They worship money and power (stay home and Netflick)

May 2021

“Restaurants are having difficulty across the country in finding enough workers as business gets back to pre-pandemic speed. The shortage of job applications is largely down to workers finding better pay, hours and benefits in other jobs.

But that hasn’t stopped numerous commentators on Fox News and elsewhere blaming the lack of applicants on laziness and government benefits. To quote the former Bush staffer Karl Rove on Fox New Sunday, paraphrasing the entire line of thinking: ‘Why work if you can get that kind of money and stay home and Netflick?’

I get where these pundits are coming from. If the average person could have their jobs, phew, they’d be crazy not to take them. I mean, who wouldn’t want to spend 10 minutes a day sitting in a chair complaining about how other people don’t want to work? That’s a great gig.

These Republicans might be right about one thing. Generous unemployment benefits really might be one reason people aren’t rushing back to their old jobs. But that doesn’t mean they’re just sitting around ‘Netflicking’ – first of all, it’s been over a year. They’ve already finished Netflix.

Second, many workers have used the unemployment benefits as a rare reprieve to look for better-paying work, with more manageable hours and childcare arrangements, in other industries, such as warehouse, shipping or medical marijuana production. Those unemployment checks are not subsidizing laziness. They’re giving workers the rare opportunity to look for a job that’s more than just a way to survive to their next paycheck.

The benefits have also provided crucial leverage over restaurant chains that are finally having to alter sub-par compensation policies to retain workers – the Texas chain Whataburger, for example, added 50,000 jobs with emergency pay and increased 401k matching, Taco Bell began offering paid family leave and Chipotle increased wages with added mental health care benefits.

The policy changes demonstrate, that when they were saying ‘nobody wants to work,’ what they actually meant was ‘nobody wants to work for the starvation wages that we were willing to pay them.’” —Trevor Noah

https://idiocracy23.blogspot.com/2021/02/a-magisterial-collection.html 

“A magisterial collection. An emotional roller coaster. Soon to be a cult classic. 

A combination of Bukowski’s Last Night of the Earth and Orwell’s 1984.”