Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I don't see any numbers of unemployed refusing work to remain on unemployment, not sure that is trackable. I meant what is the other option to expanded benefits, I am sure some are gaming the system but many are in trouble. They are supposed to be attempting to get work so not sure why they aren't being held responsible if they are refusing jobs.
A good percentage can't pay their rent, do they also remove the eviction safe guards also. UE is a really small sum, less than the minimum wage most places. I don't see any easy solution that won't hurt the needy.
What we do know is that when CARES got passed, we learned that in almost every state, the unemployed were paid more than 100% of their pre-Covid earnings when the $2400/mo was included. And yes, regular unemployment benefits in most states don't come close to covering income lost.
So, if they CHOSE (including stimmy checks) to NOT pay their rent, then they couldn't have paid their rent with income pre-Covid.
The median wage right now for an adult > 25 w/o a HS diploma is $15.33 an hour. We are told that the current "unemployment wage" is over $17/hr. It's pretty basic economics that thankfully even a non-HS grad can see:
They are paying me more today to NOT work than I could earn AT work.
Here in Charleston they were complaining about a shortage of workers in 2014......
This is probably why the Chamber of Commerce has been advocating a more open immigration policy or worker visa policy. They address the needs of their members directly.
In 1998 I was making $13.50 an hour as a line cook in a French restaurant. According to the Bureau of Labor statistics that would be $22.13 in today's money. No line cook in Minneapolis is making $22.13, most are in the $15 to $18 range.
Also in 1998, fast food restaurants like McDonalds here were paying $9 to $10 an hour here. Adjusted for inflation that would be between $14.75 and $16.39 in today's money. Anyone want to guess how many fast food restaurants are paying that?
I have a couple of observations. As people get older they tend to loose their grasp of what inflation has done to the costs of things so they don't realize that numbers that seem high aren't actually as high as they seem. The other is that a lot of right wingers who's roots are in the Reagan era or earlier really seem to think that the working class deserve bad lives, that economics is part morality play.
People need to realize that restaurant and hospitality work is not something that is done by teenagers or students anymore. The professionalization of the restaurant industry is the reason why dining has improved so much in this country over the last 30 years. But at the same time wages in the industry have been falling in inflation adjusted terms.
Also over this time period there has been a profound shift in working class jobs away from manufacturing and towards hospitality and services. The hospitality industry now employs 10% of the American work force. The restaurant is the new factory in terms of employment.
If our economy is driven by consumer spending (which it is), and wages are falling or stagnant for the working class (which they are), then where does growth come from?
We have people who claim to be capitalists who say that on one hand the working class deserve to be paid low wages because they don't have degrees, but on the other hand don't realize that those low wages hurt our economy because they stifle demand. Wall street has become really good at controlling the hourly labor costs of America's non college educated workforce. The problem is that each companies' labor cost in aggregate represent the amount of demand in our economy. They will become so good at controlling labor costs that only a small number of people will be able to afford to buy their products. If you want to know how that plays out in the long run look at Latin America, because that has been their economic structure since the end of Spanish colonialism.
This is an interesting discussion and something I have thought about for sometime. Everybody learned in school how we went from an agricultural society where most people worked on farms, to a manufacturing society where at least most men worked in factories, mines, or some related job. I grew up in that manufacturing age and heard you need to go to college so you don't have to work in the factory, steel mill, or coal mine. A lot of guys I graduated from high school with, took those jobs in the mill or mines, and were making good money up until the 1980s. Those jobs slowly disappeared. Many of the people I knew got advanced degrees and became lawyers, CPAs, consultants, computer engineers, etc. Now these degrees don't guarantee you much. When few people had college degrees, a college degree got you hired. Now it is a minimum requirement for many jobs because they want to hire people who can move up in the organization.
Have we reached a saturation point with many of these careers? Do we need as many professional sales people as we previously had? I knew many people who made good incomes in sales (and many still do), but many things can be handled online today. Take real estate agents, do I need someone taking me around to look at houses when I can view many houses online and do a virtual tour of the house in a short period of time? Does the same apply to car and insurance salesmen? I remember back in the 1960s when a Prudential agent would come to our house to collect the monthly life insurance premium. Obviously, that relationship allowed him to sell more policies but it sure wasted a lot of time.
