quo, whether that’s high profit industries that barely pay workers or people leaving the churches because, well, the sky didn’t fall in when they didn’t make their weekly pilgrimage to the church.
For the Republicans, especially the leadership, they’re the folks who are well off and therefore can’t understand why there should be a change; contrariwise, the people not scuttling back to their jobs while uttering mewling thank yous to the bosses is a signal that something’s wrong for those Republican leaders.
But to those folks who aren’t invested emotionally and financially in how things were prior to Covid, who’ve been told everything was peachy-dory outside of a few troublemakers, this may actually be a welcome development.
My thought is that these people who were forced to take a breather and figured out what their future should hold, we may see an explosion of entrepreneurship, of non-profit creation to address human needs, old and new, of people turning to creativity rather than just job slavery. Take, for example, Max Miller of Tasting History with Max Miller. Miller started this YouTube channel after he was furloughed by Disney, if memory serves; recently, he received a recall notice.
He quit, instead, choosing to pursue this new found passion of starring on a YouTube channel covering his forays into cooking with ancient recipes.
And that has to lead to good things. Sure, maybe basic prices will go up – but most of us can afford it, especially when the news gets out that the price rise is to fund the employees’ salaries.
So keep an eye on how the jobs reports go, and think about how this may not be reflective of a fundamental flaw in the Biden plan, but a signal of the behavior of those who held those jobs – and don’t want them back. Who want something more.
It’s always that desire for something more that holds the promise of improving the human condition.
