I’ve been rich, and I’ve been poor, and believe me, rich is better Sophie Tucker
After you follow politics for a while, you tend to become almost numb to the craven, almost cowardly Neil-and-Bob that the GOP does to keep their corporate overlords happy. After all, the Republicans couldn’t get grassroots funding if they ran a lawn care company. But there’s something going on right now that is making both the GOP Governors of many states, as well as their corporate overlords, look just plain stupid.
A quick history lesson. Thanks to the truly pathetic incompetence of the Trump administration, the Covid virus was allowed to run wild in the United States. The economy tanked, most of the country literally shut down for anywhere from 4-6 months, and the death toll became a national tragedy. Small businesses closed for good, never to return.
As election day finally approached, Trump finally got his shit together. He passed a $1200 stimulus check, which was delayed until his name could appear on it. Unemployment assistance from the Feds soon followed. Unemployment assistance and another $2000 in stimulus went out. Which didn’t save Trump.
But now, thanks to the Biden administration, we are rapidly approaching herd immunity in blue states, while red states lag behind. The country is starting to reopen, restrictions are being lifted, and business wants to get back to usual. Employers are throwing open their doors, and welcoming back their employees, at the same cheap ass rate they were paying them before the pandemic.
But there’s just one simple problem, the employees are not beating down the doors to go back to work for slave wages. Many of these people have been off of work for 8-15 months now, and they have time to contemplate their future. What they see is a suddenly wide open job market, with no reason to have to just jump at the first offer their boss gives them. Most businesses need employees as they gear back up, so they can play the field.
Here’s where it all falls apart for the GOP. Big business only sees one thing, the bottom line. If they invite employees back to work, and they don’t flock through the door, it can only mean one thing. They are making more money at home on augmented unemployment than they can by returning to work, so they’re just staying home. And the only resolution to that is to have subservient GOP Governors stop accepting the additional federal unemployment payments, forcing the employees back to the grindstone.
There’s just one problem, they miscalculated. God bless Sophie Tucker. I’ve never been rich, but I’ve been poor, and believe me, it sucks! And if there’s one thing I learned through my experience of being poor, it’s that when you’re poor, you hoard. And the thing you hoard the most is money. Yes, all of those stimulus payments provided a desperately needed lifeline to the economy, giving unemployed and under employed people spending money, but there’s something the GOP is missing. So is corporate America.
During the period of the stimulus, while spending went up, helping to prop up the economy and small business, something else went up as well. During the height of the stimulus checks, lower and middle class Americans savings accounts went through the roof. We were hoarding. We knew that the stimulus would end, but we didn’t know when things would go back to normal. And so, we kept stoppers. And now we have our own safety net.
Business doesn’t seem to realize that it’s a workers market. Demand for employees that companies never used to have trouble attracting is at a premium.
Furloughed employees have the power to sit back and get into a bidding war. MSNBC had a story about an upscale Missouri hotel today, that reveled in the Governor’s decision to cut off additional federal support, thinking it would bring people flooding back. It didn’t. The hotel offered a piddly ass raise to $11.50 an hour and waited for the floodgates to open. They didn’t. The hotel finally had to go up to $13.59 an hour, with enhanced benefits and a $50 a month travel bonus to get staffed back up again.
One of the reasons that lower and middle class wages have stagnated for the last 50 years is that there was a kind of stasis, just enough employees for just enough jobs, allowing employers to impose their will because an employee couldn’t be sure of getting anything better if he or she left. But the Covid pandemic changed all of that. Suddenly, the major part of the work force was laid off or unemployed by the majority of American businesses. And now business needs those employees back, and thanks to timely stimulus, it’s the employees, and not the employers who are in the drivers seat. It’s a brave new world.
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During and after the great recession, many places laid people off and forced the remaining people to cover their jobs. Then, after things started to recover, the companies were used to doing more with less people and that became the new expectation. It is overdue for a reckoning back in the direction of the workers.
I wound up in that mess myself, starting from 2009. I tried getting back in but no one wanted me. So I moved onto something else…good to see folks doimg the same here.
And the expanded Child Tax Credit is going to kick in, and people will find it a little easier to save some more money, and maybe even pay for a baby-sitter or day care.
The plight of American workers underscores our lack of child care and access to medical care, such as most European countries have. If workers have some choice about what they will do, good for them. T
What these companies and their pet politicians have failed to understand is that this was WAY different than the Great Recession. On every level possible, this was life or death, with way too many people winding up in the latter category. Nothing like those kind of stakes to make you really reevaluate your life choices and decide you’re doing something different.
The biggest problem for employers is that they were able to buy politicians off to keep the minimum wage from changing for at least two decades, while the cost of everything went up (and so did profits to obscene levels!). Employers were also able to treat employees as easily replaceable, and as not worthy of any loyalty or the slightest consideration. And now all of that is coming back to bite them in the a$$!
Bingo
Yep. Those stimulus checks and the big check from Un. Ins.-it literally took MONTHS to get-went into the bank for me. I spent the bare minimum, found a decent job, and now I’ve got better than 4k sitting in my bank account. I’ll be damned if I’m spending it unless absolutely necessary and I’m trying to build it from there.
Businesses-you keep on screwing the employees and many of us are in a position to screw you back. It’s a nice place to be.
Well, it is ridiculous that the states are paying people not to work. But as long as one state is feeding at the federal trough, all of them will be tempted.
You sorry filthy piece of traitor trash. You are a liar. It is pretty hard to draw your unemployment insurance in slaver States such as FL and you for sure don’t get that dinky check for not working. You crooks and traitors in the Republican party turned the USA into a suit hole country and only Democrats will clean up this mess.
give it up trmp cck suker everyone in your life hates you for being who you are. that includes your whole family.
People get by with less, you can step off the hamster wheel for a bit and realize you don’t need the latest phone. Spend time with the family, go ahead and take away the fed benefits. No body wants to go back to your sucking job, and you are fucking up the immigrants who would do the job, but trump says they cant.