In their ongoing effort to divert public attention from their complicity in the Jan. 6 Trump insurrection, Republicans are trying to convince voters they are a “working-class party.” No, really.
Greg Sargent observes that this narrative emphasis comes as Republicans complain that unemployment benefits they opposed are too generous. Moral hazard rises from the grave:
These benefits, they say, are discouraging Americans from getting back to their jobs. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) claims they placed “handcuffs” on the recovery, and Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) insists that they’re “making unemployment pay more than work.”
That lyric is familiar. Maybe if they hummed a few bars?
Paul Krugman concludes the Republicans’ populist rebranding effort is a farce. When they complain about cancel culture they don’t mean the Chamber of Commerce effort in Republican-controlled states to cancel the $300-a-month supplement provided under the American Rescue Plan.
As for benefits depressing job growth among low-wage workers, Krugman states, “The actual pattern was the reverse: big job gains in low-wage sectors like leisure and hospitality, job losses in high-wage sectors like professional services.”
Lack of child care remains a factor in some people not returning to work, as does covid-skittishness, as does how the pandemic has forced some people “to reassess their life prospects, a good thing,” Sargent writes:
The truth or falsity of the GOP story aside, the very fact that Republicans are telling it exposes the “working-class party” ruse. As Jordan Weissmann notes, even if benefits did discourage work, instead of slashing them we might consider letting people temporarily keep them while returning, since this dynamic would be illustrating how unremunerative their jobs are.
This is the point that doesn’t appear to concern Republicans. To them, if low-wage work is so unrewarding that paltry unemployment benefits discourage it, the problem is the latter and not the former.
The new “working-class” GOP is making the same arguments for cutting off unemployment benefits that it made during the recovery from the Great Recession. As Krugman concludes, “punishing the unemployed is what Republicans do, whenever they can.”
Laura Clawson provides a case-in-point from Mississippi. Gov. Tate Reeves will refuse to expand federal unemployment benefits, “costing unemployed Mississippians $300 a week in an effort to force them into low-wage jobs.” This, too, is what Republicans do, whenever they can.
Clawson writes:
Mississippi Republicans are trying to force people back into low-wage jobs in the state with the lowest vaccination rate in the country—just 41.5% of adults have had one vaccine dose. But they’re part of a broader effort to normalize low wages in any working environment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently called for an end to the unemployment benefits supplement. Many restaurant owners have been on an extended whine campaign—with help from the media—about how they can’t get people to work the exact schedules they want on the low wages they want to pay to deal with often unmasked, belligerent customers.
Other factors like lower numbers of seasonal immigrants or the sudden rush of restaurants trying to staff back up, creating more competition for workers, are less often mentioned.
When reporters focus on what bosses say (which is very much the same as what Republican politicians say), they get a lot of, “When people can make more staying at home than going to work, they will stay at home,” as one McDonald’s franchisee group recently wrote in a letter to its members. But when they talk to workers, they hear, “You couldn’t pay me $20 an hour to work in food for the conditions we had to endure there,” as a former Chipotle worker told Business Insider. Or, “Everybody is honestly so tired of being so mistreated, still,” in the words of a Starbucks worker.
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”We are so sick and tired of [restaurant owners] assuming we want a handout,” another Washington, D.C. area restaurant worker told Eater. “We want to work, but we also want to be treated like human beings. We haven’t been for way too long.”
But you know, Republicans being the “working-class party” means “harder work for everyone. And more of it, too!” For less money and poorer working conditions.