Oh look. Guess what helps get people back to work?
States like Georgia have used a stick: cutting unemployment benefits to push workers off the sideline. A growing number of local companies are using a carrot: raising wages to lure people back to jobs.
The reasons for worker-hesitancy are varied — lack of childcare, COVID fears, unpleasant work conditions — but money is part of the equation: Federal jobless subsidies combine with Georgia’s program to pay up to $665 a week, the equivalent of $16.63 an hour.
That is more than a lot of people make. Georgia’s Department of Labor says 80% receiving jobless benefits previously made $20,000 a year or less, or just under $10 an hour.
A 2019 Brookings study calculated that median earnings in metro Atlanta were $18.12 an hour. But about one-fifth of workers made $10.09 an hour or less, below the roughly $12.74-an-hour wage that sets the poverty line for a family of four.
“It does give people a little wiggle room not to take a job that has really low wages and is not safe,” said Heidi Shierholz, former chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor, and now senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
No wonder Republicans are horrified. Imagine poeple being able to turn down low-paid unsafe work. Whatever is this world coming to?
Apparently, a bunch of large retailers like Target and Costco are raising wages and fast food places are following suit. It’s about time. The health care sector is seeing a lot of shortages and are paying bonuses and offering other incentives to nurses and respiratory therapists, many of of whom are probably suffering extreme burnout from the past year.
And how about these workers?
Most intense is the demand for certified nursing assistants who work in nursing homes, home health care and COVID testing, she said. “Pre-pandemic, a CNA was making $10 or $11 an hour. Now a CNA won’t even talk to you unless it’s $16.”
They were making below poverty wages before. That is a crime against them as vital workers and a crime against the elderly who we clearly don’t value either.
And keep in mind that $16 an hour doesn’t even bring them 35k a year. It’s not as if even then it’s a job that can support a family. And yet we have millions of people dependent on these workers. It’s an immoral situation all around.