By Labor Correspondent Joe Hill
America's ruling plutocrats and the media leeches who make a handsome living parroting their supposed concerns have a new kvetch: you can't find anyone who wants to work anymore.
The Boston Globe devoted most of its Sunday opinion section to this burning question:
Perhaps the best thing you can say about this exercise of editorial judgment is that it is an improvement over the New York Times's obsession with defending rich middle aged women who enjoy tormenting trans and trans-curious children.
The answers they provided were in part reasonable and in part editorial word salad. Here comes the old “existential shift” again!
Stories such as theirs reveal that what’s going on is not entirely quantifiable; it runs deeper than what economics or demography can explain. We’re living through an existential shift in how people think about work and where it fits into the other things that give our lives meaning. And though this transition is particularly wrenching in some sectors, there might be a kernel of good news: Labor scarcity could give workers more power, which in turn could help spread prosperity more widely.
Let's start with considering what work is. We remember one of our old bosses suggesting that we do something disagreeable (have lunch with lawyers, as we recall). When we shuddered at the prospect, he replied, “That's why they call it work.” There a clue there: work is something that we either need someone else to do (because we can't) or want someone else to do (because it's unpleasant).
Of course, not all work is disagreeable. For example, presiding over The Boston Globe sounds fun and interesting and if you are the trophy wife of its billionaire owner, you, too, might be considered for the job! Good luck!
Other careers in journalism sound similarly tempting. If you could earn a steady income publishing crapcan columns in The New York Times being mean about trans kids or Hillary Clinton or pushing your own nutball views on abortion as reasonable and moderate, and then do the same column week after week, why wouldn't you?
But most work isn't that easy or agreeable. The Boston Globe reports that any number of employers can't find bodies:
Hotels and restaurants. Railroads. Retail stores. Nonprofits. Hospitals. The MBTA. Police departments. Schools. Construction companies. Delivery services. Day care centers.
Our economy depends on millions of service workers, doing things that don't seem all that appealing, like wiping the asses of old people in nursing homes, plowing buses through rush hour traffic, hammering nails in the freezing cold, or being nice to ass****s in restaurants and hotels.
When these jobs are customarily performed by men, like construction and railways, the tedium is leavened by living wages and sometimes union protection.
When the jobs are thought to be women's work, no such luck: it's minimum wage toil, or in the case of teachers, a slightly better wage but less than those brave men in blue rake in.
The explanations for the lack of willing workers thrown out by the usual suspects vary. COVID. Drug addiction. Variations on laziness, including the canard, disproved by the Globe's own data, that older people are leaving the labor force. But the data shows the opposite: 55+ labor force participation is near its highs, and far above the rates of the 1970's-1990's:
By the way, ask anyone over 60 about how easy it is to get a decent non-barista professional job.
There are a few more sensible arguments: the Boomers are aging out of the workforce and subsequent generations are smaller. As unions atrophy and wages stagnate, Economics 10 will tell you that the supply of persons willing to labor for pennies is unlikely to increase.
Here's a thought experiment: would restaurants and nursing homes really have trouble attracting workers at $25 an hour plus benefits? Why not find out?
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| They're ready to work as assassins or otherwise. |
The reason is because the owners of businesses have become accustomed to floods of workers toiling for declining real wages, allowing the owners to trouser the lion's share of economic growth. And when you take that pleasing outcome away from them, they naturally doth protest. Sure some businesses might go under if higher wages were paid, but if your business model is dependent on immiserated labor it's not much of a business now is it?
The one industry where higher wages might bite hard is nursing homes, although since most are owned by depraved private-equity finaglers squeezing every last farthing out of bedridden grandmas, it's hard to be too sympathetic.
If Medicaid would reimburse nursing homes for higher wages for front-line workers, then the labor market would clear. That in turn would require political will, But the older white workers complaining about low wages are the same workers who vote for the same billionaire-owned Republicans whose policies have brought about their current plight. Why this is is a complex topic for another day. In other words, racism.
Speaking of white bigotry, there's another answer to the lack of persons willing to toil in s**t jobs like nursing homes or slaughterhouses: immigrants.
Right now there are millions of noncitizens without work authorization in America, and hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees who would happily carve up pigs all day long if they could enter the country. To the Globe's credit, it mentions the option.
And yet, the same small and great business persons who whine about the lack of workers tend to support a political party devoted to demonizing immigrants and blocking any solution that would allow more to work and live freely in America.
To put it bluntly, if you voted for the corrupt Russian-owned sex criminal who launched his campaign by telling us that Mexico was sending us its rapists and assassins, we're not going to listen to your complaints about how you can't get enough workers to man your deep-fat fryer.
It turns out that like almost every other problem facing America, the supposed labor crisis is at root caused by greed, bigotry, and Republicans.
But, to avoid misunderstanding, if the guy who owns The Boston Globe wants to replace his trophy wife/publisher, we'd be interested.
Not in the wife part though. Too much like work.
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