The economy added 531,000 jobs in October, as the unemployment rate fell to 4.6 percent, a level not reached following the Great Recession until February 2017. The jobs numbers for the prior two months were also revised upward by 235,000 to bring the three-month average to 442,000.
It’s also worth noting that private sector employment grew even more rapidly, adding 604,000 jobs. The hours-worked index, which only measures private sector employment, has risen by 1.2 percent in the last three months, which would translate into 498,000 private sector jobs per month if there were no change in hours. Many employers who are unable to hire are likely increasing the hours for the workforce they have.
Unemployment Falls for Most Groups
The drop in the unemployment rate was much larger than most analysts had expected, especially after a 0.4 percentage point decline in September. It has fallen by 1.3 percentage points since June. The least educated saw the largest drop in unemployment with the rate falling by 0.5 percentage points for those without a high school degree to 7.4 percent, and 0.4 percentage points for those with just a high school degree to 5.4 percent. The unemployment rate for college grads edged down 0.1 percentage points to 2.4 percent, which is 0.3 percentage points above its pre-pandemic average.
The unemployment rate for Blacks and Asian Americans was unchanged at 7.9 percent and 4.2 percent, respectively. It fell 0.4 percentage points to 5.9 percent for Hispanics.
Wage Growth Remains Strong
We continue to see strong wage growth, especially for low-paid workers. The average hourly wage for production and nonsupervisory workers has risen 5.8 percent year-over-year. In the low-paid leisure and hospitality sector, it has risen 12.4 percent. However, wage growth is slowing somewhat in the leisure and hospitality sector. The annual rate for the last three months (August, September, October) compared with the prior three months (May, June, July) was 9.7 percent; although it accelerated slightly for production workers overall to 6.6 percent.
Manufacturing and Construction Have Strong Growth, Again
The manufacturing sector added 60,000 jobs, following a gain of 31,000 in September. Construction added 44,000 jobs after adding 30,000 in September. The sectors are now down 2.1 percent and 2.0 percent, respectively, from their pre-pandemic levels. This compares to a falloff of 2.5 percent for the private sector as a whole. That reverses the normal pattern where these sectors are hit hardest in a recession.
Strong Job Growth in Hard-Hit Service Industries
Most of the hardest hit industries showed good job growth in October. Air transportation added 9,200 jobs, but is still down 9.7 percent from its pre-pandemic level. The motion picture industry added 11,300 jobs and is now down 20.9 percent. The temp sector added 41,100, while arts and entertainment added 20,900 jobs. They are now down 5.9 percent and 11.4 percent, respectively, from pre-pandemic levels. Hotels added 23,200 jobs, while restaurants added 119,400, leaving them 14.9 percent and 6.4 percent lower than their pre-pandemic levels, respectively.
Nursing homes added 11,800 jobs, but employment is still 14.2 percent below pre-pandemic levels. Child care facilities added just 700 jobs in October, leaving employment 10.1 percent below pre-pandemic levels. This presumably corresponds to a roughly 10 percent drop in child slots, which means many parents of young children face even greater than normal difficulties finding care if they want to work.
State and Local Education Shed 65,000 Jobs
This sector continues to lose jobs even with children back in school pretty much everywhere. This could reflect difficulty in hiring, as governments often can’t raise wages as rapidly as in the private sector. Employment in the sectors are now down 7.9 percent and 4.6 percent, respectively, from pre-pandemic levels.
The Number of Unincorporated Self-Employed Edged up by 24,000
The October figure is 643,000 (7.3 percent) above the 2019 average. This presumably reflects people taking advantage of the pandemic to change career paths.
Share of Long-Term Unemployed Falls
The share of long-term unemployed (more than 26 weeks) fell sharply in September to 31.6 percent. However, it is still well above normal levels, which would be under 20 percent.
October Report Is Solidly Positive
There is much to like in this report. The overall picture in both surveys is overwhelmingly positive. If we can keep up this pace of growth we will get back the jobs lost in the pandemic by next summer. The unemployment rate is already below many economists’ estimates of Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU). And workers have more freedom to change jobs than at any point in the last half century.
Well well, some of us try-try. We end up having to take pittance jobs, with pitiful nonprofits, where the bottom line is, well, poverty pimping.
So in a time of Covid Capitalism, in a time of quick silver circling the drain, quitting after 5 weeks on the job may appear rash, or self-defeating.
But here is the rub — working in Oregon, on the coast, in areas that are tourist-centric, rural, redneck, we have to juggle our principles and our ethics with the prevailing job market. Social services in USA are feces factories, and in Oregon, we as a state hit rock bottom. Not to take anything away from the rock bottom that Georgia claims, as we see in the Intercept, an article, “Judge, Lawyer, Help, Case Dismissed — Atlanta’s Mental Health Problem — and Ours” by George Chidi:
About 62 percent of Georgians believe they may be foreclosed on or evicted in the next two months for being behind on payments, according to a U.S. Census Bureau survey conducted last month. It is by far the highest percentage in the United States.
There aren’t actually enough marshals to process all of the evictions that are coming. People will be forced from their homes in fits and spurts. Many residents will look for relief from Georgia’s Department of Community Affairs, which has a $1 billion allocation for emergency rental assistance from the federal government.
Good luck.
After eight months with cash in hand, the department had spent about 9 percent of its money. The federal government is probably going to claw some of the remaining cash back.
Chidi’s piece follows one woman, who lives in her feces, half naked, in Atlanta. His perspective is on mental illness, generational trauma, inept systems of oppression, and the disgusting nature of Americans. One super user person — her name is Harmony — has been to court, has been busted, has been ambulanced to the ER multiple times, has been forcefully evaluated and drugged. Tens of thousands a year just for one person. Some super users, as they are called, are costing taxpayers a million bucks or more a year in the penury-ripoff medical-mental health-nonprofit-policing systems of oppression. The housing-first model can’t work in capitalism, and the attendant mental illnesses, outright and brewing, in the tens of millions of Americans will be dealt with (sic) through fines, tolls, penalties, surcharges, fees, taxes, imprisonment, probation, handcuffs, rough sleeping on America’s streets, slow death, traumatic death.
Pretty hardboiled this country, these systems are! And, after five weeks, I had to quit a job where my requirement was supposedly to help people living in poverty, living with mental illnesses, with traumatic brain injuries, with developmental disabilities, get job ready, get their job profiles and interview skills up to speed, and to get them jobs that are in most cases, Customized. That term is a double-edged sword, really, since in Oregon, the job of employment specialists like myself is to to find competitive, integrated employment. That sounds grand, but the reality is most of the clients I have served here at this new ex-company and for years elsewhere need bridges: guys like me speaking with employers, the business’ other employees, with the client, and with an eye to part-time work with accommodations requested, i.e. some tasks removed from the job, some coaching and supervision by the social services’ agency, and a lot of check ins with the employer, as well as natural supports and the client and his or her team of service coordinators, housing support staff, parents, guardians, state brokerages, and state vocational rehabilitation, as well as mental health teams when applicable, supporting him or her.
This shit-show company (the identify and identifying characteristics have been changed herein) has headquarters two hours south of my county, and they have money making services that employ people with DD and ID, and, well, they are run by broken people, the services and the company in general. I’ve written about this before — Social services is populated with people living with a boat-load of chronic illnesses, complex PTSD, even mental illness. There are many in this field with physical disabilities. Unfortunately, these people on the coast, where I live and work, are loud, obnoxious, jealous of people with graduate degrees. They are racist, ageist, plain crude, rude and ugly in the way they talk out of the sides of their mouths. They are American, as American as this new putrid governor of Virginia, Youngkin, another racist, backward, millionaire of the private equity kind (inequity for us, the 80 percent). As American as Hunter Biden. As American as David Duke. Just on a poor scale. Trump and Jerry Springer. So many examples of the sickness of Americans, from academics, to FDA props, to your local gas station attendant.
In my case, the supervisor unloaded on me — on day one — her personal life, her own prejudices, demonstrating all sorts of sad non-supervisorial ticks and attitudes. Unprofessional seems to be her middle name. She had to unload on me about her own broken family background, her own personal struggles, and all of the bad stuff. She’d say, “Well, this is between you and me … and if you try to throw me under the bus, watch out.”
Funny how this field attracts broken people, and when you put these people into a supervisorial role, they take it seriously — boss, man. Broken bosses!
Seriously, a fifty-something single mother of four boys expected the “yes, boss” crap from me. She is seriously flawed, and on day one she trashed the state workers, the counselors I had to work with since they are the people who refer clients to this nonprofit, which profits off of the homelessness, the intellectual disabilities, the mental and psychiatric disabilities, the trauma, the life circumstances of their clients.
Having a supervisor, or manager, telling me “I’m a beaner,” and then laughing that she has “Mexican roots,” and then thinking and saying, “Yes, it may be crude and racist, but I am okay with it.”
A boss who is confused about LGBTQA+, about transgenderism and transitioning, and yet, she has a military-based (Navy) son who is marrying another man, and that is how this redneck, broken world is — still calling people faggot, as an enduring term. She laughed about it.
Again, this messed up, crude, disgusting country (yes, you can call anyone anything you want to in the privacy of your home, in the open air of your backyard and amongst your sick family and friends) is broken from top to down. But this is day one, day two, and on and on, of a low paying job.
I quit yesterday, and my tendered resignation was about all sorts of terrible things this supervisor was doing. You are left out there in the middle of the muck when the boss ma’am is racist, sexist, loud, cussing, and yakking about her dating life, yakking to me, a man disinterested in this crap, and, me, someone who just wanted to get down to brass tacks with clients and their support network.
The company is run by a guy who is ex-military, Army, and the entire organization is full of broken, sick and troubled people. There you have it, no, troubled, sick, broken people working with adults with broken lives, troubled minds, sicknesses from developmental disabilities and beat down emotionally and physically by weathering and the trauma of foster care and group homes and bad-bad families and schools.
At the heart of it all, read Patrick Lawrence, “The Manufacture of Decline — Americans suffer the same disabilities as the Europeans of 1919: They cannot think. They cannot speak plainly among themselves.”
It is sobering, to put the point mildly, to sit in America in 2021 and read the reflections of a writer sitting in Paris 102 years ago. The world America made in the post–1945 years has ended just as the Great War ended the world Paul Valéry, born in 1871, knew as his own.
And Americans suffer the same disabilities as the Europeans of 1919: They cannot think. They cannot speak plainly among themselves.
They are, in a phrase, manufacturing their own decline as they flinch from the world as it is in this, our post–American century.
It makes sense that I would unfold this catharsis from my life in this attempt at closure, at DV, a newsletter, “a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice.” It makes sense that I tell the world — a few readers — that is — things stink in Denmark, or Detroit, or Oregon. This is called ground-truthing, and as I age out of this society (aging out means that this society gives shit about you, gives shit about your background, gives shit about your great licks and qualities, your travel and depth of life), the micro/macro aggressions heaped up on the feces pile that these people, low or high, rich or poor, broken or semi-fixed, closeted tyrants or semi-narcissists, just grows.
Failure after failure, I have weathered, leaving these trauma-inducing places behind. I have a thousand stories, or more. Maybe the nonfiction book or anti-memoir memoir, about all the people I have worked with, taught, reported on, been with throughout my walkabout. Again, who buys, who reads, who cares?
How the Salvation Army Lives Off (and thrives with) a Special Brand of Poverty Pimping Part-One: The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Salvation Army’s Faith-based ‘One Treatment Fits All’
Insanity of Social Work as Human Control — Contemporary penal institutions are not often the penitentiaries themselves, but, are immersed within communities, manifesting in social welfare programming
Death by a Thousand Cuts: When the Cures of Big Pharma are Worse than the Diseases; The more chemicals, drugs, vaccines, additives, toxins they make, the more difficult it is to escape from big business’ straight-jacket
In this eco-porn world now, where all we hear is about COP26, again, again, and again, Deja vu, the same rotting messages. Climate capitalism has always been the agenda, and so in Glasgow, we expect something different?
Jesus. This is fossil fuel financing, fossil fuel usury, the tipping point of their multiple disruptive economies, pitchman of all pitchmen: Bill Gates.
Gates set off on his environmental crusade aboard a superyacht, which environmentalists say are among the world’s worst ecological offenders. According to Turkish news reports, he sailed the azure waters of the Aegean on LANA, a 354-foot yacht described as “one of the most luxurious superyachts in the world.” The boat includes eight staterooms, a golf range, a cinema room, a pool and massage rooms. It accommodates 12 guests and 31 crew members, and rents for more than $2 million a week, according to a Monaco-based yacht rental service.
