This morning as I was sitting in the bleachers watching Grant play tee-ball, I overheard a conversation a nearby family nearby was having. (I wasn’t intentionally eavesdropping. They were talking pretty loudly.) A mom, dad, and grandpa of one of the players on Grant’s team were talking about unemployment benefits, and the grandpa was pretty vocal about his support of Governor Mike Parson’s announcement that he’s canceling the benefits.
“It’s about time!," the grandpa said. "There’s tons of jobs out there, and people are getting paid to just sit around and not work. It’s ridiculous. It’s time for them get off their lazy butts and get a job.”
While I was surprised to hear this at a kids’ tee-ball game on a Saturday morning, I wasn’t surprised to hear someone say it. I’ve been seeing a variation of it for weeks now on social media and various news outlets. The narrative goes something like this: Now that vaccination rates are going up and COVID cases are going down, the economy is starting to return to normal. Jobs are increasing, more people are shopping or dining in, and a lot of employees are needed to fill service roles. But because the federal government is paying unemployed people $300 per week now, people are choosing not to go back to work.
On its face, this actually sounds like a fair assessment of the situation. If people can work, they should. That makes sense. Work ethic, pride, initiative, providing for yourself and your family…these things should matter. Yes. Agreed.
The problem is that when you dig a little deeper into why there’s a labor shortage right now, things get a little bit more complicated than the talking points you’ve been hearing.
Something I haven’t heard talked about much in this conversation is child care. If an unemployed person has kids, and the money he would make by taking a low-paying job is equal to (or less than) the money he would have to pay for child care, why in the world would he go back to work? This dilemma will become even more pronounced as the school year ends, kids are home during the day, and someone needs to stay home with them.
Another thing grandpa isn’t acknowledging is that the labor situation today isn’t close to what it was when he was beginning his professional career. Until the late 1970s, people who worked jobs on the lower end of the economic spectrum could still afford to live. A college degree wasn’t essential to all entry-level professional jobs. College wasn’t free, but it was far more affordable than it was now. And more families in the previous generation (people who were parents in the ‘50s and ‘60s) were economically stable enough to help their kids get on their feet. (To be clear, this wasn't true of all or even most families. But certainly more than today.) None of that is true now. Our real, lived-in economy is completely different now, and a lot of people in this man’s generation aren’t willing to acknowledge that before they scornfully tell people to “get a job.”
A major problem specific to 2021 is that many of the mid-range, middle class jobs (paying $40,000-70,000 per year) that disappeared over the course of the last year haven’t returned. And competition is so fierce for the ones that have returned that a lot of people are still on the sidelines, wondering where they fit in and how they’re supposed to make a living. What we have now is an explosion of jobs that don’t pay anything close to a living wage. People are being asked to work jobs with erratic schedules in a service sector that has to contend with customers who grow more and more hostile and entitled every year, and they’re being compensated with salaries that don’t come close to covering mortgages, car payments, or child care.
Contrast that with the other end of the pay scale. Today I read that Kroger, a company that cut off hazard pay for its employees only two months into the pandemic last year, paid its CEO a $22 million compensation package this year. The hourly grocery workers who risked their health working essential jobs so people could get food for their families apparently weren’t worth paying an extra $2 per hour, but the company’s CEO was worth paying $22 million. Because obviously.
And it’s not just Kroger. This executive compensation/bonus bump was true across the board last year. According to the Bloomberg article, “McMullen, a Kroger lifer, is one of many CEOs who saw their pay jump last year even as the pandemic roiled the U.S. economy and drove millions into unemployment. The typical company in the Russell 1000, an index of larger corporations, reported CEO compensation up 3% last year.” When people see this kind of obscene disparity and gross unfairness, they’re right to think the whole system is rigged and rethink the value of their work.
One of the things I was hoping to see over the course of the last year was a genuine reimagining of the economy as a whole. If nothing else, the last year should have revealed to us very clearly who does the work that matters most to our social survival: health care professionals, grocery store workers, postal employees, restaurant workers, teachers…generally, people who don’t get paid nearly enough for the work they do.
