"People Don't Want to Work Anymore!": A Explanation of One of the Oldest Canards
The next time someone attempts to drop the mike with the now-cliche, "No one wants to work anymore!" finish the sentence for him: "For crappy wages."
“People don’t want to work anymore!”
How many times have you heard someone exclaim that?
At least once probably, most likely in the past two years, from a fiscally secure conservative over 50.
We started hearing it a lot during the pandemic after Congress passed the CARES Act that included $600 per week in unemployment benefits in addition to individual state unemployment benefits.
When that expired, Congress passed another relief bill that included an unemployment insurance benefit of $300 until mid-March of 2021 when President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law.
Naturally, right-wing pundits started screaming about how the government is “paying lazy people to stay home,” and “evil incentives that are disincentivizing people to work”.
The slogan “People just don’t want to work” became trendy as service-oriented businesses like restaurants, retail, and manufacturing all over the world started to reopen.
But is it true?
Do people really not want to work?
Has time off during the pandemic coddled them so comfortably, they realize how blessed the unemployed life is?
The truth is, the convenient declaration about “people not wanting to work” is one of the oldest fallacies, going back to at least 1894.
Take a look at some of the headlines through the decades.
1894:
1905:
1916:
1922:
1937:
1940:
1952:
All the way up to present day.
You can read the complete Twitter thread by Paul Fairie here:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1549527748950892544.html
In every instance, the problem never is that people refuse to work.
The problem is people have refused to work when the wages they have been paid are disproportionate to the cost of living.
During the pandemic, many realized it wasn’t worth risking contracting a highly contagious virus for a paltry federal minimum wage that has remained insultingly stuck at $7.25 per hour for the past 13 years.
This became even more apparent when CEO pay exploded during the pandemic.
Last year, median CEO pay grew to $14.2 million, an increase from the record $13.4 million in 2020 as the pandemic was descending upon us.
But most people’s wages effectively remained stagnant.
As former labor secretary Robert Reich explains:
“70% of the US economy depends on consumer spending. So if the economy is to function well, Americans need to spend enough money to buy most of the goods and services they’re capable of producing.
“But incomes haven’t nearly kept pace with productivity. Over the past 40 years, most people’s wages have basically stagnated, while worker productivity has soared. Most economic gains have gone to the wealthy–who now own more of America than at any time since the 1920s.“
You can probably hear the roar from the right proclaim, “Then people should be thankful for any job they can get!”
The truth is, they’re over it.
As a recent piece in Business Insider reports:
“Some workers simply say they’ve had enough of being overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated during a particularly stressful moment: So-called ‘rage quitting’ has become more common after 15 months of life with the coronavirus. And that’s all before we start talking about long-term trends in worker wages, which have been on the decline for years.”
Aspen Institute program manager, Diara Townes, explained:
“It leans on the long-held belief that ‘young people are entitled’ and prefer instant gratification. And it appears bipartisan likely because — as social research has shown — as some people age their politics shift to be more conservative, adding to the generational effect.”
If “no one wants to work anymore,” why is unemployment at a historic low?
While things are not nearly where they ought to be, we are headed in the right direction, and people demanding they be dignified with better wages is one way in which we achieve progress.
It has always been this way.
Wealthy corporations have always and will always justify paying workers less while “rewarding” the economic royalists obscenely more.
Traditionally, though, when businesses offer higher wages, they attract more workers.
Thanks to the recently passed the Inflation Reduction Act, companies that report more than $1 billion in profits will now pay a 15% minimum corporate tax rate, and wealthy shareholders will pay a 1% tax on stock buybacks.
The bill requires Americans making over $400,000 to pay a little more in taxes.
As of the beginning of this year, 56 counties, cities, and states raised their minimum wages in response to the “Fight for 15” movement that began around the time Vt. Sen. Bernie Sanders took up its mantle in his 2016 and 2020 democratic presidential campaigns.
As reported in Mother Jones magazine:
“In his 2020 campaign for the presidency, Joe Biden also promised to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 — a move that would push pay up in the 20 states that refuse to raise wages above this federal floor, which currently stands at $7.25 per hour. Democrats included the $15 change in early versions of Biden’s stimulus bill last year, but it was removed from that legislation in order to garner enough Senate votes for passage, and the effort is now stalled at the federal level. The administration did, however, increase minimum hourly pay for federal contractors nationwide to $15 with an executive order this past April, and the change went into effect in November.”
The next time someone attempts to drop the mike with the now-cliche, “No one wants to work anymore!” finish the sentence for him: “For crappy wages.”