LANA was followed by the Wayfinder — a 223-foot luxury “supply boat” that is believed to be owned by the billionaire and was used to house his 30 bodyguards for the weeklong trip, according to Turkish news reports.
[Superyachts like LANA (top) and the Wayfinder are some of the most exclusive in the world and dump 7,020 tons of CO2 a year, making them the worst asset to own from an environmental standpoint. Anadolu Agency via Getty Images]
Really, that is the contrast today, folks — finishing up my time with this poverty pimping outfit at 5 PM PST, Nov. 3, and the kicker is that according to service coordinators in my county, the supervisor for whom I argued failed to do her due diligence around mandatory reporting. Clients who have paychecks shorted, and who have bosses abusing them verbally. Each person in the developmental disability world who claims this to be happening, well, it is called financial exploitation, and as mandatory reporters we have to report it to an investigatory agency. I pushed this anti-Mexican, anti-transgender boss to do something, but her words stuck: “It’s not your job to get into the middle of that.”
Yet, it is our job to report it, alas, and not analyze or parse the words of a person living with developmental disabilities when she or he reports financial abuse/exploitation.
That is a good evening, November 3, to quit this shit job, and leave these bullshit people.
But the fight is on, not just in DD Services. Oregon, the masked-up, blue state, retrograde and defiantly backward place, has these health care outcomes:
The white paper explores the impact consolidation has on patients and communities and highlights current trends in Oregon. Key findings from the report include:
The number of independent hospitals and physicians in Oregon is dwindling. The number of independent hospitals in Oregon has declined by 43 percent since 2000. The share of physicians affiliated with health systems in the Portland metro area grew from 39 percent in 2016 to 71 percent in 2018.
Oregon’s most competitive healthcare market is not only highly concentrated, but also one of the priciest in the nation. In 2017, Portland had the 14th highest healthcare prices out of 124 large metro areas across the nation. In addition, the amount Oregonians paid for their healthcare increased nearly 29 percent in four years, outpacing the rate of inflation.
Consolidation could exacerbate health disparities in Oregon. Experts argue that when hospitals raise prices, resources are redirected to facilities that cater to privately insured individuals (who are disproportionately white and high-income) as opposed to those that care for Medicaid patients (who are disproportionately Black, brown, and people of color).
Following affiliation, rural hospitals are more likely to lose access to services, such as onsite imaging, outpatient nonemergency care, and obstetric and primary care.
Reproductive, gender-affirming, and compassionate end-of-life care are at risk. Several large, religiously-affiliated healthcare entities are governed by ethical religious directives that prohibit or impose barriers that reduce access to these services. Past mergers have put reproductive, gender-affirming and compassionate end-of-life-care at risk, as could future ones.
And, just in the Portland area, the mental health outcomes, coming to, or already in your neighborhood/city/state:
Typical caseload: 100+ clients
Care provider turnover rate: 40%
Wait time for appointments: 4-6 weeks
It’s no wonder Oregon ranks 51st in the country for mental health outcomes—behind every other state and Washington DC. (source)
Fitting, and so I quit, left, tendered my resignation: This is a crisis beyond crisis,
Clients feel abandoned by staff who leave due to low pay and poor conditions.
— Community Behavioral Health Survey, 2016
Ending with the Intercept story, this is the emblematic one issue tied to a thousand issues of our time. I just do not know how any sane person can look at these judges, cops, DAs, governors, senators, representatives, White House officials, administration armies without the thought of taking an old trusted Louisville Slugger to their blanks _____(fill in the blank).
Harmony lay in a 6-foot-wide stream of her own waste, swaddled in a blanket infused with feces. She propped up her matted head on her right arm, looking up at two downtown ambassadors from the community improvement district who had come out to ask her to move for the fourth time in a week. They needed to pressure wash the sidewalk.
Harmony is not her real name. Atlanta’s powers that be know who she is.
Phillip Spillane, a good friend of mine among the ambassadors, had called 911 to get paramedics to take her to Grady Hospital that Friday. He has made this call about once every two weeks, when the state of Harmony’s squalor becomes too much to bear for an observer with a soul.
I came upon them as paramedics were piling back into a Grady ambulance. I watched them drive away, an impassive expression on the face of the paramedic in the passenger seat as she watched Harmony, who remained on the sidewalk.
It was the same expression on the faces of most of the people walking by. I’ve seen it every time I’ve come downtown to Atlanta to talk with her. It’s not that passersby don’t notice her, but people make an immediate mental calculation about their ability to help someone in this kind of distress. The social reaction — the human reaction — left over is a carefully deliberate nonchalance meant to provide some dignity to a person in a state of public humiliation and to retain some dignity of their own on the scene of a moral catastrophe.
Of course, some people realize that they’re about to step in her shit and can’t keep from scowling.
This story starts with Harmony. It does not end with her. (George Chidi)
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Earlier this year, an insistent cry arose from business leaders and Republican governors: Cut off a $300-a-week federal supplement for unemployed Americans. Many people, they argued, would then come off the sidelines and take the millions of jobs that employers were desperate to fill.
Yet three months after half the states began ending that federal payment, there’s been no significant influx of job seekers.
In states that cut off the $300 check, the workforce — the number of people who either have a job or are looking for one — has risen no more than it has in the states that maintained the payment. That federal aid, along with two jobless aid programs that served gig workers and the long-term unemployed, ended nationally Sept. 6. Yet America’s overall workforce actually shrank that month.
“Policymakers were pinning too many hopes on ending unemployment insurance as a labor market boost,” said Fiona Greig, managing director of the JPMorgan Chase Institute, which used JPMorgan bank account data to study the issue. “The work disincentive effects were clearly small.”
Labor shortages have persisted longer than many economists expected, deepening a mystery at the heart of the job market. Companies are eager to add workers and have posted a near-record number of available jobs. Unemployment remains elevated. The economy still has 5 million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic. Yet job growth slowed in August and September.
Adam Todd, director of the Governor’s Job Fair Network, speaks about the state’s efforts to attract applicants to attend the Lee County Area Job Fair in Tupelo, Miss., Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021. Employers representing a variety of manufacturing, production, service industry, medical and clerical companies attended the day long affair with an eye towards recruitment, hiring, training and retention.
An analysis of state-by-state data by The Associated Press found that workforces in the 25 states that maintained the $300 payment actually grew slightly more from May through September, according to data released Friday, than they did in the 25 states that cut off the payment early, most of them in June. The $300-a-week federal check, on top of regular state jobless aid, meant that many of the unemployed received more in benefits than they earned at their old jobs.
An earlier study by Arindrajit Dube, an economist at University of Massachusetts, Amherst and several colleagues found that the states that cut off the $300 federal payment saw a small increase in the number of unemployed taking jobs. But it also found that it didn’t draw more people off the sidelines to look for work.
A workforce placement company outlines the pay and benefits that could be obtained should the applicant be placed at the Toyota Auto Manufacturing plant in Blue Springs, Miss., during the Lee County Area Job Fair in Tupelo, Miss., Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021. Employers representing a variety of manufacturing, production, service industry, medical and clerical companies attended the day long affair with an eye towards recruitment, hiring, training and retention.
Economists point to a range of factors that are likely keeping millions of former recipients of federal jobless aid from returning to the workforce. Many Americans in public-facing jobs still fear contracting COVID-19, for example. Some families lack child care.
With a growing Latino population in the northeastern counties of Mississippi, Direct Auto Insurance sought out bilingual job applicants during the Lee County Area Job Fair in Tupelo, Miss., Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021. Employers representing a variety of manufacturing, production, service industry, medical and clerical companies attended the day long affair with an eye towards recruitment, hiring, training and retention.
Other people, like Rachel Montgomery of Anderson, Indiana, have grown to cherish the opportunity to spend more time with their families and feel they can get by financially, at least for now. Montgomery, a 37-year-old mother, said she has become much “pickier” about where she’s willing to work after having lost a catering job last year. Losing the $300-a-week federal payment hasn’t changed her mind. She’ll receive her regular state jobless aid for a few more weeks.
Ariel Jones, a United Parcel Service human resources intern, hands an applicant an information sheet, while the human resources specialist for the company, Mareno Moore, right, monitors the interaction during the Lee County Area Job Fair in Tupelo, Miss., Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021. Employers representing a variety of manufacturing, production, service industry, medical and clerical companies attended the day long affair with an eye towards recruitment, hiring, training and retention.
“Once you’ve stayed home with your kids and family like this, who wants to physically have to go back to work?” she said. “As I’m looking and looking, I’ve told myself that I’m not going to sacrifice pay or flexibility working remotely when I know I’m qualified to do certain things. But what that also means is that it’s taking longer to find those kinds of jobs.”
Jamie Snyder, right, of H&R Block, explains the training process to applicant Diane Moore, during the Lee County Area Job Fair in Tupelo, Miss., Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021. Employers representing a variety of manufacturing, production, service industry, medical and clerical companies attended the day long affair with an eye towards recruitment, hiring, training and retention.
Some former recipients, especially older, more affluent ones, have decided to retire earlier than they had planned. With Americans’ overall home values and stock portfolios having surged since the pandemic struck, Fed officials estimate that up to 2 million more people have retired since then than otherwise would have.
And after having received three stimulus checks in 18 months, plus federal jobless aid in some cases, most households have larger cash cushions than they did before the pandemic. Greig and her colleagues at JPMorgan found in a study that the median bank balance for the poorest one-quarter of households has jumped 70% since COVID hit. A result is that some people are taking time to consider their options before rushing back into the job market.
An applicant fills out a job employment form during the Lee County Area Job Fair in Tupelo, Miss., Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021. Employers representing a variety of manufacturing, production, service industry, medical and clerical companies attended the day long affair with an eye towards recruitment, hiring, training and retention.
Graham Berryman, a 44-year-old resident of Springfield, Missouri, has been living off savings since Missouri cut off the $300-a-week federal jobless payment in June. He has had temporary work reviewing documents for law firms in the past. But he hasn’t found anything permanent since August 2020.
“I’m not lazy,” Berryman said. “I am unemployed. That does not mean I’m lazy. Just because someone cannot find suitable work in their profession doesn’t mean they’re trash to be thrown away.”
Likewise, some couples have decided that they can get by with only one income, rather than two, at least temporarily.
Graham Berryman looks at his laptop at his apartment in Springfield, Mo., on Thursday, Oct. 21, 2021. Berryman is a lawyer that his struggled to find work during the pandemic after he was let go by his previous firm in August 2020. He has lived off savings since losing his job, but the money may not last much longer.
Sarah Hamby of Kokomo, Indiana, lost her $300-a-week federal payment this summer after Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, ended that benefit early. Hamby’s husband, who is 65, has kept his job working an overnight shift at a printing press throughout the pandemic. But he may decide to join the ranks of people retiring earlier than they’d planned.
And Hamby, 51, may do so herself if she doesn’t find work soon. The jobs she had for decades at auto factories have largely disappeared. The positions that she sees available now require skills she doesn’t have. Yet she isn’t desperate for just any job.
“I’m at a point where I feel too old to go off and get educated or trained to do other type of work,” she said. “And to be honest, I don’t want to go work at a computer, in an office, like what a lot of us are being pushed to do. So now I’m stuck between doing some line of work that pays too little for what it’s worth — or is too physically demanding — or I just don’t work.”
Nationally, the proportion of women who were either working or looking for work in September fell for a second straight month, evidence that many parents — mostly mothers — are still unable to manage their childcare duties to return to work. Staffing at childcare centers has fallen, reducing the care that is available. And while schools have reopened for in-person learning, frequent closings because of COVID outbreaks have been disruptive for some working parents.
Exacerbating the labor shortfall, a record number of people quit their jobs in August, in some cases spurred by the prospect of higher pay elsewhere.
In Missouri, a group of businesses, still frustrated by labor shortages more than three months after the state cut off the $300-a-week federal jobless checks, paid for billboards in Springfield that said: “Get Off Your Butt!” and “Get. To. Work.”
The state has seen no growth in its workforce since ending emergency benefits.
“We don’t know where people are,” said Brad Parke, general manager of Greek Corner Screen Printing and Embroidery, who helped pay for the billboards. “Obviously, they’re not at work. Apparently, they’re at home.”
Richard von Glahn, policy director for Missouri Jobs With Justice, an advocacy group, suggested that many people on the sidelines of the job market want more benefits or the flexibility to care for children.
“People don’t want to go back” to the pre-pandemic job market, von Glahn said. “Employers have a role in creating a work environment and offering a package that provides workers the security they need.”
In Wyoming, fewer people are in the workforce now than when the state cut off all emergency jobless aid. Fear of contracting COVID-19 likely discouraged some people from seeking jobs, Wenlin Liu, chief economist at the state Economic Analysis Division, said last week.
