Twitter user Robert Black put it succinctly: Republicans don’t actually want the specific things they say they want.
Recent events, once again, back up that assessment. Jonathan Chait finds they have their diapers in a wad over the balance of power shifting in the direction of beleaguered low-wage workers. They claim to be the workers’ party except when it comes to actually taking workers’ side on conditions of employment.
“Giving low-income workers money is bad because that creates a disincentive to work,” they argue. “Regulating a higher minimum wage is also no good because that kills jobs. Government-subsidized health insurance or child care is also problematic, and encouraging the formation of unions to give them more bargaining power is totally unacceptable.”
Now, Covid-driven economic conditions have left short-staffed employers scrambling to attract workers in a labor seller’s market, forcing them to bid up wages. Turns out, the “workers’ party” hates that too:
This week, Chipotle announced it would raise its prices by 4 percent to cover the cost of paying higher wages. The National Republican Congressional Committee pounced with a press release attacking the Democrats for having engineered this catastrophe. “Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage,” complained a GOP spokesman, “and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill.”
They’re serious. Well, as serious as Republican flacks. Kylee Zempel of The Federalist is horrified that the fast food joint has “jacked up the price of [her] Chipotle order.”
Zempel is specifically angry that Democrats have engineered a tight labor market forcing Chipotle to raise wages: “Restaurants have had to bribe current and prospective workers with fatter paychecks to lure them off their backsides and back to work,” she complains. “That’s what happens when the federal government steps in with a sweet unemployment deal, incentivizing workers do a little less labor and a little more lounging.”
Bloody peasants!
Why, Chipotle actually announced it would raise its average hourly wage to $15, Zempel raged, “the same dollar figure Democrats have pushed as a federal minimum wage.”
Chipotle is not alone, reports the Washington Post. Twelve employers the Post surveyed found when they raised their base pay to $15/hr., “It was like a dam broke.” Over 1,000 applications piled up in a week at Jacob Hanchar’s Pittsburgh ice cream shop:
Enrique Lopezlira, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley and an expert on the low-wage workforce, said the stories were a sign, albeit anecdotal, that the market was functioning as it should in the face of excessive demand for workers.
“The more employers improve the quality of the jobs and the more they think of workers as an asset that needs to be maximized, the better they’re going to be able to find and retain workers long term,” he said.
Patrick Whalen co-owns a string of restaurants in Charlotte and Charleston, SC. As business increased in March, so did wait times for his understaffed eateries. And his negative online reviews:
After one of his managers told him that a line cook needed to borrow money to get groceries, Whalen was moved to reconsider wages at the company.
“It was just one of those moments where you just kind of stop and you say, ‘Is there a real problem in our industry?’” he said. “We always kind of knew it was there, but we didn’t really know what to do with it.”
Clearly, a financial genius.
Whalen raised starting pay from $12-$13/hr to $15 and added a “tip the kitchen” program. Applications poured in, and his restaurant group went from “about 50 to 60 percent staffed to nearly fully staffed” within three weeks.
Naturally, this situation is intolerable for the workers’ party, says Chait:
The putative objection to increasing the minimum wage is that employers would eliminate jobs because they don’t produce enough value to make that wage profitable. But now that employers like Chipotle are finding they can pay that wage, and the only cost is a rather modest increase in prices, it turns out some conservatives simply object to working-class employees making that much money.
When large chains pay employees so little that they qualify for government nutrition assistance, Republicans tolerate taxpayers picking up that tab. But when market conditions force employers to pay employees more, it is an outrage if any of those costs are passed along to consumers. Especially to Republican consumers. Now, you’re getting personal.
I’ve got an idea. We’ll call your burrito cost increase a user fee.