Customers arriving at closing time is rarely welcome for restaurant workers. (I know.) But arriving in the suburbs, hungry, after a late flight, and in the middle of a pandemic is no fun for travelers either. Jason Steinhauer found himself among the latter just before Christmas in Nashville. A Thai restaurant with its lights still on re-opened its door and offered to cook one last entre for him.
The pandemic had been tough on them, they said. The closures. The delayed deliveries. But the worst was finding help: servers, cooks, sushi chefs. Steinhauer had heard the same story in Miami, in Washington, D.C., and in Philadelphia and New York. People are dropping out of the labor force.
In November, 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs (Business Insider):
The new data shows that the need for workers stuck around in November, as people left low-paying work at a record rate. Eight months of elevated quits shows that labor shortages and the reshaping of the labor market might be a permanent feature of the post-vaccine economy. The quitting spree says that Americans want better conditions, better pay, and more fulfillment from their jobs.
Steinhauer writes at the Hollywood Progressive:
Anecdotes and media reports cannot fully diagnose such a complex issue. I don’t pretend to know all the answers, and I’m certainly not an economist or a sociologist. Yet, in beginning to wrap my mind around this phenomenon, I couldn’t help but think about my own experience. For four years, I worked at an institution that showed little concern for its employees. Mold in offices went un-remediated. Water leaking into people’s work spaces went un-repaired. Harassment, abuse and anti-Semitism festered. During the pandemic, before a vaccine was available, some staff were told to report to work and sign waivers stating that if they contracted COVID-19 they would not pursue legal action against the employer. After years of such treatment, my wife and I decided 2020 would be my final year. The pandemic had made it crystal clear to us: why should I work endlessly and tirelessly, risking my health and well-being, for an institution that cared so little about me?
I’ve heard similar refrains from people in many walks of life over the past two years. Harassment and abuse seem to be common in academia, government, hospitals, schools, law firms, tech companies, construction firms and service jobs. Employees are constantly mistreated and released by management seemingly without compunction. When the pandemic hit and people were told to stay home, receiving unemployment checks and stimulus payments to do so, many decided not to return. Some pundits have dubbed this the “Great Resignation.” But I suspect something more profound may be going on.
“America’s unrelenting capitalism” is what’s going on:
People have been working more and earning less. Union protections have been degraded (see previous History Club newsletter). Wages have been stagnant. Health insurance has become more expensive. Increased housing costs, increased student loans and increased medical bills have diminished people’s abilities to save, invest and retire. All the while employees are asked to work longer hours and produce more. Meanwhile, CEOs and venture capitalists flaunt $1 billion dollar valuations and record-breaking IPOs. Amazon workers fought tooth-and-nail to earn $15 an hour; meanwhile Jeff Bezos spent more than $500 million per year to blast celebrities into space. Something isn’t adding up.
The American Dream has become an American scam. In support of the lie, conservative pundits will complain that government supports are to blame. Stop coddling these slackers! We need to apply the invisible backhand of the marketplace to people worried that their work will make their children orphans. Cut ’em off! Institute means-testing! Drive workers back into the labor force so the entrepreneurs can thrive!
What’s next? Forced labor? If it’s what the money wants. The last thing “unrelenting capitalism” wants is to treat and pay employees better.
The Great Resignation adds noise to economic signals, especially regarding unemployment, that under Joe Biden the economy is going gangbusters. Eric Boehlert at PressRun:
The U.S. economy just set the record for the most jobs created in one year, but you’d never know it from the continuing doomsday economic coverage under President Joe Biden.
The new jobs report, released Friday, offered the latest evidence of the purposeful disconnect the media maintain, and specifically how journalists rely on consistently unreliable “expectations” for job report numbers in order to portray the results as “disappointing,” and to paint a picture of a faltering U.S. economy even as it shatters growth records.
The U.S. economy just posted 199,000 new jobs in December, during a pandemic surge. That sounds like a good thing, right? Especially considering that in December 2020, under Trump and during another wintertime pandemic surge, the U.S. lost 140,000 jobs. Instead, the press was uniformly pessimistic about Friday’s news.
It was a “major disappointment,” CNN announced, despite the fact employee wages hit record heights and the unemployment rate tumbled to 3.9 percent. (Last winter, the CBO predicted it would take five years for the U.S. to reach an unemployment rate that low.) NPR stressed the US added “only” 199,000 jobs. Hiring had “faltered” the New York Times reported. All because the key number failed to meet estimates.
What’s missing are acknowledgements that experts’ predictions that were always iffy are even more so amidst a global pandemic. Economic reporting and government accounting have not adjusted.
It’s a one-two combo: The BLS is regularly undercounting jobs, which is bad news for the White House, and economists are regularly overestimating what the monthly BLS jobs number will be, which is also bad news for the White House. Then when the BLS revises the monthly gains, the media are nowhere to be found.
Even the Great Resignation is a kind of good news … for workers. But except for the MAGA-hatted, disgruntled rural diner crowd, workers earn fewer column inches than captains of industry.
There’s also the lingering suspicion that the press simply likes to tell bad economic news — and hide upbeat newsflashes — during the Biden years. Just look at this pretzel-logic headline from the Washington Post yesterday, “2021 Shattered Job Market Records, But It’s Not as Good as it Looks.”
Bad News Bearers gonna bear bad news.