Wyoming has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, he noted, and has been a COVID-19 hotspot since late summer. The surge in infections, Liu said, may be causing some parents to keep their children home.
State Rep. Landon Brown, a Republican, defended the cutoff of federal unemployment aid.
“Wyoming,” Brown said, “is not interested in continuing to allow the federal government to keep people away from jobs, paying them as much to stay home in some cases as to go and get a job.”
Mississippi ended all emergency jobless aid on June 12. Yet it had fewer people working in August than in May. In Tupelo last week, a job fair attracted 60 companies, including a recruiter from VT Halter Marine, a shipbuilder located 300 miles south. About 150 to 200 job seekers also attended, fewer than some businesses had hoped.
Adam Todd had organized the job fair for the Mississippi Department of Employment Security, which helps people find jobs and distributes unemployment benefits. The agency has received “calls of desperation,” Todd said, “from businesses needing to recruit workers during the pandemic.
“We’re in a different point in time than we have been in a very long time,” Todd said. “The job seeker is truly in the driver’s seat right now.”
For decades, the United Auto Workers has been controlled by a tight-knit group of insiders. Now members are voting in a historic referendum on how the union elects its central leadership.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) criticized a Republican colleague on Thursday, pointing out that the GOP’s stance on unemployment insurance is not only misguided but factually incorrect.
Her criticism was in response to a statement by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee), who tweeted, “4.3 million workers quit their jobs. We need to quit paying folks not to work.” His tweet refers to recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that a record number of people quit their jobs in August. But most people who quit their jobs aren’t eligible to collect unemployment benefits — and the unemployment insurance program that Burchett is likely referring to has already ended.
“Y’all already [ended unemployment insurance] over a month ago despite everyone having data that ending [unemployment insurance] doesn’t push people back to work,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response. “Conservatives love to act like they’re ‘fiscally savvy’ yet remain puzzled as to why people can’t work a job whose pay won’t even cover the childcare costs to work.”
Despite Burchett’s declaration that “paying folks not to work” decreases employment rates, the past few months have borne evidence that the opposite is true: Unemployment insurance has actually improved employment rates. This summer, 26 states ended extra unemployment aid early; those states went on to experience slower employment growth than the states that kept the program through the beginning of September
The pandemic has been challenging for working parents — particularly for women, who often bear a disproportionate burden when it comes to childcare. Reports have found that 1 in 4 women are considering quitting or reducing their hours in order to help take care of their children.
Meanwhile, paying for childcare is becoming increasingly inaccessible. Last month, the Treasury Department wrote that the current system of low wages and skyrocketing childcare costs is unsustainable. The average family with a child under 5 must spend around 13 percent of their family’s income on childcare, the Treasury found — an amount well past the 7 percent of a family’s income that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) deems affordable for childcare.
Ocasio-Cortez went on to explain that the GOP’s refusal to understand why workers are quitting in droves is contradictory to their stated beliefs about the way the economy works.
“Quitting being [unemployment insurance] ineligible aside, the idea that laziness is why people stay home contradicts the ‘free market ideals’ these folks pretend to champion,” she wrote. “Markets apply to labor, too. If supply is low and demand high, price goes up. People seem to accept that for everything but wages.”
Workers, especially those with frontline jobs, have indeed cited low wages as a reason to consider quitting their jobs during the pandemic. A report in May found that of the 53 percent of restaurant workers surveyed who said they have considered quitting, 76 percent cited low wages and tips as a top reason why.
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has also pointed out that the conservative “worker shortage” myth is likely more attributable to labor market dynamics.
“When restaurant owners can’t find workers to fill openings at wages that aren’t meaningfully higher than they were before the pandemic — even though the jobs are inherently more stressful and potentially dangerous because workers now have to deal with anti-maskers and ongoing health concerns — that’s not a labor shortage, that’s the market functioning,” EPI wrote in May. “The wages for a harder, riskier job should be higher.”
Ocasio-Cortez concluded by pointing out that the reasoning behind people’s employment decisions often isn’t as simple as the GOP implies. “And by the way, free time is VALUABLE,” she said. “People pay for time routinely, whether it’s in delivery, services, etc. It’s not lazy to stay home with family — it can lower costs. 700k+ people in the US have died of COVID so far. Do people think that has no impact on labor supply/capacity?”
Last month, Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill that would extend unemployment benefits until February of next year and would make payments retroactive to September, when the benefits expired. Though lawmakers neglected to reinstate the federal unemployment program, the Census Bureau found that the program kept 5.5 million people from experiencing poverty in 2020.
New data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows that the number of people quitting their jobs has surged to record highs, with retail and hospitality workers driving the surge. The data suggests that an increasing number of workers are unwilling to risk contracting COVID for the sake of their low-paying jobs.
The number of resignations, or “quits,” surged to 4.3 million in August — the highest number since agencies began collecting such data in December of 2000. New data also reveals that job creation has continued to slow in recent months, sinking to disappointing lows in September, when extra unemployment benefits from the stimulus package ended.
The industry that saw the largest proportion of quits was the hospitality industry, particularly the food service industry. Retail workers also quit at higher rates than workers in other industries. The rise in quits coincided with the surge of COVID cases across the U.S. over the past few months, hitting highs in August and early September.
The possibility that resignations are tied to a rise in COVID cases is further supported by regional data. People in the South and Midwest — regions that were hit with higher rates of COVID infections and deaths over the past few months — quit at higher rates than those in the Northeast, where COVID infections were less widespread.
Economists usually interpret a high number of quits to be a positive sign for the job market, assuming that people leave positions with confidence that they’ll find another job soon. But this may not hold true as COVID continues to rock the already-fragile economy.
This summer, employers and conservative lawmakers predicted that ending unemployment insurance in September would drive people to work, but the opposite proved true. In the 26 states that ended extra unemployment benefits early — most of which were led by conservative governors — employment rates actually slowed to about half the rate of states that kept the benefits until September.
Economic studies have drawn similar conclusions: When people don’t have enough money to get by, as is currently the case for a huge portion of the U.S., they spend more time managing scant resources and less time job searching, economists say. Unemployment can also have long-term effects on people’s personal finances, leading to lower lifetime earnings.
According to a post by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) last month, lawmakers hoping to increase employment rates should focus on strengthening social programs that could ease these worries for workers. “Policymakers should prioritize efforts to bolster job growth, protect those still unable to find suitable work, and build a more equitable economy than what existed before the pandemic,” EPI wrote, adding that states should invigorate programs like education.
Though it’s unclear exactly why retail and hospitality workers are currently quitting at such high rates, personal and familial concerns may be playing a role. A report earlier this year by One Fair Wage found that restaurant workers were likely to quit over COVID concerns and low wages. The report also found that COVID creates risks for workers who are unlikely to get health insurance from their jobs — and that workers are experiencing increased harassment during the pandemic, which is worsening their job satisfaction.
Employment may also be impacted by family-related responsibilities. In May and June, a Harvard Business Review survey found that during the pandemic, 20 percent of working parents had to reduce their hours or quit their jobs entirely to help with childcare. All the while, childcare facilities have reported being understaffed, and parents have experienced burnout and exhaustion as the pandemic stretches on — now worrying about rising COVID infections in children as schools have reopened.
While conservatives circulate spurious talking points about people not wanting to work, they are fighting tooth and nail against Democratic proposals that could save or create jobs. Their recent opposition to raising the debt ceiling could cost 6 million jobs if the U.S. defaults on its debts. And the GOP and conservative Democrats have been rallying against the relatively inexpensive reconciliation bill, which could create over 4 million jobs annually.
One of the fundamental economic laws under capitalism is for wealth to become more concentrated in fewer hands over time, which in turn leads to more political power in fewer hands, which means that the majority have even less political and economic power over time. Monopoly in economics means monopoly in politics. It is the opposite of an inclusive, democratic, modern, healthy society. This retrogressive feature intrinsic to capitalism has been over-documented in thousands of reports and articles from hundreds of sources across the political and ideological spectrum over the last few decades. It is well-known, for example, that a handful of people own most of the wealth in the U.S. and most members of Congress are millionaires. This leaves out more than 95% of people. Not surprisingly, “policy makers” have consistently failed to reverse these antisocial trends inherent to an obsolete system.
At the same time, with no sense of irony and with no fidelity to science, news headlines from around the world continue to scream that the economy in many countries and regions is doing great and that more economic recovery and growth depend almost entirely, if not entirely, on vaccinating everyone (multiple times). In other words, once everyone is vaccinated, we will see really good economic times, everything will be amazing, and we won’t have too much to worry about. Extremely irrational and irresponsible statements and claims of all kinds continue to be made in the most dogmatic and frenzied way by the mainstream press at home and abroad in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the deep economic crisis continually unfolding nationally and internationally. Dozens of countries are experiencing profound economic problems.
While billions of vaccination shots have already been administered worldwide, and millions more are administered every day (with and without people’s consent), humanity continues to confront many major intractable economic problems caused by the internal dynamics of an outdated economic system.
A snapshot:
More rapid and intense inflation everywhere
Major supply chain disruptions and distortions everywhere
Shortages of many products
“Shortages” of workers in many sectors worldwide
Shortened and inconsistent hours of operation at thousands of businesses
Falling value of the U.S. dollar and other fiat currencies
Growing stagflation
Millions of businesses permanently disappeared
More income and wealth inequality
High dismal levels of unemployment, under-employment, and worker burnout
Growing health insurance costs
Unending fear, anxiety, and hysteria around endless covid strains
More scattered panic buying
The stock market climbing while the real economy declines (highly inflated asset valuations in the stock market)
Spectacular economic failures like Lehman Brothers (in the U.S. 13 years ago) and Evergrande (in China in 2021)
All kinds of debt increasing at all levels
Central banks around the world printing trillions in fiat currencies non-stop and still lots of bad economic news
And a whole host of other harsh economic realities often invisible to the eye and rarely reported on that tell a much more tragic story of an economy that cannot provide for the needs of the people
The list goes on and on. More nauseating data appears every day. Economic hardship, which takes on many tangible and intangible forms, is wreaking havoc on the majority at home and abroad. There is no real and substantive economic improvement. It is hard to see a bright, stable, prosperous, peaceful future for millions under such conditions, which is why many, if not most, people do not have a good feeling about what lies ahead and have little faith in the rich, their politicians, and “representative democracy.” It is no surprise that President Joe Biden’s approval rating is low and keeps falling.
What will the rich and their political and media representatives say and do when most people are vaccinated, everyone else has natural immunity, and the economy is still failing? What will the rich do when economic failure cannot be blamed on bacteria or viruses? To be sure, the legitimacy crisis will further deepen and outmoded liberal institutions of governance will become even more obsolete and more incapable of sorting out today’s serious problems. “Representative democracy” will become more discredited and more illusions about the “social contract” will be shattered. In this context, talk of “New Deals” for this and “New Deals” for that won’t solve anything in a meaningful way either because these “New Deals” are nothing more than an expansion of state-organized corruption to pay the rich, mainly through “public-private-partnerships.” This is already being spun in a way that will fool the gullible. Many are actively ignoring how such high-sounding “reforms” are actually pay-the-rich schemes that increase inequality and exacerbate a whole host of other problems.
It is not in the interest of the rich to see different covid strains and scares disappear because these strains and scares provide a convenient cover and scapegoat for economic problems rooted in the profound contradictions of an outmoded economic system over-ripe for a new direction, aim, and control. It is easier to claim that the economy is intractably lousy because of covid and covid-related restrictions than to admit that the economy is continually failing due to the intrinsic built-in nature, operation, and logic of capital itself.
There is no way forward while economic and political power remain dominated by the rich. The only way out of the economic crisis is by vesting power in workers, the people who actually produce the wealth that society depends on. The rich and their outmoded system are a drag on everyone and are not needed in any way; they are a major obstacle to the progress of society; they add no value to anything and are unable and unwilling to lead the society out of its deepening all-sided crisis.
There is an alternative to current obsolete arrangements and only the people themselves, armed with a new independent outlook, politics, and thinking can usher it in. Economic problems, health problems, and 50 other lingering problems are not going to be solved so long as the polity remains marginalized and disempowered by the rich and their capital-centered arrangements and institutions. New and fresh thinking and consciousness are needed at this time. A new and more powerful human-centered outlook is needed to guide humanity forward.
Human consciousness and resiliency are being severely tested at this time, and the results have been harsh and tragic in many ways for so many. We are experiencing a major test of the ability of the human species to bring into being what is missing, that is, to overcome the neoliberal destruction of time, space, and the fabric of society so as to unleash the power of human productive forces to usher in a much more advanced society where time-space relations accelerate in favor of the entire polity. There is an alternative to the anachronistic status quo.
