Remember how Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were worried about the “unemployment on steroids” aspect of the stimulus package? You know—the one thing that might help ease some of the financial burden of the historic number of people hitting the unemployment rolls as a result of the terrible COVID-19 pandemic response of the Republican administration in the White House?
It turns out that the Republican Party was on to something. NPR received well-deserved blowback for their profile of an eastern Kentucky coffee shop owner who lamented the fact that the workforce pool around her was making more money on unemployment. It turns out paying people subsistence wages means that you don’t have much of a claim to their labor. Despite the fact that Donald Trump and the Republican Party have done nothing over the past few decades to create more opportunities for Americans to pursue happiness, this week the do-nothing Republican Party gets another tone deaf, analysis-free profile of how difficult it is to be a small business owner from The Wall Street Journal.
In a story titled “Coronavirus Relief Often Pays Workers More Than Work,” Eric Morath opens by explaining that around half of the many millions of newly unemployed Americans may be eligible to “earn” more than they were making at the jobs they were let go from. At issue is the $600 boost to unemployment benefits that Democratic leaders pushed to get into the original multitrillion dollar stimulus bill.
At the time, the Republican Party fought against giving direct relief to the unemployed. Republican leaders like Sen. Lindsey Graham disingenuously argued that nurses and other professional frontline workers would use unemployment to become lazy. It was a bogus argument, belying how unemployment works in our country. However, it did serve to cover up the dark secret that Republican Party members like Graham really didn’t want to talk about: the majority of working Americans in our country and the problem of a sub-living wages.
The WSJ’s report is absent any meaningful context on the issue, offering up a “Republicans wanted small business loans and Democrats wanted unemployment benefits” analysis that, besides being incorrect and incomplete, is also sophomoric. For example, they give this example—a woman who has “worked as a cook for a college” for five years. Finding herself having to file for unemployment as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has led her to see a few things a bit more clearly. Those include her worth and her time.
She wants to return to work, but being stuck at home has given her time to reflect. The extra money she receives in unemployment benefits has made her conclude she had been underpaid at her previous job, earning $10.30 an hour after five years.
“I like the college, I really do,” she said. “But they’re going to have to come with more money. If they don’t, I’m not going to be there.”
On the flip side, the WSJ talks with small business owners who aren’t nearly as “small” as most small business owners, and the big problem they face: How are they to rehire people for less money? On one level, at issue is the fact that most businesses in our country are service industry businesses, and wages are terrible. Even businesses that pay above their local minimum wage still don’t pay much. Compounding this tough situation is that the small business loans, as set up by the Republican side in the stimulus plan, favor larger and resource-heavy small businesses, while forcing businesses with less workers and less resources to jump through hoops with no guarantee that they aren’t just pushing themselves into deeper debt with no real relief down the road.
The WSJ did speak with National Employment Law Project senior policy analyst Michele Evermore, who pointed out that if low-wage workers didn’t have financial aid benefits coming to them, they would be a lot more likely to be out and about, spreading the virus, trying to find other low-wage work in less healthy situations.
The harsh reality is that Republicans have destroyed social safety net systems like unemployment across the country. Americans’ attempts to receive money from completely overburdened and underfunded systems created by conservatives have been a disaster so far.
But in the end, the true problem posed by this extra $600 in unemployment for free marketeers, like those who report for the Wall Street Journal, is that it exposes the fundamental immoral nature of the system. It doesn’t work for most Americans. Maybe more persuasively, our weakly regulated economy doesn’t work for everybody, as it is clearly a system too fragile to withstand the issues we now face in our new world.
Raising the minimum wage is an easy thing to remember and say to others. Hopefully, at the very least, that will happen as a result of this disaster. But it’s going to take a lot of more profound readjustments in our country for it to become a genuine superpower.
