Sen. Mitch McConnell berates the Biden Administration for providing enhanced unemployment compensation benefits in the American Rescue Plan to those unemployed during the pandemic. He claims workers are staying home because they make more with the government largesse than they can by working.
This argument just shows how out of touch McConnell and his disciples are. These workers, largely from the service and retail industries, don’t stay home because they don’t want to work. They stay home because they don’t want to work for poverty-level wages.
Col Owens
Once these unemployed workers have a more adequate amount of money, even if only for a short period of time, that trumps – no pun intended – their returning to work immediately.
That action on their part so outrages McConnell and friends — that low-wage workers would dare to act in their immediate self-interest — is a sign of their deep sense of entitlement to their position, income, and lifestyle. Regardless of the impact on those on whom they depend to maintain their status.
Most observers of our economy in recent years have noted one of its largest and most problematic components, widening income inequality. While wages have been stagnant — the minimum wage, not increased since 2009, is 60% of the poverty level — the incomes of the wealthiest have skyrocketed.
It is not just corporate executives that fall in this category. While many small businesses are Mom-and-Pop operations, many are not, but are enterprises where owners or partners make very large incomes. While their support staff, suppliers, and maintenance workers do not.
The problem begins to be cured when wages increase. Data from the pandemic recovery show clearly that when wages are increased, workers return. And there is no shortage of money with which to pay increased wages. It’s just been sitting in the accounts of their masters.
McConnell and his peers want to maintain this plantation economy they have exploited for years. They care not for working Americans. This is so clearly seen in the tax cut legislation they passed in 2017, where the vast amount of the benefits went to the very richest Americans. Analysis of its performance reveals, once again, the failure of trickle-down economics. There was no trickle-down under Reagan. There isn’t any trickle-down now.
It’s taken the American Rescue Plan and its aftermath to show the simple solution to getting people to work. Pay them. Fairly and adequately. It will be simply amazing how quickly they take up the jobs McConnell and his friends want and need them to take up, in order to shore up their lifestyles.
Finally, to discount this simple justice-based approach, they call its adherents socialists. What a joke. There is nothing socialistic about this. Workers believe in capitalism. They just want it to work for all, including them, as it does in other parts of the world. CEOs do not need to make 400 times what their workers make. It is unworkable. It is unhealthy. It is unjust.
It’s time to leave the plantation behind. Time to re-shape our economy into an engine that pulls the whole train forward.
Col Owens is a retired legal aid attorney who teaches poverty law at Chase College of Law. He is the author of the recently-released book Bending the Arc Toward Justice (Cincinnati Book Publishing, 2020) available at colowensbooks.com.
One of the best pieces I have read to counter McConnell’s argument that the Biden plan keeps people from returning to work. Regarding the comment by Richard: business owners technically break current immigration laws by hiring undocumented immigrants under the table; they bear responsibility for keeping wages low for many workers, American and otherwise.
One of the finest pieces I have read to counter McConnell’s view that Biden’s Rescue Plan keeps people from returning to work.