The number of jobs added in September came in far below most forecasts, with the establishment survey showing just 194,000 new jobs. However, the household survey showed the unemployment rate falling by 0.4 percentage points to 4.8 percent. This decline was not due to people dropping out of the labor market, as the survey showed a rise in employment of 526,000, and the employment-to-population ratio rose 0.2 percentage points to 58.7 percent.
The Establishment Survey Is Not as Bad as It First Appears
It is not clear that the weak story in the establishment survey should be seen as primarily a demand issue. First, private sector employment rose by a respectable 317,000, which follows a sharp upward revision to the August number to 332,000. The biggest surprise in this report is a drop of 123,000 in state and local government employment, putting the September level 874,000 below the pre-pandemic level. This drop, following weak growth in August, is hard to understand since most schools are open and state and local governments are mostly in decent fiscal shape.
Hours Rise Rapidly
The other reason the establishment data is better than it first appears is that there was a substantial increase in the length of the average workweek from 34.6 hours to 34.8 hours. As a result, the index of aggregate hours rose 0.9 in September, the largest rise since an increase of 1.5 in March. This is consistent with the idea that, facing a labor shortage, employers are increasing hours for the workers they have.
Wage Growth Remains Strong
The rapid wage growth we are seeing, especially for low-paid workers, is consistent with this picture. The average hourly wage for production and nonsupervisory workers increased at a 6.7 percent annual rate comparing the last three months (July August, September) with the prior three months (April, May, June). In the leisure and hospitality sector, the annual rate of wage growth over this period has been 18.1 percent.
Low-Paying Industries Shedding Jobs
Consistent with the idea that weak job growth is largely a supply-side story, many of the lowest-paying industries are losing jobs. Nursing home employment fell by 15,800. It is now down 241,000 (15.2 percent) from its pre-pandemic level. Temporary employment dropped 5,200, putting it 257,000 (8.7 percent) from its pre-pandemic level. Employment in child care was up 17,800 in September, but still down 109,000 (10.4 percent) from its pre-pandemic level. Restaurants added 29,000 jobs, but with a drop in August, this put employment just 4,300 above the July level. September employment is 931,000 (7.6 percent) below the pre-pandemic level.
Manufacturing and Construction Have Strong Growth
The manufacturing sector added 26,000 jobs, following a gain of 31,000 in August. Construction added 22,000 jobs after a flat August. The retail sector was a big gainer, adding 56,100 jobs, in spite of a loss of 12,300 jobs in grocery stores, the third-straight monthly decline. The big gainer was clothing stores, which added 27,300 jobs.
Ending Unemployment Insurance (UI) Supplements Had Little Obvious Effect
There was no evidence in this report that ending the $300 weekly UI supplements, and the pandemic unemployment programs, had a notable impact on job growth. Many states had ended their programs in June or July, but the national program ended in early September. It is hard to find evidence in this report of any upsurge in people seeking jobs.
Picture in the Household Survey Is Overwhelmingly Positive
The drop in the unemployment rate was considerably larger than most analysts had expected. The unemployment rate didn’t fall to 4.8 percent following the Great Recession until January of 2016. There is now a large gap in unemployment rates for men and women over age 20, as the unemployment rate for women fell by 0.6 percentage points to 4.2 percent, 0.5 percentage points below the unemployment rate for men.
The share of long-term unemployed (more than 26 weeks) dropped 2.9 percentage points to 34.5 percent. This is still unusually high but far below pandemic peaks hit earlier this year.
The Number of Unincorporated Self-Employed Fell But Is Still Well Above the 2019 Average
The number of people reported as being unincorporated self-employed fell by 123,000 in September, but it is still 619,000 above the 2019 level.
Black Unemployment Fell 0.9 Percentage Points
The unemployment rate for Black workers fell to 7.9 percent. The rate for Black men over age 20 was 8.0 percent, and 7.3 percent for Black women. The unemployment rate for Black workers did not get this low following the Great Recession until January of 2017.
Overall Report Is Mixed
It is likely that this report will be seen as negative because of the lower-than-expected job growth in the establishment survey. That take is wrong. If we pull out the government sector, (which is hard to understand) job growth in the private sector increased by 317,000 after a rise of 332,000 in August. Also, the rise in hours and the rapid increases in wages, indicates that employers are having a hard time finding workers. If we only had looked at the household side of this report, we would be seeing it as a very strong jobs report for September.
Eve Livingston’s new book, Make Bosses Pay, aims to get young people connected to unions and to push unions to engage more with the working class as it is today: diverse, precarious, and perhaps on the brink of rebellion.
In October 2019, in a speech at an International Monetary Fund conference, former Bank of England governor Mervyn King warned that the world was sleepwalking towards a fresh economic and financial crisis that would have devastating consequences for what he called the “democratic market system”.
According to King, the global economy was stuck in a low growth trap and recovery from the crisis of 2008 was weaker than that after the Great Depression. He concluded that it was time for the Federal Reserve and other central banks to begin talks behind closed doors with politicians.
In the repurchase agreement (repo) market, interest rates soared on 16 September. The Federal Reserve stepped in by intervening to the tune of $75 billion per day over four days, a sum not seen since the 2008 crisis.
At that time, according to Fabio Vighi, professor of critical theory at Cardiff University, the Fed began an emergency monetary programme that saw hundreds of billions of dollars per week pumped into Wall Street.
Over the last 18 months or so, under the guise of a ‘pandemic’, we have seen economies closed down, small businesses being crushed, workers being made unemployed and people’s rights being destroyed. Lockdowns and restrictions have facilitated this process. The purpose of these so-called ‘public health measures’ has little to do with public health and much to do with managing a crisis of capitalism and ultimately the restructuring of the economy.
Neoliberalism has squeezed workers income and benefits, offshored key sectors of economies and has used every tool at its disposal to maintain demand and create financial Ponzi schemes in which the rich can still invest in and profit from. The bailouts to the banking sector following the 2008 crash provided only temporary respite. The crash returned with a much bigger bang pre-Covid along with multi-billion-dollar bailouts.
The dystopian ‘great reset’ that we are currently witnessing is a response to this crisis. This reset envisages a transformation of capitalism.
Fabio Vighi sheds light on the role of the ‘pandemic’ in all of this:
… some may have started wondering why the usually unscrupulous ruling elites decided to freeze the global profit-making machine in the face of a pathogen that targets almost exclusively the unproductive (over 80s).
Vighi describes how, in pre-Covid times, the world economy was on the verge of another colossal meltdown and chronicles how the Swiss Bank of International Settlements, BlackRock (the world’s most powerful investment fund), G7 central bankers and others worked to avert a massive impending financial meltdown.
The world economy was suffocating under an unsustainable mountain of debt. Many companies could not generate enough profit to cover interest payments on their own debts and were staying afloat only by taking on new loans. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cash flows and highly leveraged balance sheets were rising everywhere.
Lockdowns and the global suspension of economic transactions were intended to allow the Fed to flood the ailing financial markets (under the guise of COVID) with freshly printed money while shutting down the real economy to avoid hyperinflation.
Vighi says:
… the stock market did not collapse (in March 2020) because lockdowns had to be imposed; rather, lockdowns had to be imposed because financial markets were collapsing. With lockdowns came the suspension of business transactions, which drained the demand for credit and stopped the contagion. In other words, restructuring the financial architecture through extraordinary monetary policy was contingent on the economy’s engine being turned off.
It all amounted to a multi-trillion bailout for Wall Street under the guise of COVID ‘relief’ followed by an ongoing plan to fundamentally restructure capitalism that involves smaller enterprises being driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies and global chains, thereby ensuring continued viable profits for these predatory corporations, and the eradication of millions of jobs resulting from lockdowns and accelerated automation.
It retains all the cruelties of the free market for those who live and work in the real world, but turns the paper economy into a state protectorate, surrounded by a kind of Trumpian Money Wall that is designed to keep the investor class safe from fear of loss. This financial economy is a fantasy casino, where the winnings are real but free chips cover the losses. For a rarefied segment of society, failure is being written out of the capitalist bargain.
The World Economic Forum says that by 2030 the public will ‘rent’ everything they require. This means undermining the right of ownership (or possibly seizing personal assets) and restricting consumer choice underpinned by the rhetoric of reducing public debt or ‘sustainable consumption’, which will be used to legitimise impending austerity as a result of the economic meltdown. Ordinary people will foot the bill for the ‘COVID relief’ packages.
If the financial bailouts do not go according to plan, we could see further lockdowns imposed, perhaps justified under the pretext of ‘the virus’ but also ‘climate emergency’.
It is not only Big Finance that has been saved. A previously ailing pharmaceuticals industry has also received a massive bailout (public funds to develop and purchase the vaccines) and lifeline thanks to the money-making COVID jabs.
The lockdowns and restrictions we have seen since March 2020 have helped boost the bottom line of global chains and the e-commerce giants as well and have cemented their dominance. At the same time, fundamental rights have been eradicated under COVID government measures.
Capitalism and labour
Essential to this ‘new normal’ is the compulsion to remove individual liberties and personal freedoms. A significant part of the working class has long been deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ – such people were sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberalism. They lost their jobs due to automation and offshoring. Since then, this section of the population has had to rely on meagre state welfare and run-down public services or, if ‘lucky’, insecure low-paid service sector jobs.
What we saw following the 2008 crash was ordinary people being pushed further to the edge. After a decade of ‘austerity’ in the UK – a neoliberal assault on the living conditions of ordinary people carried out under the guise of reining in public debt following the bank bail outs – a leading UN poverty expert compared Conservative welfare policies to the creation of 19th-century workhouses and warned that, unless austerity is ended, the UK’s poorest people face lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, accused ministers of being in a state of denial about the impact of policies. He accused them of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”.
In another 2019 report, the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank laid the blame for more than 130,000 deaths in the UK since 2012 at the door of government policies. It claimed that these deaths could have been prevented if improvements in public health policy had not stalled as a direct result of austerity cuts.
Over the past 10 years in the UK, according to the Trussell Group, there has been rising food poverty and increasing reliance on food banks.
And in a damning report on poverty in the UK by Professor David Gordon of the University of Bristol, it was found that almost 18 million cannot afford adequate housing conditions, 12 million are too poor to engage in common social activities, one in three cannot afford to heat their homes adequately in winter and four million children and adults are not properly fed (Britain’s population is estimated at around 66 million).
Moreover, a 2015 report by the New Policy Institute noted that the total number of people in poverty in the UK had increased by 800,000, from 13.2 to 14.0 million in just two to three years.
Meanwhile, The Equality Trust in 2018 reported that the ‘austerity’ years were anything but austere for the richest 1,000 people in the UK. They had increased their wealth by £66 billion in one year alone (2017-2018), by £274 billion in five years (2013-2018) and had increased their total wealth to £724 billion – significantly more than the poorest 40% of households combined (£567 billion).
Just some of the cruelties of the ‘free market’ for those who live and work in the real world. And all of this hardship prior to lockdowns that have subsequently devastated lives, livelihoods and health, with cancer diagnoses and treatments and other conditions having been neglected due to the shutdown of health services.
During the current economic crisis, what we are seeing is many millions around the world being robbed of their livelihoods. With AI and advanced automation of production, distribution and service provision on the immediate horizon, a mass labour force will no longer be required.
It raises fundamental questions about the need for and the future of mass education, welfare and healthcare provision and systems that have traditionally served to reproduce and maintain labour that capitalist economic activity has required.
As the economy is restructured, labour’s relationship to capital is being transformed. If work is a condition of the existence of the labouring classes, then, in the eyes of capitalists, why maintain a pool of (surplus) labour that is no longer needed?
A concentration of wealth power and ownership is taking place as a result of COVID-related policies: according to research by Oxfam, the world’s billionaires gained $3.9 trillion while working people lost $3.7 trillion in 2020. At the same time, as large sections of the population head into a state of permanent unemployment, the rulers are weary of mass dissent and resistance. We are witnessing an emerging biosecurity surveillance state designed to curtail liberties ranging from freedom of movement and assembly to political protest and free speech.
In 2020, World Bank Group President David Malpass stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet after the various lockdowns but such ‘help’ would be on condition that neoliberal reforms become further embedded. In other words, the de facto privatisation of states (affecting all nations, rich and poor alike), the (complete) erosion of national sovereignty and dollar-denominated debt leading to a further strengthening of US leverage and power.
In a system of top-down surveillance capitalism with an increasing section of the population deemed ‘unproductive’ and ‘useless eaters’, notions of individualism, liberal democracy and the ideology of free choice and consumerism are regarded by the elite as ‘unnecessary luxuries’ along with political and civil rights and freedoms.
