How sick to death am I of hearing American businesses whine that they can't get help, and "No one wants to work do (sic) to government handouts"?! American business has been the beneficiary of a "Lucky To Have A Job" economy since the crash of 2008. And sporadically before that, every time the economy has taken a financial dump, large or small--which has historically occurred every four or five years since 1929--Americans workers became "luckier and luckier" to have employment bestowed upon them by beneficent American Business. It's hard to know whether these economic contractions were actually orchestrated by Big Business. I suspect that's highly possible. Because every time one of these blips shows up on the economic radar screen and unemployment rises, business exploits to the hilt the opportunity to browbeat American workers into believing they are SO "lucky to have a job." ANY job. The shittier the better.
And since simply HAVING a job is reward in itself, any notion of attracting employees with higher pay, health benefits, paid time off, or schedules that allow them to have lives outside of work has disappeared, as if it never existed...at least, that's what business would like us to believe. American businesses do not want employees. They want slaves. Or, at the very least, indentured servants with no hope and no options.
The "recovery" following the Great Recession of 2008 was fueled by an explosion of crappy, low-paying service jobs. Restaurants and retail businesses opened on every corner. Strip malls sprang up magically on every empty lot within spitting distance of a population center. The expansion of these two industries was largely fueled by the existence of a labor pool full of Americans thrown out of work by the high jinks of the big banks, desperate for an income...ANY income. The restaurant and retail industries made hay while the bright sun of high unemployment shone down upon them. People needed jobs. Businesses could pay the legal minimum, offer no benefits, guarantee no hours, treat workers like crap...and people would put up with it. Because folks had to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Exploitative employment practices became a fundamental bullet point in the business plans of the service industry.
I know this because I participated in it. I owned a restaurant from 2006-2011. I never paid myself, and we never made any money. But we stayed in business. If I'd been required to pay my employees a living wage and provide benefits for them, I would not even have been able to consider being an entrepreneur. My restaurant would not have existed. (And the world would have gone along fine without it.) But worker exploitation was/is the industry standard. I never gave it a second thought. Now...let's just say my eyes have been opened.
It's not difficult to understand why COVID-19 has brought a time of reckoning to the service industry. Enhanced unemployment benefits early in the pandemic provided exploited workers with an opportunity to enjoy what it might be like to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads without being subject to the terrible conditions offered by the service industry: no set schedule, no guarantee of income, no paid days off, no vacation, no health insurance, nasty managers who didn't give a crap about the workers, and wildly aggressive customers. People finally got the message that a stagnant minimum wage wasn't nearly enough compensation for having to work under those conditions. And the "front line workers" who kept their jobs during the pandemic, literally putting their lives on the line every day to continue the flow of dollars into their employers' pockets, got to experience first-hand exactly how much their lives were valued by those employers--who would basically allow customers to get away with any bad behavior, up to and including physically assaulting workers, in order to keep the cash registers ringing.
Today, service industries are bleeding employees to the tune of 700,000 workers a month who are turning their backs on their former or present employers, walking away and never looking back. They're finding work in the health care industry, or the gig economy, or wherever they can as long as it's NOT servitude to mean, aggressive customers for the benefit of nasty, uncaring companies.
And what are the employers doing? Are they ponying up extra dollars, looking at providing health insurance, coming up with attractive benefit packages...basically doing what it will take to attract workers in a free market economy where there is a labor shortage? Hell fucking no! They're putting up signs on their doors whining that they can't open or they've had to cut their hours because nobody wants to work due to government handouts. They're staying steadfastly and aggressively blind to their culpability for their own problems, and blaming the government...because the free market gravy train has stopped going their way and veered off toward giving workers the advantage. Oh, waaaaaah!
Economies swing on a pendulum. Back and forth between boom and bust, feast and famine. Fueled by an unforeseen rise in fascism, helmed by a corrupt, power-mad political party ostensibly representing half the voting population of the country, ours has taken a dangerous swing toward oligarchy. But the pendulum can be counted upon to reach its zenith in one direction, and fall back the other way, one way or another. In the past, this has been heralded by murder and mayhem, bloody revolutions and periods of tooth-gnashing anarchy.
Let's hope that COVID-19 has been the catalyst the US has needed to come to its senses and reset the economic scales, so that we can skip the riots, the guillotine and the firing squads this time around. Let's hope that those of us who lately have survived at the pleasure of the rich can retrieve our dignity, and some measure of the power that has been stolen from us over the past 70 years, without having to grab them out of the cold, bloody dead hands of those who took took them from us.
From my keyboard to gods' ears....
