Nobody Wants to Work (Script & Sources)
Added 2021-05-12 19:00:50 +0000 UTCGood morning, bad news: Americans who lost their jobs during the pandemic are not going back to work, and it’s creating a massive labor shortage. The latest jobs report was expected to add a million new jobs, but only saw a quarter of them filled, while the unemployment rate is still above 6%.
And you know what? I lied, it’s actually great news. Because there isn’t a labor shortage, there are more than enough people to do these jobs. What’s actually happening is a massive restructuring of the labor market, in response to the fact that these jobs suck, and nobody is willing to do them, unless the alternative is literally homelessness and poverty.
But with pandemic unemployment payments and the eviction moratorium, the poorest Americans who have been forced to do these jobs to maintain basic human needs, are now saying “No, we’re not going to go back to dirty, dangerous, thankless jobs where we’re being treated like garbage by customers and management, while our actual labor pays for our boss’s new Mercedes”.
And this refusal to go back to work is terrible for exploitative business owners, billionaires, real estate developers, and Wall Street who all depend on minimum wage workers to keep cranking out trillions of dollars in productivity.
And it’s working! Many companies are now being forced to raise entry-level pay to attract the low-wage workers they desperately need to keep the company going - because as it turns out, those “disposable burger flippers” are actually the most valuable and necessary employees they have.
But don’t be fooled, this isn’t the free market at work, this is a global disaster shining a tiny bit of light onto a completely broken and unsustainable economic system that can only survive through blind exploitation and wage theft under the threat of artificially created poverty.
