Is there actually a crisis as is claimed if people will not work minimum wage jobs if they can earn more on unemployment?

I was furloughed in the early days of the pandemic for 3 weeks. I was bringing home more money on unemployment plus the extra 600 a week my state was giving the unemployed. But my company would not have paid my health insurance past the 3 weeks and I had to have that, plus no one would have been available to do my job. Trust me, I was very scared in the beginning and having to walk into the hospital on a daily basis with the Covid floor 2 flights above me, I would have loved to have stayed home. But I knew I had to suck it up and be very careful and get myself back to work. I do know quite a few people who are still on unemployment and are just now looking for a job because the extra 600 a week has stopped.
I think they are taking advantage of the situation. Not all people, but some.

If some people are choosing not to work to live off of unemployment insurance plus the extra COVID $600, I have zero issue with it for a couple reasons:

1) If you’ve paid into unemployment for years, you have a right to get UI when you’re laid off. It’s your money.

2) The extra $600 is temporary. You’re going to have to go back to work eventually.

My wife’s entire department was let go days after lock down. Fifty people. She’s been job hunting and interviewing the entire time with little luck. Her UI plus the $600 did not add up to what she was making before, but it certainly saved our bacon. Regardless, she’d much rather be working than struggling to find a gig and feeling terrible about herself.

The “crisis” is people realizing it is not worth working for substandard pay when they can work elsewhere.

When a lot of states let restaurants pay a cash wage of $2.13 an hour, better to go work somewhere else.

The real crisis is that employers are not willing to pay fair wages.

@Zenvelo…a good waiter or waitress can blow it out of the water with tips.

@cookieman I don’t know of anyone who has “paid into unemployment.” The employer pays a set fee for unemployment insurance, and when you try to get it, the employer fights you like hell because if he has to pay he loses the insurance payment and has to repay the amount.
When I was asked if I had employees, I asked what the amount was that I would have to pay to have unemployment insurance for my employees in this state. The amount was $670 per employee.

@Dutchess_III What about an average waitperson working in a diner?

Again it just depends. I know I made more money at the end of the day than the cooks.
I worked in a pizzaria.

@stanleybmanly Of course Conservatives can’t be right. You need to come up with some other reason. Maybe everybody is just lazy. Maybe they are hoping to force the government to support them. What does the leftist playbook tell us?

Would anyone with a leftist playbook please step forward?

@seawulf575 my own playbook tells me that if no one wants to work for the minimum wage, the minimum wage is not enough.

@stanleybmanly But does your playbook tell you that the extra Covid benefits add to the increased inability to fill open positions? And does your playbook tell you that people would rather not work than work? Or that they would accept the minimum wage if they weren’t being paid to stay home?

It tells me that you’re less likely to work once you understand that you can only fall further behind.

I wonder what the rightist playbook says?

I mean, maybe employers need to make their shitty low-paying non-benefited jobs better if they want to entice people to work for them. Just a thought…

Well the Mexicans will always take those jobs.

Probably they are correct that 600 bucks a week is enough to disincentivise some kinds of labor. I don’t have a problem with this. We’re mostly talking about service industry jobs here, which have always been a problematic way to structure an economy. The robots will replace most of these workers soon anyway, so why try to rat-screw them preemptively?

600 bucks weekly isn’t much, but it can sustain a radical change in career, without risking literally everything and everyone you love. I think we should keep it up if we aren’t going to pursue better pro-business legislation, like universal health care or day care.

@zenvelo – wherever they are, tipping is usually used to enforce class. Take a look and you’ll see that waitstaff in tipping, non-sharing, establishments are chosen for non-foreigness, whiteness, and every form of typicality. “Hot” people are always front of house, and waiters typically make much more per hour than kitchen staff, though they do work shorter shifts in general. Of course, as you pointed out, a waiter in a much slower place will be getting closer to minimum wage, and working barely enough hours to get by.

I shouldn’t complain a one group of people, being able to earn a living wage, but the victims of the service industry are many.

@Demosthenes Yes, that would help. And it may help put those businesses out of business. After all, their prices would have to be raised to compensate for the raise in wages, would they not??