We need only look at the ongoing tyranny in Australia to see where other countries could be heading. How quickly Australia was transformed from a ‘liberal democracy’ to a brutal totalitarian police state of endless lockdowns where gathering and protests are not to be tolerated.
Being beaten and thrown to the ground and fired at with rubber bullets in the name of protecting health makes as much sense as devastating entire societies through socially and economically destructive lockdowns to ‘save lives’.
It makes as much sense as mask-wearing and social-distancing mandates unsupported by science, misused and flawed PCR tests, perfectly healthy people being labelled as ‘cases’, deliberately inflated COVID death figures, pushing dangerous experimental vaccines in the name of health, ramping up fear, relying on Neil Ferguson’s bogus modelling, censoring debate about any of this and the WHO declaring a worldwide ‘pandemic’ based on a very low number of global ‘cases’ back in early 2020 (44,279 ‘cases’ and 1,440 supposed COVID deaths outside China out of a population of 6.4 billion).
There is little if any logic to this. But of course, If we view what is happening in terms of a crisis of capitalism, it might begin to make a lot more sense.
The austerity measures that followed the 2008 crash were bad enough for ordinary people who were still reeling from the impacts when the first lockdown was imposed.
The authorities are aware that deeper, harsher impacts as well as much more wide-ranging changes will be experienced this time around and seem adamant that the masses must become more tightly controlled and conditioned to their coming servitude.
The capitalist vultures are wheeling low, but they’re finding slim pickings to choose from these days.
“No one wants to work!” The bosses whine about a worker shortage — though it’s one they brought about.
Eighteenth-century British economist Adam Smith noted how common it is to hear complaints about workers coming together to fight for their interests, and how rare it is to hear about all the scheming the bosses do to plunder workers’ labor.
“Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate,” Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations.
That scheming is the background to the current labor shortage. Over the past 40 years, employers have used their collective power to wring skyrocketing productivity out of workers while suppressing wages. Productivity grew 60 percent between 1979 and 2019, while the average worker’s wage grew just 15.8 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
That’s why so many jobs are just jobs that nobody wants to do. Draconian surveillance, massive overtime, short-staffing, two-tier contracts, calling your workers “contractors” so they’ll have no rights—this corporate playbook has made today’s workplace a tougher place to be than it’s been for generations.
More workers are throwing in the towel than at any other time in at least two decades. The number of job openings climbed to a record 10.9 million in July.
Many workers are acutely aware that the supply snarls also include labor. Forced overtime, an issue in recent strikes at Frito-Lay and Nabisco, is rampant, to compensate for understaffing. Help Wanted signs are everywhere. Schools are having a hard time finding bus drivers.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham had great insight into the basic calculus that capitalist labor relations rest on: the choice between working and starving. “What if we just cut off the unemployment?” she said in August. “Hunger is a pretty powerful thing.”
But that hasn’t worked. More than 7 million people stopped receiving unemployment benefits in early September as federal programs expired, and nearly 3 million more saw their benefits reduced by $300 per week. Yet the expected spike in job applicants hasn’t happened.
This favorable labor market is an opportunity for workers and unions to undo concessions they’ve made for years — or even to win long-sought demands.
At least some workers have gotten bold together; witness the high-profile fights at Frito-Lay and Nabisco and the months-long battles by Massachusetts nurses to lower nurse-to-patient ratios and Alabama miners to win back the $1.1 billion in concessions they forked over to rescue their employer from bankruptcy.
It’s also showing up in the willingness of Seattle Carpenters and Virginia Volvo workers earlier this year to vote down multiple contract offers. And in big strike votes at John Deere and by film and TV crewmembers.
The pandemic and the end of unemployment benefits haven’t cowed these workers into submission. Now’s the time to turn up the heat, take risks, and refuse to settle for less. It’s an opportunity that won’t last forever.
An estimated 9 million Americans got the rug pulled out from under them over Labor Day weekend as enhanced pandemic federal unemployment benefits expired, leaving millions of families in the lurch during a record-breaking season for COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.
Some 35 million people — nearly 1 in 10 Americans — live in households that will be impacted by the cut. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) tweeted a response to those families: “Um, get a job?”
If only it were that simple.
Workers in this country aren’t lacking work ethic. They simply don’t have reliable child care, health care, or economic infrastructures to support them in times of crisis.
Vaccination rates are still lagging in much of the country, yet many state governments are undermining masking rules and other basic precautions. That makes returning to work more dangerous for frontline workers, many of whom also continue to lack paid leave or reliable child care.
Additionally, in a pandemic that’s sent billionaire and CEO wealth soaring, many workers are asking if their labor is worth the risk if their bosses are the ones reaping the benefits.
For instance, Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta rigged the company’s pay rules to inflate his 2020 compensation to $56 million — 1,953 times more than the company’s median employee. Frontline Hilton workers, meanwhile, face a 39 percent reduction in staffing as the company moves to cut costs.
How could we expect an abrupt and mass return to work under these conditions?
Republicans thought they could force it by simply cutting the added $300 a week in federal unemployment insurance. It didn’t work.
Over the summer, governors in 25 states prematurely ended the enhanced unemployment benefits to pressure people back to work. The results? Unimpressive. Payrolls grew by a meager 1.33 percent in the states that chose to end the benefits — compared to 1.37 percent in states that maintained them.
Unemployment insurance wasn’t keeping people out of work, it turns out. It was keeping them out of poverty.
After Congress expanded government assistance programs in spring 2020, including unemployment insurance, the number of people in poverty actually fell. All told, pandemic government aid programs kept 53 million people above the poverty line in 2020.
Had enhanced programs not been in place, the number of people in poverty would have increased by 2.5 percent, new data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggests.
The pandemic unemployment benefits also, for the first time, reached workers previously left out of our already-faltering unemployment system — including part-time workers, gig workers, and the self-employed.
Ending enhanced federal unemployment benefits during a global pandemic isn’t just cruel — it’s ineffective. Taking away $300 a week — equivalent to $15,200 a year — from a single parent won’t make that parent return to work during a global pandemic. It will force them deeper into poverty.
Fortunately, Congress has an opportunity to build a just economy that advances equity in the pandemic recovery and beyond.
The $3.5 trillion reconciliation package Congress is debating would provide paid leave, universal pre-K, affordable childcare, an expanded Child Tax Credit, and better health care programs. These badly needed investments would provide families and individuals with the social safety net needed to recover from the pandemic before the next crisis hits.
If policy makers want to get people back to work, they need to make our economy work for people.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has unveiled a bill to extend additional unemployment aid after lawmakers allowed the program to expire on Labor Day, leaving millions of unemployed people in the lurch.
The bill would extend the benefits that were first introduced during stimulus talks last year until February 1 of next year and would make payments retroactive to September 6, when the benefits expired.
“I’ve been very disappointed on both sides of the aisle that we’ve just allowed pandemic unemployment assistance to completely lapse, when we are clearly not fully recovered from the cost effects of the pandemic,” Ocasio-Cortez said during a town hall Tuesday. “I simply just could not allow us to let this happen without at least trying.”
The checks, which sent hundreds of dollars to unemployed people each week, were critical in keeping people afloat during the pandemic. A Census Bureau report released Tuesday found that the unemployment checks kept 5.5 million Americans out of poverty in 2020, with the stimulus checks lifting another 11.7 million out of poverty.
Democrats and progressive groups have been pushing for an extension of the unemployment aid. In August, over 100 House Democrats sent a letter to House leaders urging them to take up a bill to reinstate the $600 unemployment checks that were being sent out last year.
“We owe it to people waiting to get back to work across the country not only to extend unemployment benefits to help them pay their bills, but to tie these benefits to economic conditions so workers are not held hostage by another cliff like this one,” the lawmakers wrote.
In April, 38 Democrats and progressives wrote a letter to President Joe Biden calling on him to include permanent unemployment benefits in his infrastructure package, but that call was left unheeded. Meanwhile,the reconciliation bill focuses on job creation but does little to help unemployed workers directly. When the checks expired early this month, there was negligible action from Democratic leadership, who were preoccupied with details surrounding the bipartisan infrastructure and reconciliation bills. People like Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) were mum about the issue, allowing the benefits to expire for the estimated 7.5 million people who were receiving them.
Republicans have been staunchly against the additional unemployment aid, despite the aid’s vast impact on poverty reduction and economic recovery and growth.
“The negative economic impacts of these incentive effects have always been exaggerated,” the Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens wrote in June, “but these effects become truly trivial during times when the economy’s growth is clearly constrained.” Bivens argued that unemployment benefits are massively helpful to the economy, with every dollar spent on unemployment aid returning to the economy by up to double the amount. According to his report, the only reason the economy hasn’t seen further growth as a result of unemployment aid being distributed, is that the checks were relatively stingy and small.
Still, Republicans and some conservative Democrats have latched onto a false narrative about unemployment aid. Governors in 26 states, all but one of whom are Republicans, cut off the unemployment checks early this summer, promoting the fallacious claim that there was a worker shortage. However, data from the Labor Department demonstrated that cutting off the unemployment aid didn’t accelerate the rate of employment; if anything, it created a slight lag.
“Allowing unemployment benefits to expire does not force people back to work,” Ocasio-Cortez said Tuesday. Referring to the bill, she continued, “Even if the majority of the caucus is not on board, we are going to do our best to make that effort.”
Ocasio-Cortez will likely face opposition from the usual conservative Democrats like West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin. Manchin in August told Business Insiderthat he wouldn’t support extending unemployment benefits. “I’m done with extensions,” he said. “The economy is coming back.”
While Manchin is correct in one way — the economy has been booming for the wealthy — he’s incorrect on one crucial point: Growth for the middle class is still stalling, and poverty only decreased last year because of government aid in the form of stimulus payments, social security and unemployment checks.
Now that benefits from the stimulus packages are expiring, the future is uncertain. Economists predict it will take years for the economy to fully recover from the pandemic. Meanwhile, the pandemic is still very much ongoing, with infection numbers in the U.S. reaching new peaks and death counts ticking upward each day.
On September 9, 2021, President Joe Biden publicly issued sweeping statements and demands that make it clear that, whether they like or it, millions more people will have to get vaccinated or risk losing their livelihoods and security. His posture has been described by mainstream media as “aggressive.” Many alternative news and information sources describe Biden’s actions as righteous, arrogant, authoritarian, and incoherent. 1 Biden asserted that choice and freedoms are not the issue. He dismissed both in one breath. One’s right to consent to something was banished in three seconds. Many have also asserted that Biden does not have the legal authority to make and enforce such top-down mandates. Others claim that his White House speech on vaccinations is full of contradictions and disinformation.
Like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and many other capital-centered ideologues and “leaders,” Biden keeps disinforming the polity with the worn-out dogma that economic recovery is largely dependent on getting everyone vaccinated. We are to believe that the broad and stubborn economic failure confronting everyone today is largely caused by the virus and that once the virus is “under control” through vaccines rush-produced by for-profit companies with a long record of malpractice, the economy will soar and flourish. A variety of mainstream news sources have been desperately reinforcing this disinformation for more than a year; they have no interest in economic science.
However, despite an enormous number of vaccinations issued worldwide, despite a large portion of humanity “taking the jab” already, the economy keeps declining and decaying; many serious economic distortions, problems, and uncertainties persist. Inflation, debt, inequality, homelessness, poverty, under-employment, and environmental destruction, for example, appear to be growing. More than one million people per month are still filing unemployment claims in the U.S. alone and job “creation” numbers are superficial and unimpressive. In addition, the U.S. labor force participation rate remains historically low and the number of long-term unemployed remains high. On top of all this, millions of employed workers are living pay-check to pay-check, which means that even full-time employment is no guarantee of security and prosperity. Various surveys also show that large majorities are not hopeful about the future and health of the economy.
It is no surprise that euphoric economic growth forecasts made just weeks or months ago by “leaders” and “experts” are already being revised downward—in some cases significantly. The ruling elite is always embracing magical thinking; they are not on good terms with reality.
It is also being said that large numbers of people will end up leaving their jobs—voluntarily or by being fired—rather than compromise their right to conscience and get vaccinated. This could mean even fewer workers taking available jobs and even more retailers, businesses, and services operating in dysfunctional, disruptive, and unreliable ways without employees. Thus, for example, many nurses, teachers, police officers, and other workers are choosing the right to conscience and unemployment over mandated vaccination. Thousands of businesses are already struggling to fill low-paying positions in the context of constantly-rising inflation and an uncertain future. The American Hospital Association said that Biden’s vaccination plan “may result in exacerbating the severe work force shortage problems that currently exist”. Not surprisingly, some organizations have already started to oppose Biden’s vaccination plan.