I'm wondering why supply and demand is not doing a better job of setting wages. For example, I'm hearing there is a shortage of school bus drivers in my area. It never seemed like a problem before, but I never thought about it. It is not a job I would want. With Covid-19, you were exposed to the virus. When schools were online, did school bus drivers get paid? The job does have some danger. I know of two school bus drivers who were killed within 15 miles of my house over the past few years while driving a school bus. Shouldn't supply and demand push the wages of school bus drivers up? It does require a special driver's license, clearances, a health physical, etc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hesychios
I was going to post on this earlier. Fortunately you opened the subject up.
You are correct.
Back in 2019 we were starting to have problems getting the people we needed in canneries and farms, mostly due to restrictions on legal work visas.
Of course, these policies were designed to free up jobs for people native to the United States, but more often than not native born US citizens shun that type of work except as a temporary expedient. As soon as something better comes along they are gone.
No one raising kids today is doing so with the object of providing our nation with the dishwashers and burger flippers we need. Everyone wants them to get good jobs, and make their parents proud!
For the last few years the supply of legal and illegal immigrants has been squeezed quite a bit, and the Covid crises and subsequent economic collapse has slowed the entry of people even more.
What we are seeing is the precise goal of our policies protecting the border: making jobs available for US citizens to fill, with the obvious expectation that employers would probably have to raise wages sooner or later. Not that they would want to of course, but it would be unavoidable.
So now is the time to raise wages.
How is your example any different than the area where I grew up and live? I've lived in the Pittsburgh area all my life. There are still coal patches all over Southwestern PA where immigrants moved to get jobs in coal mines. Many of these coal patches were settled by one ethnic group because they didn't speak English. Areas around the Pittsburgh steel mills were settled by Eastern and Southern Europeans. who migrated from 1890 to the 1920s. My wife's grandfather was an example of someone who couldn't read and write in Hungarian, and spoke broken English his entire life. He came to the USA to work in the steel mills and worked in the same mill his entire life. Did he take a job from an American worker who was already here?
At what point do we have more potential workers than jobs? The industrial age took up the excess workers when less workers were needed on the farm. With computerization and automation, we need less workers in stores, offices, and hospitals. How many more services jobs can be created that are not considered to be entry-level? It seems the most potential is in direct healthcare jobs such as nurses, and warehouse and delivery type jobs such as Amazon, UPS, and Fedex.
Solve the problem by making them legal. Mexican restaurants or any other shouldn't have to break the law by smuggling in Mexican or other nationality of workers from Mexico.
If they are made legal, the cost of their employment would quadruple or more. No more tax-free slave-wage labor.
Still adds up to "raise wages." Doesn't seem to be a way around that, except to have the Border Patrol look the other way.
This is probably why the Chamber of Commerce has been advocating a more open immigration policy or worker visa policy. They address the needs of their members directly.
Yes, after all, lots of Mexican restaurants need more help.
What we do know is that when CARES got passed, we learned that in almost every state, the unemployed were paid more than 100% of their pre-Covid earnings when the $2400/mo was included. And yes, regular unemployment benefits in most states don't come close to covering income lost.
So, if they CHOSE (including stimmy checks) to NOT pay their rent, then they couldn't have paid their rent with income pre-Covid.
The median wage right now for an adult > 25 w/o a HS diploma is $15.33 an hour. We are told that the current "unemployment wage" is over $17/hr. It's pretty basic economics that thankfully even a non-HS grad can see:
They are paying me more today to NOT work than I could earn AT work.
The supplemental $600 that was paid through August was based on the average wage (not median) in 2020 of $25/hr. Clearly plenty of people were making less on unemployment than when they were working. And yes, some made more. A larger percentage of those making more were in Red states that typically have a lower average wage.
It was intended to replace 100% of wages so that people would shelter in place to keep the virus under control. That ended in August. The current Federal supplement is $300 and significantly less than the 100% replacement figure.
Since the peak of the unemployment rate high in March and April (14.8%), that number has plummeted to 6.1%. The only thing this thread is focused on are those in a select segment of the market on lower paid jobs in states with a lower average wage. So in other words, it's pigeonholed to only that group of people that have been cherry picked. The majority of people currently on unemployment would make more if they could return to work. But please don't let facts and actual numbers provided by the labor department get in the way of your whining.
While bicycling I stopped at a drive-thru. That chain serves only to people in motor vehicles at the drive-thru. It's a liability issue, but without walk-in service, that leaves nothing for people who don't drive.
While bicycling I stopped at a drive-thru. That chain serves only to people in motor vehicles at the drive-thru. It's a liability issue, but without walk-in service, that leaves nothing for people who don't drive.
Why did you think u would be serviced on a bike?
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