But now that things are starting to return to “normal,” it’s becoming a lot clearer that “normal” is pretty fucked up. The people who should be getting paid a fair and living wage aren’t, while the people who worked at a safe distance from COVID while directing the people on the front lines got even richer. Wage inequity has increased exponentially over the course of the last three decades. That problem should have been course-corrected over the last year as people got a close-up look at the economy, but somehow it got even worse.
And now people who see the problems with the system are being told to close their eyes and go back to work for meager wages anyway. The top wage earners got even richer as the economy tanked and 550,000 Americans died, but somehow it’s unemployed people who are being guilted into returning to a messed-up, unbalanced, unfair system.
I wish more people could see and really understand what’s going on here. A lot of people who are getting unemployment benefits genuinely don’t want to have to take them. I was unemployed for several months last year, and I received money every week. It allowed me to take my time to figure out what my next move was – who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. I was able to think a lot, write a lot, build a portfolio, and get myself ready to apply for jobs again. If I hadn’t received unemployment – if I had been told just to jump at the first minimum-wage job (remember, this is only $7.25 an hour) that opened up – I would have had time for none of that, and my family would be much worse off today as a result.
I shouldn’t have to feel guilty about using unemployment assistance to get back on my feet in a meaningful way, and no one else should right now. I, like many, paid into the unemployment system for years so it would be available for me if the worst case happened. And it did. And when tax day came around this year, I also had to pay taxes on the minimal unemployment income I received. But somehow unemployment is a dirty word and an embarrassing secret.
Do some people game the system? Sure. That’s inevitable. But that isn’t the majority of what’s happening now. The truth is that most people want to work. Work is a huge part of American identity. It’s bred into us. It’s what makes us think that two weeks of vacation a year is normal, when most of the rest of the developed world realizes that people need much more time than that to decompress, recharge, and reset. It’s part of why many families feel disconnected here – work is often supposed to take precedence over private lives. It’s why “work to live, don’t live to work” sounds like a strange philosophy to a lot of Americans.
Our jobs are an inextricable part of us. One of the first things we do when we introduce ourselves to strangers is explain what we do professionally. I don’t say “Hey, I’m Alex. I love comics and cats and music and pop culture, and my action figure collection is kind of ridiculous.” I say “Hey, I’m Alex. I’m a writer and an editor.” In many ways, our jobs define who and what we are. So the idea that most Americans don’t want to work right now just isn’t true.
What’s true is that a lot of Americans are hesitant to return to a system that’s clearly, obviously unfair and stacked against them. And as long as the $300 per week unemployment payments are in place, that clarity will remain. It’s why many corporate executives and the elected GOP leaders who represent their interests are so eager to see those benefits end. It’s why FOX News keeps hammering the “get back to work” line, guilting people into feeling bad about sitting out a rigged game and convincing their viewers that America is filled with a lot of lazy bums.
And it just might work. As soon as people have to rush back to jobs that don’t pay enough to live, they’ll be too busy and exhausted to think about how messed up our economy is right now. People will stop asking “Why is this the way it is?” and they’ll just be scrambling to make ends meet and racking up debt. And the economic disparity will continue to grow. If we want to talk about who’s actually gaming the system to their massive benefit, maybe we should look higher up on the economic food chain. It’s not people who are getting $300 a week to help them pay for food.
We had a year to figure this out. We could have challenged the way we thought about the value of work – who does it, who contributes the most to making things work, and how to rebalance the system. But we didn’t. And predictably, we’re right back where we were. But we don’t have to let the “people are too lazy to work” narrative continue. If we want things to change for ourselves and our family and our neighbors, we have to keep challenging it. If employers want people to help their businesses run, then they should pay a fair wage that works to everyone’s benefit. There should be nothing controversial about that statement. That’s the way it should work.
There are going to be plenty of grandpas at tee-ball games who sound very reasonable when they’re rattling off soundbites they read on Facebook or heard on Fox News. But there’s a bigger story – a more complicated reality – underneath it all, and it needs to be talked about and heard.
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