The economic depression confronting humanity at home and abroad will not be overcome by leaving major owners of capital in power while workers, the people who actually produce the wealth that society depends on, remain marginalized and disempowered. Economic collapse will not be reversed by funneling more socially-produced wealth to different monopolies and oligopolies, while leaving everyone else with less. Fostering policies, agendas, and arrangements that make the rich even richer is a recipe for deeper problems, not a promising path forward. To date, billions of vaccination shots at home and abroad have not stopped or slowed a range of serious economic problems.
Since the start of the never-ending “COVID Pandemic” more wealth has become concentrated in even fewer hands and more people have experienced more psychological, social, and economic problems. Inequality has soared over the past 18 months.
The current economic crisis started long before 2020 and is rooted in the same contradictions that produced big economic problems before 2020. Even if there were no covid virus mutations, the economy would still be declining because economic upheavals are endemic to the capitalist economic system. Depressions and recessions are not caused by external factors. To claim that the economic system is generally sound but runs into problems now and then because of exogenous forces is nothing more than a way to apologize for the outmoded economic system.
Without major changes, without vesting power in workers themselves, economic crises will keep recurring and deepening. The rich and their representatives have shown time and again that they are unable and unwilling to solve economic and health crises, let alone in a human-centered way.
In December 2020 Biden publicly stated that the federal government should not or could not mandate vaccinations.
How did Occupy change the labor movement? And what lessons might it still hold for unions struggling to find their footing in an ever more crisis-prone world?
Nothing maintains the culture wars more than a conservative PM blaming the unemployed for their lack of employment to a room full of rich business people, writes Dechlan Brennan.
Millions of Americans have entered Labor Day weekend knowing that one of the key unemployment benefits that has been keeping them afloat throughout the pandemic is coming to an end. States across the country have announced they will not be extending the specially created federal pandemic unemployment beyond Sept. 4, leaving workers and advocates scrambling to figure out what to do next.
But while first-time unemployment claims are currently at their lowest rates since March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, about 3.4 million Americans are considered long-term unemployed, meaning they have been out of work for six months or longer. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in August, these workers represent about 39% of those currently on unemployment benefits, a statistic that is particularly worrying to experts because of the stress the lack of income puts on personal savings and the fact that workers tend to earn less than they did before when they do find new positions.
While long-term unemployed people figure out their next steps, those who have been unable to access any sort of unemployment relief will be continuing to search for a way to make ends meet.
“Even before the pandemic, just one out of four workers who are unemployed were getting employment checks,” said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation who specializes in unemployment. “The program is really restricted.”
Among those traditionally shut out of unemployment insurance access prior to the pandemic were gig workers, freelancers, students, migrant workers, and undocumented immigrants who, despite paying taxes, often do not qualify for assistance. Also excluded were workers who had to leave their jobs because of illness or a lack of child care, Stettner said. Under the specially created CARES Act, which was designed to address coronavirus-related economic issues, many of these groups received assistance for the first time.
Experts and community advocates stress that a better approach to unemployment is possible — and that many special programs created specifically to address the catastrophic job losses related to the pandemic can serve as a model for what permanent change can look like.
The federal weekly unemployment subsidy — which was up to $600 a week — was a game changer for families living in poverty in particular, said Cassandra Welchin, the executive director of the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable (MBWR), a Jackson, Mississippi-based community network that serves Black women and girls.
“Right when the pandemic happened and families were accessing those resources, it made a significant difference particularly when we talk about single moms,” she said, noting that many of these women are in the service industry. “They are low-wage workers who are barely making ends meet.”
The availability and accessibility of unemployment insurance also varies greatly by state and Stettner notes that the differences between different regions — and the way primarily white workforces and communities of color are treated — is stark. States like Minnesota, North Dakota, and Oregon tend to have fewer barriers to unemployment assistance, while states in the South and Southwest — regions where much of the low-income workforce tends to be Latinx and Black — tend to have lower benefits that are harder to get approved for, with many workers in those states getting their unemployment eligibility challenged by either their former employer or the state if stringent requirements aren’t followed.
Workers will “say they lost their job because of COVID, and that their employers will say they didn’t, that they are still eligible to work,” but will not be scheduled for shifts. said Stettner. Additionally, the record number of people filing for unemployment benefits during the pandemic has overwhelmed the system.
“It really is very racially constructed, how accessible the benefits are,” Stettner said.
The staff at the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable say they see every day how that disparity plays out for Black women in their state, noting that after taxes, most Mississipians receive about $200 a week in unemployment benefits.
“I can speak from experience and say that is not enough,” said Melissa Overton, the group’s special projects coordinator. The enhanced unemployment benefit allowed many of these women to provide for their children while also addressing household debt for the first time. “It allowed them to say, ‘Okay, this week will be for the rent check, this week will be for the car note, this will be groceries,” Overton said.
When Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves announced the state would opt out of the enhanced federal unemployment benefits beginning on June 12, those same families were left reeling.
“That [decision] hurt a lot of families and a lot of women,” Overton said.
Lessening the amount of control individual states can have over how unemployment benefits are distributed is an essential part of reform, Stettner said.
“If we want to fix it, we need to have more federal standards,” he said. “The shift needs to happen from ‘This is a state problem’ to ‘This is a national priority.’”
For undocumented Americans — a group that disproportionately works in the service industry — the combined impact of a loss of income because of the pandemic and a lack of unemployment benefits was felt immediately.
“It can be very difficult because none of them are qualified for any sort of unemployment,” said Yesenia Mata, the executive director of La Colmena, a community-based organization in New York City’s Staten Island that supports day laborers and undocumented workers.
As organizers lobby for better benefits for those traditionally shut out of the unemployment system, they also say that advocating for better unemployment is just one step needed to improve the lives of low-wage workers, especially those from poorer states.
“Let’s increase wages in this state, let’s have an equal pay bill in Mississippi that would close the wage gap,” Welchlin said. “When we talk about people’s — in particular women’s — economic security, we want equity here.”
Prismis a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places and issues currently underreported by national media.
The August job gains were somewhat weaker than expected; although it is not clear that it should be viewed as a seriously negative report. The 235,000 figure is less than half of what most forecasters had been predicting, but it was still associated with a 0.2 percentage point drop in the unemployment rate to 5.2 percent. The unemployment rate had not fallen to 5.2 percent following the Great Recession until July of 2015. It is also important to note that in the prior two months jobs gains were revised up 134,000, bringing the three-month average to 750,000.
State and Local Government Lost 11,000 Jobs in August
The state and local sectors, which are still down 815,000 jobs from their pre-pandemic level, lost 11,000 jobs after adding 246,000 in July. This is likely a question of timing, with some jobs that would be added back in the fall showing up in July and some still to appear in September. It may be some time before state and local governments gain back all the jobs lost in the pandemic, but with most schools back to in-person instruction and most of these governments’ budgets in reasonably good shape, it seems likely most jobs will be coming back soon.
Restaurants Shed 41,500 Jobs in August
By far the biggest single factor in the slowdown from July to August was the loss of 41,500 restaurant jobs after a gain of 290,000 in July. There are several different factors at play in this. Clearly the spread of the Delta variant played a role, but that can be exaggerated. The arts and entertainment sector, which is also dependent on in-person gatherings, added 35,000 jobs in the month.
Restaurant owners have complained that they can’t find workers. They had been blaming the $300 unemployment insurance (UI) supplements, but with almost half the states ending their pandemic UI programs, this cannot be the explanation. But wages are rising very rapidly in the lowest paying sectors. Over the last year, the average hourly pay for production and nonsupervisory workers in leisure and hospitality has risen by 12.8 percent. In the last three months (June, July, and August) compared with the prior three months (March, April, and May), the average hourly wage in the sector has risen at a 23.7 percent annual rate.
These sorts of rapid wage gains are consistent with a story where employers really are unable to find workers. In some cases, employers may not be able to afford to offer higher wages. That will mean they will go out of business, but that is the way a healthy capitalist economy works, with workers moving from lower-paying, lower-productivity sectors to higher-paying, higher-productivity sectors.
Home Health Care and Nursing Homes Both Lose Workers in August
The home health care sector lost 11,600 jobs in August, while nursing homes lost 7,100 jobs. Both of these are among the lowest-paying sectors in the economy. The job loss is consistent with a story where workers feel they are in a position to turn down jobs with low pay and bad working conditions.
Share of Unemployment Due to Quits Fell to 9.9 Percent
The share of unemployment due to voluntary quits fell 0.9 percentage points to 9.9 percent, reversing the July increase. This goes in the opposite direction of a story where workers feel comfortable quitting a job without a new one lined up.
One factor keeping down the quit share of unemployment is the continued high share of long-term unemployed (more than 26 weeks). This fell slightly to 37.4 percent, but is still unusually high.
The Number of Unincorporated Self-Employed Is More Than 700,000 Above the 2019 Average
There was a small drop in the people reported as being unincorporated self-employed (more than 60 percent of the self-employed), but it is still more than 700,000 above the average for 2019. The monthly data are erratic, but seeing a high number month after month indicates that the rise in this category of self-employment (more than 7 percent) is real.
Asian American Unemployment Falls 0.7 Percentage Points
The unemployment rate for Asian Americans fell 0.7 percentage points to 4.6 percent. This still leaves it slightly higher than the 4.5 percent for whites. It is typically slightly lower than the unemployment rate for whites.
Manufacturing Added 37,000 Jobs in August
This gain follows a 52,000 gain in July, which was revised up by 25,000 from a previously reported gain of 27,000. The 89,000 two-month gain is the strongest since May and June of last year when the economy was recovering from the shutdown.
Black Teen Unemployment Rises 4.6 Percentage Points
The unemployment rate for Black teens jumped 4.6 percentage points to 17.9 percent. This is unfortunately still a low level for Black teens, but their unemployment rate has been at record lows in the prior three months.
Mixed Employment Report for August
This is a difficult unemployment report to read. While it is easy to be disappointed with the 235,000 overall job growth number, it is important to remember that months of extraordinarily rapid job growth, like June and July, are likely to be followed by slower job growth, for the simple reason that if employers make a lot of hires in one month, they don’t hire people again. The three month-average of 750,000 is still solid by any measure.
It also seems likely that much of the seeming weakness in job growth is on the supply side as workers are opting not to work at the lowest-paying, and often least desirable, jobs. This would explain the drop not only in restaurant jobs but also jobs in home health care and nursing homes. If workers now feel they don’t have to take these jobs (perhaps because of money saved from their pandemic checks), unless they get much better pay, this is a positive for the economy.
It is also worth noting that we are hugely ahead of the recovery from the Great Recession. The employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) for prime age workers (ages 25 to 54) rose 0.2 percentage points to 78.0 percent, a level we did not reach until July of 2016 following the Great Recession. The broad U-6 measure of unemployment fell 0.4 percentage points to 8.8 percent, a level not reached following the Great Recession until March of 2017.
In short, this should not be viewed as a terrible jobs report. The growth is definitely weaker than we need, given that we are still down more than 5 million jobs, but in the context of the last two months’ extraordinary growth, perhaps a slowdown should not be a surprise. As the impact of the Delta variant fades in the months ahead, we should see strong job growth through the fall.
Millions of jobless workers are set to lose critical unemployment benefits in roughly 72 hours — and neither Congress nor the Biden administration seem prepared to do anything about it.
Despite the ongoing threat posed by the highly transmissible Delta variant, the White House and Democratic lawmakers have provided no indication that they plan to prevent several pandemic-related unemployment programs from expiring on September 6, which — in a cruel irony — happens to be Labor Day.
The consequences of government inaction in the face of what one analyst recently described as “the largest cutoff of unemployment benefits in history” could be massive, both for those directly impacted by the cuts and the still-ailing U.S. economy.
As Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project noted Thursday, the Labor Department’s latest weekly unemployment insurance (UI) report shows that “9.2 million people are currently receiving benefits from either the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program or the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program,” which were implemented last year to extend the duration of jobless aid and provide assistance to those who are typically ineligible for UI, such as gig workers.
“According to the Census Household Pulse Survey, the average household that is receiving UI benefits has 3.8 members in it,” Bruenig observed. “This means that around 35 million people (10% of the U.S. population) live in households that are scheduled to lose unemployment income.”
“These are not small cuts either,” he continued. “Based on what happened in the states that already cut these benefits, we know that around half of those on UI will see their benefits drop to $0 while the remaining half will see their benefits cut by $300 per week, which is equivalent to $15,200 per year. Those formerly on UI will also cut their spending by about $145 per week ($7,540 annually), which will have negative effects on the revenue and employment of the businesses they patronize.”