@kritiper Well, that’s the capitalist catch-22. If your job isn’t paying enough to live off of and unemployment benefits are actually going to pay better ($600 a week is more than I made at my last part-time job), that isn’t the sign of a well-functioning system imho.

Yes, it is a crisis. We had a hard time finding someone to repave a parking lot. They called a few days prior to their start date and said they could not get their employees to come back to work so they have hired inexperienced people and subs and it took the estimated time for just half the job. They are back on the job working on the other side. I have friends with restaurants and no wait staff. My state is cutting off the federal bonus payments, which were ridiculous to start with, so more people will go back to work. Many of them will not be able to go back to the same jobs or in some cases even the same secter.

Not really. Unemployment benefits are limited to begin with, both in amount and duration; the temporary COVID-related boost certainly helps, but both the supplement and the base UI funds will eventually end. So whatever “crisis” conservatives have created in the public discourse is temporary, at best. Eventually people will have to return to some kind of work, just to be able to stay afloat.

What IS a crisis is that the minimum wage has stagnated for decades, and costs have outpaced this base rate. People are increasingly unable to afford housing and other essential elements necessary to maintain a basic standard of living. We would have approached this point anyway, where there is an undercurrent of unrest regarding how our labor force is structured and designed. The pandemic just sped up and exacerbated this, so that we are confronting these issues now rather than, say, a couple more years down the road. But this conversation and reckoning was coming, and is long overdue.

What’s making things difficult right now is even though businesses are re-opening and returning to a new “normal”, not every business has returned to the same level of operations. Additionally, too many people have turned to Amazon and other online platforms (some of which are monopolies or in the process of becoming monopolies), which further suffocates brick-and-mortar businesses, whether local, regional, or national entities. So the labor market itself is changing and adjusting because of this. A set number of expected hours or familiar wax-and-wane patterns (more business during the holidays, pre-summer, pre-fall, etc., etc.) have changed or vanished. This results in limited hours. Some employers are readily hiring, but more on an on-call basis, or offering the same part-time jobs as before, but controlled so that employers don’t have to pay benefits (one dodge a lot of big corporation do is use staffing agencies—they’ve been shifting towards this the last 10–20 years, but I see this slowly accelerating again). So people are facing a new labor market where they are “earning” the same or more on unemployment as they did in their old jobs, and they know based on what we all went through the last 16 or so months is that it doesn’t have to be that way. “Essential workers” and others who work in the supply chain or at the retail end are realizing they have power—they just have not used it.

Additionally, with children at home or other family obligations, it means that people who might already be back at work currently have no means to obtain childcare or ensure that other family members are cared for at this time. So some parents may choose to stay home a bit longer, as the uncertainty plays out (Open this week! Whoops, closed again three weeks later. Masks off, no worries! Oh, wait… masks on again, please!).

A number of people also retired or changed careers. We are seeing this play out right now with the huge gas price spikes. Gas tanker drivers are a small number of the total trucker force, to begin with, and the older ones, sidelined during the height of the pandemic last year, decided retiring now rather than a couple years down the road was A-OK. This is a factor in why prices at your local station jumped.

So there are some industries or areas where there is indeed a slight labor shortage. Others may have changed careers. A waiter may have finally decided to find a more stable job, for example. A cook may have used their leverage to find a job in a different place where they could earn a bit more. A retail worker may have returned to school, or is now taking the opportunity to leverage the small amount of power they have to try to get a better-paying job, or a full-time slot rather than return to the same job they had before.

So yes, there’s a “crisis”, but it’s a lot more complex than conservatives would have you believe. The job market is in flux, and so there’s a temporary advantage for workers, not employers, to determine where and when to rejoin the workforce. But the overarching issue here is an affordability crisis: housing, food, and other essentials. Wages are going to have to go up, and whether the consumer pays (more likely) or the employer does (this is what SHOULD happen; C-suite compensation is out of control), it’s a conversation we need to have immediately. Add the specter of climate change into the mix (food costs will probably start to skyrocket before long, as droughts worsen, fires increase, and temperature fluctuations destabilize growing and harvesting), and you’re looking at a real mess.

Yes, there is a crisis. Minimum wage jobs are not the only jobs unfilled at the moment. Not by a long shot!