But even amid such dire warnings, the possibility of a UI extension has been virtually absent from discussions on Capitol Hill as Democratic lawmakers work to assemble a $3.5 trillion spending package aimed at achieving a range of longstanding policy goals, from major climate investments to Medicare expansion.
“The Biden administration has not made it a priority, and outside of Ron Wyden, you haven’t heard too many people in the Senate be willing to push on that,” Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, toldVox, referring to the Democratic senator from Oregon, a key architect of the soon-to-expire UI programs.
“It doesn’t seem like right now there would even be 50 votes in the Senate” for an extension, Stettner observed.
Last week, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that President Joe Biden believes it is “appropriate” for the $300-per-week federal UI boost to expire as scheduled. Twenty-six states — each led by a Republican governor except Louisiana — have already ended the emergency UI aid, and the Biden administration did not try to stop them.
Subsequent research has vindicated economists who warned that — contrary to the claims and predictions of Republican leaders — ending the benefits prematurely would do little to boost hiring. A Wall Street Journalanalysis released Wednesday found that “states that ended enhanced federal unemployment benefits early have so far seen about the same job growth as states that continued offering the pandemic-related extra aid.”
While Republicans have insisted that the emergency UI programs are dissuading people from returning to the workforce, analysts have pointed to the myriad other factors at play, including lack of child care and pandemic-related health concerns.
Dr. Rakeen Mabud, the chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, warned in a statement earlier this week that “amid increasing uncertainty in the trajectory of the pandemic, Monday’s unemployment cliff could not come at a worse time.”
“Millions will suffer as they lose this critical source of income and the loss of spending will suppress job growth, setting us back yet again in our efforts for an inclusive and equitable recovery,” Mabud said.
Painful enough in itself, the benefit cut-off will come just days after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s nationwide eviction moratorium, putting millions of people at imminent risk of losing their homes amid a deadly pandemic. The U.S. is currently averaging around 164,000 new coronavirus infections and 1,500 deaths per day.
“It’s going to be a perfect storm for a lot of folks,” Jordan Dewbre, a staff attorney for the New York-based community organization BronxWorks, said of the confluence of UI expirations and the end of the eviction moratorium. “We are still in the middle of a pandemic.”
In a series of tweets on Thursday, Stettner of the Century Foundation warned that “this cliff dwarfs anything we have seen before.” If the federal programs expire, jobless workers will be left with often-paltry state-level UI benefits or — if they’ve exhausted their eligibility for such assistance — nothing at all.
“The unwillingness to extend emergency benefits — or even debate it — shows how inured we’ve become to plight of the unemployed,” Stettner wrote. “With eviction protections ending at the same time, long-term unemployed workers are now vulnerable to lasting economic damage. Black and Latino workers have the least in savings built up to navigate this transitional period.”
“Congress should have the courage to reinstate benefits, especially in high unemployment states, if the Delta surge slows the recovery,” Stettner added, “and make permanent changes to UI benefits so that we won’t have to rely on emergency programs during the next economic crisis.”
As hopes for ambitious climate policy fade, Joe Uehlein, Founding President of the Labor Network for Sustainability, talks about why we must decarbonize the economy while protecting workers.
The Biden administration recently announced a record permanent increase in the value of food stamps aid going to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients around the country. The average amount received each month by each of the 42 million Americans relying on SNAP, formerly titled the Food Stamp Program, to put food on the table was $121 before the pandemic hit. It will now increase by $36, or 27 percent, reflecting what the Agriculture Department believes to be a more realistic cost of healthy foods.
This boost is nothing to sneeze at – it constitutes the largest permanent boost in the history of the public benefits program. But to truly end hunger in the United States and address the ongoing economic crises faced by people across this country, it’s vital for the same sort of boost to happen across all U.S. anti-poverty programs, with funds extracted from corporate profits and the ultra rich.
Bernie Sanders, chair of the powerful Senate Budget Committee has proposed just this, putting forward one bill to restore the corporate tax rate to 35 percent, which is where it was until Republicans reduced it to 21 percent in 2017. He has also introduced a second bill to create a progressive estate tax that would kick in on estates valued at $3.5 million and above. Such reforms would generate large sums of money that could be used to expand health care access, to put in place more programs tailored to low-income children, to expand safety net programs to noncitizen immigrants, and so on. These reforms will, however, take time; in the meanwhile, increasing the value of SNAP benefits is a good way to get bang-for-the-buck in reducing hunger, one of the most destructive consequences of poverty.
As with so many of the new social programs and spending being pushed by the Biden administration, the impetus for the recent boost in SNAP benefits came with temporary fixes put in place during the first two waves of the pandemic. Then, with tens of millions of Americans suddenly out of work and unable to meet their basic needs, Congress temporarily increased the value of food stamps aid sent out to recipients by 15 percent. But that boost was initially slated to expire at the end of September.
The GOP critique of these benefits was disingenuous. For even though the original increases were only meant to be temporary, the reality is that the United States has long failed to allocate enough resources to properly provide for the nutritional needs of its poorest residents. The COVID crisis shone a spotlight on the hunger crisis that has long been brewing in the shadows, and the temporary increases in food stamps and unemployment benefits were effective at taking millions of families out of absolute poverty; they showed that targeted government interventions can be dramatically powerful tools to mitigating the worst impacts of economic inequality.
The Biden administration’s permanent increase in food stamps this month is an overdue acknowledgement of this reality. And it stands in stark contrast to the efforts by his predecessor to block emergency SNAP payments to the poorest of recipients at the height of the public health crisis.
In fact, from the earliest days of the Trump administration, SNAP came under sustained fire from a political leadership that saw recipients as spongers and loafers, and viewed cutting SNAP as a key part of its toolkit to further limit the welfare system and further undermine vital anti-poverty programs. In the very first months after Trump’s inauguration, administration officials proposed cutting the program by $191 billion over 10 years. Luckily, that didn’t fly. Then, in late 2019, members of the Trump administration unveiled rules tightening up work requirements for recipients without children — putting the food stamps of roughly 700,000 people at risk. They also sought to make states more rigorously police who could enroll in SNAP, and recalculate income of applicants in a way that made it easier to deny benefits. All told, the Urban Institute estimated that if these reforms were fully implemented, the number of recipients in several states would fall by at least 15 percent in 13 states. Then, during the pandemic, the Trump administration continued to wage war on SNAP, despite private food bank and food pantry networks being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of suddenly hungry people lining up on foot and in cars to access their food supplies.
Thankfully, Trump’s team never really managed to implement its draconian cuts to food stamps. There was no congressional consensus to accept these cuts, and no public support to impose hunger on millions of Americans already living on the margins. In fact, by the time the pandemic rolled around, the administration had been participating in a yearly stunt for three years already, regularly promising huge cuts to food stamps as a way to assuage its anti-government base, while knowing full well that of all the big pillars of the U.S. welfare system, food assistance is the one that has garnered more bipartisan support in Congress — and among the public — than virtually any other part of the social support web outside of social security and Medicare.
Biden came to power last January projecting ambitions to use government in the way Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson had done, as a counterbalance against economic policy that kept millions of Americans in dire poverty. He had, as a result, a dramatically different understanding of the social safety net from his predecessor, and a willingness to put his weight behind huge expansions in government programs ranging from the provision of health care to low-income people to child tax credit payments offered to parents by the federal government.
Biden has ambitions to use the power of government to massively reduce poverty in this country. In particular, he has focused on halving child poverty in the coming years, through direct monthly payments to families, and through a better use of existing programs such as SNAP.
But to truly change the landscape of poverty and inequality in this country, this turn toward state spending can’t just be framed in limited ways as a project to restore consumer spending. And the expansions to public benefits programs can’t adequately be paid for through tax revenues without a targeted effort to redistribute the gross profits that corporations have been hogging in increasing proportions each year.
The U.S. was at its most dynamic economically in the post-WWII decades, when income inequality was lower than at other moments in the country’s history, and when corporate tax rates were higher. Today, wealthy individuals and corporations pay less into the tax pot and, in consequence, public systems and benefits programs are chronically underfunded. The president has the public behind him on the changes needed to tackle poverty in the U.S. Now he needs to marshal his negotiating skills to get the fractious Democratic coalition in Congress to coalesce around this agenda.
Six academics, including Arin Dube and Suresh Naidu, released a paper last week estimating the impact of the massive unemployment benefit cuts that occurred in twenty-two states in June. The team was able to use bank transaction data and comparisons to unemployment benefit recipients in states that did not cut benefits to get precise estimates of both the employment and income effects of the policy change.
The unemployment rate for Black and Minority Ethnic workers has risen three times faster than for white workers over the past year.
New figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that the unemployment rate for BME workers has increased from 6.1% in 2020 to 8% this year.
In contrast, the rate for white workers has increased much slower – from 3.6% to 4% in the same time period.
Unions say the new figures illustrate the continuing disproportionate impact of the pandemic on minorities.
Protecting jobs
TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said:
BME workers have borne the brunt of the pandemic. They’ve been more likely to be in low-paid, insecure work and have been put at greater risk from the virus. They’ve also been more likely to work in industries that have been hit hard by unemployment, like hospitality and retail.
As we emerge from the pandemic, we can’t allow these inequalities in our jobs market to continue. Ministers must take decisive action to hold down unemployment, create good new jobs and challenge the discrimination that holds BME workers back.
The TUC is calling for the extension of the furlough scheme while it’s needed, and for the government to create a short-time work scheme for the future. This would mean employers could reduce workers’ hours on a temporary basis, but the government would cover most of their lost pay.
Unequal pandemic
According to figures from November 2020, Black people were “twice as likely to catch coronavirus”. Asian people were also 1.5 times more at risk than white people.
Furthermore, research by Mind in 2020 found that Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic people were also more likely to report a decline in their mental health during the pandemic.
Zero-hours contracts
The ONS figures also showed that 917,000 people are still on zero-hours contracts in 2021.
Women from BME backgrounds are over-represented in this figure at nearly twice the percentage of white men on such contracts. This can leave BME workers in much less secure positions in their jobs.
The TUC is therefore calling on the government to end zero-hours contracts. O’Grady said:
Too many BME workers are stuck on zero-hours contracts, and face a triple whammy of low pay, limited rights, and an increased risk of dying from the virus.
This is what structural racism at work looks like – BME workers getting trapped in jobs with the worst pay and the worst conditions, struggling to pay the bills and feed their families.
The July employment report again showed very strong gains in both the establishment and household survey. In addition to showing 943,000 new jobs in July, the numbers for April and May were also revised up substantially so that the average over the last three months is now 832,000. At that pace, we would make up the jobs lost in the recession in seven months.
Unemployment Record Far Ahead of Recovery From Great Recession
The 0.5 percentage point drop in the household survey was also impressive. We didn’t get down to 5.4 percent unemployment following the Great Recession (GR) until March of 2015. The Black unemployment rate fell 1.0 percentage points to 8.2 percent, a level not reached following the GR until May of 2016. The unemployment rate for Hispanics dropped 0.8 percentage points to 6.6 percent.
Not all the news in the household survey was positive. The unemployment rate for Black teens rose from its record low level of 9.3 percent to 13.3 percent, but this is still lower than any pre-pandemic level.
Unemployment for Asian Americans Above Level for Whites, Reversing Pre-Pandemic Pattern
The unemployment rate for Asian Americans fell from 5.8 to 5.3 percent, but it is still 0.5 percentage points above the rate for whites. It had generally been slightly lower before the pandemic. It’s not clear whether this is the result of discrimination or small businesses owned by Asian Americans continuing to feel the impact of the pandemic.
Share of Unemployment Due to Quits Rises But Still Low
The share of unemployment due to voluntary quits rose 0.9 percentage points to 10.8 percent. However, this is still low; it should be around 14-15 percent in a strong labor market. The share of the unemployed who reported being on temporary layoffs fell to 14.3 percent, which is a normal level. It had been over 70 percent during the shutdowns last spring.
Share of Long-Term Unemployed Still High
The share of long-term unemployed (more than 26 weeks) fell 2.8 percentage points in July, but it is still very high at 39.3 percent. It was only above this level in the recovery following the Great Recession.
Unincorporated Self-Employed Rises in July
The number of people who reported being unincorporated self-employed rose by 425,000 in July, which puts it almost 800,000 above the 2019 average. This could mean many people are starting small businesses as a result of changes in their situation in the pandemic.
Women Accounted for Most of the New Jobs in July
Women accounted for 649,000 of the new payroll jobs in the month. Their share of payroll employment is now 49.9 percent. It had been just over 50.0 percent before the pandemic.
Hardest Hit Sectors Were Big Job Gainers
Local government education added 220,700 jobs, restaurants added 253,200 jobs, hotels added 73,700 jobs, and arts and entertainment added 53,000 jobs. However, employment in all four sectors remains well below its pre-recession level. In percentage terms, the hardest hit sector is motion pictures. It added 17,800 jobs in July, but jobs in the sector are still 30.2 percent below its pre-recession level. Manufacturing and construction both had good gains in the month, adding 27,000 and 11,000 jobs, respectively.
Nursing Homes Continue to Shed Jobs
Nursing homes shed another 1,500 jobs in July, which puts employment 215,600 (13.6 percent) below the pre-pandemic level. This is likely due to the difficulty in finding workers and also reduced demand as the result of many nursing home deaths in the pandemic.
Mixed Evidence on the Labor Shortage Story
The Employment Cost Index (ECI) for the second quarter showed that many of the claims about soaring labor costs were not true. The ECI rose just 0.7 percent in the quarter and is up just 2.9 percent over the last year. However, wages do appear to be rising rapidly at the bottom.
Pay for production and nonsupervisory workers in leisure and hospitality is up 13.0 percent from its year-ago level. It has been rising at an annual rate of 24.3 percent for the last three months (May, June, and July) compared with the prior three months (February, March, April).
The average hourly wage overall is up 4.0 percent for the last year. That is somewhat more rapid than the pre-pandemic clip but can certainly be supported by the rapid productivity growth we have seen in the pandemic. It is important to remember that there was a large shift from wages to profits in the first quarter.
Hours Are Little Changed
There was little change in the length of the average workweek, another piece of evidence for a labor shortage. Average weekly hours for production workers were unchanged in July at 34.2. This is up from 33.7 pre-pandemic, but below the 34.4 peaks in Jan and March. In leisure and hospitality, average hours increased by 0.2 hours to 25.3, the same as the high reached in April.
Very Solid Jobs Report
The job growth figure was again better than most economists had predicted. It appears that the spread of the Delta variant had not had a major impact on the labor market, at least through the middle of July. If its spread can be contained we will likely continue to see strong job growth, coupled with declines in unemployment.
Federal unemployment programs that have paid jobless benefits since March 2020 are poised to end Sept. 6. It doesn’t appear Congress will extend them again.
Roughly 7.5 million people will lose benefits entirely at that time, per one estimate.
Those eligible to collect state unemployment insurance may continue to receive weekly payments past Labor Day. They would get $300 less per week.
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Millions of jobless Americans are poised to lose Covid-era income support in about a month’s time.
This impending “benefits cliff” appears different from others that loomed this past year, when Congress was able to keep aid flowing after eleventh-hour legislative deals.
There doesn’t seem to be an urgency among federal lawmakers to extend pandemic benefit programs past Labor Day, their official cutoff date.
“There’s almost nobody talking about extending the benefits,” said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.
The cliff will impact Americans who are receiving benefits through a handful of temporary programs.
They include aid for the long-term unemployed, as well as the self-employed, gig workers, freelancers and others who are generally ineligible for state benefits.
More than 9 million people were receiving such assistance as of July 10, according to the Labor Department.
About 7.5 million will still be collecting benefits by the time they end Sept. 6, Stettner estimates. They’d lose their entitlement to any benefits at that time.
Others who are eligible for traditional state unemployment insurance can continue to receive those weekly payments past Labor Day. Roughly 3 million people are currently getting regular state benefits.
However, they’ll lose a $300 weekly supplement.
The average person would have gotten $341 a week without that supplement in June, according to Labor Department data. (Payments range widely among states — from $177 a week in Louisiana to $504 a week in Massachusetts, on average.)
State benefits replaced about 38% of pre-layoff wages for workers in the first quarter of 2021, according to the Labor Department.
The CARES Act expansions of unemployment benefits were unprecedented in the history of the unemployment insurance program, which dates to the 1930s.
Congress has expanded payments in past recessions, too, to varying degrees.
During the Great Recession, for example, workers were able to collect up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits — far more than the traditional 26 weeks (or less in some states). That aid ceased in December 2013, at which time 1.3 million workers lost benefits.
During the pandemic, workers were poised to lose extended benefits last December and again this past March, but Congress intervened in both cases, most recently with the American Rescue Plan.
“This is so many more people than have ever been cut off from something like this,” Stettner said of the looming cliff relative to past cutoffs.
Of course, the economy has recovered more quickly than in past recessions. It’s now larger than it was before the pandemic, according to Commerce Department data released Thursday.
Hiring is also up over the past few months. The economy added 850,000 new jobs in June, after 583,000 in May and 269,000 in April. However, the U.S. has yet to recover almost 7 million lost jobs versus pre-pandemic levels.
Critics of expanded benefit programs believe they’ve led workers to stay home instead of looking for work, which has made it harder for businesses to fill openings and contributed to muted hiring.
There was about one unemployed person for every job opening in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Twenty-six states ended their participation in federal unemployment programs over June and July, to try to encourage recipients to return to work — effectively moving up the benefits cliff for residents by about two to three months.
“Businesses across the state continue to say they would grow and expand, if it wasn’t for the lack of workers,” Marcia Hultman, secretary of the South Dakota Department of Labor and Regulation, said in May. “Ending these programs is a necessary step towards recovery, growth and getting people back to work.”
With the $300 supplement, almost half of jobless workers (48%) make as much or more money on unemployment benefits than their lost paychecks, according to a recent paper published by the JPMorgan Chase & Co. Institute.
The extra funds had a small impact on job-finding among workers, but didn’t significantly hold back the job market, according to economists Fiona Greig, Daniel Sullivan, Peter Ganong, Pascal Noel and Joseph Vavra, who authored the analysis.
“We conclude that unemployment supplements have not been the key driver of the job-finding rate through mid-May 2021 and that U.S. policy was therefore successful in insuring income losses from unemployment with minimal impacts on employment,” they found.
And though it’s still early, evidence so far doesn’t suggest the state policies immediately pushed people back into the workforce.
Some economists argue pandemic-related factors, not benefits, are the primary reasons workers may not be returning to the workforce as quickly as anticipated.
For example, parents may still not have adequate child care; those who can’t work from home may still be cautious for health reasons; workers may have relocated away from jobs, or changed industries, during the pandemic.
There was a seven-day average of more than 62,000 new Covid cases as of Thursday, up from about 47,000 a week earlier, according to CDC data. The overwhelming number of hospitalizations and deaths are occurring among the unvaccinated. But it appears vaccinated individuals with breakthrough cases can still transmit the virus to others, according to the CDC.
The executive power in our government is not the only, perhaps not even the principal, object of my solicitude. The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.
― Thomas Jefferson, (Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville(
It is time to recalibrate the government.
For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.
By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.
We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.
We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.
This COVID-19 pandemic has provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.
These kinds of crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.
That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.
This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.
“The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance,” concludes law professor William P. Marshall. “The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”
Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom.
There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.
The fact that any individual—or branch of government—of any political persuasion is empowered to act like a dictator is danger enough.
So what can we do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?
It won’t be easy.
We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority.
This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.
We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.
We are viewed as relatively expendable in the eyes of government: faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they seem to care about are power and control.
We are being made to suffer countless abuses at the government’s hands.
We have little protection against standing armies (domestic and military), invasive surveillance, marauding SWAT teams, an overwhelming government arsenal of assault vehicles and firepower, and a barrage of laws that criminalize everything from vegetable gardens to lemonade stands.
In the name of national security, we’re being subjected to government agencies such as the NSA, FBI and others listening in on our phone calls, reading our mail, monitoring our emails, and carrying out warrantless “black bag” searches of our homes. Adding to the abuse, we have to deal with surveillance cameras mounted on street corners and in traffic lights, weather satellites co-opted for use as spy cameras from space, and thermal sensory imaging devices that can detect heat and movement through the walls of our homes.
That doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways in which our Fourth Amendment rights are trampled upon by militarized police and SWAT teams empowered to act as laws unto themselves.
In other words, freedom—or what’s left of it—is threatened from every direction.
The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers are shooting unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—are being armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies are fleecing taxpayers. Government technicians are spying on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors are making a killing by waging endless wars abroad.
In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.
Nothing has changed, and nothing will change unless we insist on it.
Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.
Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.
Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?
As director James McTeighe observed about the tyrannical regime in V for Vendetta, “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”
Clearly, our leaders have stopped listening to the American people.
We are—and have been for some time—the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government—from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.
We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American. We are relatively expendable in the eyes of government—faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars.
What will it take for the government to start listening to the people again?
In V for Vendetta, as in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, it takes an act of terrorism for the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny: in Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.
These acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.
This way lies madness.
Then again, this madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.
How to do this? It’s not rocket science.
There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.
Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.
Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.
Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.
At least, she relied on the money until West Virginia governor Jim Justice (R) announced that beginning on June 19, the state would end its participation in federal unemployment programs enacted during the pandemic to encourage people to go back to work. As an independent contractor, Hardy was receiving Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), a federal program created last March as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act to provide unemployment insurance for workers like Hardy, who don’t normally qualify for jobless aid.
At a town hall in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Wednesday night, President Joe Biden appeared to side with progressives on the issue of the so-called worker shortage sweeping the country, saying that it’s a low-wage issue instead.
When an audience member and restaurant owner asked the president how he plans to incentivize people into returning to work, Biden pointed out that workers have shouldered disproportionate blame for businesses not being able to find workers. He challenged the Republican narrative that people are lazy and would rather collect unemployment than return to work and said that it’s the businesses that must attract the workers with appropriate pay and benefits.
“There’s some evidence that maintaining the ability to continue to … have to pay your rent so you don’t get thrown out and being able to provide” are priorities for people in considering their financial situation, the president said.
He suggested that many people may be shifting industries, saying “I think it really is a matter of people deciding now that they have opportunities to do other things and where there is a shortage of employees, people are looking to make more money and to bargain.”
Biden told the business owner that, if businesses want to attract more employees, they should offer higher pay because people won’t settle for $7 or $8 an hour. “If you make less than 15 bucks an hour working 40 hours a week, you’re living below the poverty level,” the president said. Indeed, studies have shown that even $15 an hour isn’t enough for people to cover basic expenses, especially for families.
The president’s remarks echo what progressives have been saying over the past several months. As many businesses are reopening and rehiring in this stage of the pandemic, business owners and corporations have complained that expanded unemployment benefits are to blame for unfilled job openings, fueling Republican grievances.
But research has shown that many frontline workers are unwilling to work to serve increasingly hostile customers while making low wages, especially while risking exposure to COVID-19 at their workplace or while using public transit. Wages have largely stayed stagnant since before the pandemic, writes the Economic Policy Institute, but with workers having to wade through anti-mask and anti-vaccine customers, “The wages for a harder, riskier job should be higher.”
As One Fair Wage found in a survey of restaurant workers earlier this year, of restaurant workers who have considered leaving their jobs during the pandemic, an overwhelming majority cite low tips and wages as a reason to leave. The second most common reason for wanting to leave, meanwhile, was fear of COVID.
Restaurant owners, anecdotally, have shown that low wages may be the underlying problem: as The Washington Postreported, when Klavon’s Ice Cream Parlor in Pittsburgh posted job openings that paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25, they didn’t get applications for months. But when they raised the starting wage to $15, they got more than 1,000 applications in one week. Restaurant owners across the country, the Post found, have had similar experiences.
Many workers may also be recognizing new opportunities, as Biden suggested, and moving to jobs that have more consistent expectations and hours, even if they don’t pay more.
Progressives lawmakers have pushed back on the argument that the unfilled vacancies are due to unemployment benefits. “We don’t need to end $300 a week in emergency unemployment benefits that workers desperately need. We need to end starvation wages in America,” wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) in May. “If $300 a week is preventing employers from hiring low-wage workers there’s a simple solution: Raise your wages. Pay decent benefits.”
Biden echoed that sentiment on Wednesday, saying he’s seen “no evidence” that additional unemployment checks are stopping people from working.
Though Biden pushed for $15 an hour wages on Wednesday, however, he did not fall in line with progressive messaging on how to raise the federal minimum wage. Biden insisted that the filibuster in the Senate — currently blocking a wide swath of Democratic priorities like infrastructure, climate and a higher minimum wage — is not only necessary, but somehow is preventing chaos in the Senate.
But the Senate is already in chaos, with every major Democratic proposal being completely held up or blocked outright by Republicans, even when Democrats make major concessions. Luckily for the party, Biden’s approval or disapproval isn’t strictly needed to get rid of the filibuster. Unluckily, Senate Democrats need unity on the subject that they don’t have.
