“Whatever the market will bear.”
That was my father’s universal answer when it came to prices and wages.
Why is the cost of living going up more than the workplace raises? “Whatever the market will bear,” was his answer.
Why are workers getting paid less than their true worth? “Whatever the market will bear.”
Why are prices going up but not wages? “Whatever the market will bear.”
My father was not an idiot. Nor was he simple-minded. In his life he worked the spectrum of business positions from a pin-setter in a bowling alley to being a plant manager. He was on both sides of a union strike. He not only knew how to start a business, but was called in several times to help start new manufacturing plants. And although he didn’t get a degree, he did take business management courses in college.
In his later years, though, he began to lean on the idea that businesses knew more than anyone and were even better than everyone. More than politicians, more than civil leaders, even more than most hard-working Americans, of which he and I were a part of.
My father put his faith in “the market” to know what is best. It didn’t matter how hard you worked or whether or not the cost of living was going up and you weren’t, it was always up to “the market”. When gas prices reached gouging levels around 2005, my father said it was whatever “the market will bear”. To that end, people were still paying for that expensive gas for trips when they should have stayed home. Workers were still being short-changed, forced to work harder for less money, and that was “okay” because at least they were still working.
But what happens when “the market” is saying something that Big Business doesn’t want to hear?
So here we are in the middle of 2021, after a year of a global pandemic-forced shutdown, with businesses desperately trying to rebuild and come back from said catastrophic shutdown, and the big bitch from Big Business is that they can’t fill vacancies in certain places. They need “workers” but they “can’t fill” those jobs.
Which jobs? Well, some those happen to be the service jobs... fast food places and the like. You know... the same folks who were declared “essential” during the pandemic but just weren’t worth paying extra for. Those are the jobs you’re hearing about now with people “rage quitting”.
And it’s understandable. After all, why should people work long hours for poverty wages when they could go work for Amazon, still put in the long stressful hours but get paid $15-20-an-hour?
Not too long ago, I passed by a Burger King that put up a huge banner that said that they were offering work starting at $12-an-hour, like that was something to be proud of. Maybe that would be if the person applying was that classic high school student looking for some spending money, or maybe some retiree who doesn’t really need the money but still wants to feel useful. But if you’re someone who is out of work from the pandemic, needs money to pay the bills and keep a roof over your head, $12-an-hour is poverty wage. It sure as hell won’t cover the bills or the rent/mortgage.
There are explanations abound about why this is a thing. Big Business is peddling their long-running Big Lie that it’s people who have been getting paid to not work... aka those who are on unemployment... that are rejecting these poverty-wage jobs. Except they’re dead wrong about it. It is a lie. A bold-faced lie. And the numbers are showing it. But it is based off their old biases about people on unemployment as being “lazy”.
Another excuse being peddled is that people have “tasted freedom” during the pandemic by being forced to stay at home and/or work from home, and they really don’t want to “go back”. Must have been nice to be able to do that, but the people who still worked but from home still had a job, which meant they still had a paycheck. That’s really a workplace issue, not an employment issue. Unless they all quit. But we’re not really seeing that yet. And this whole business of “tasted freedom”? It sounds like you’re actually admitting that your workplace is hell.
And there another issue to deal with... which is that many of the jobs that are not being filled require skills that your regular worker on unemployment just does not have and has no possibility of getting. Like doctors, hospital workers, airline pilots, and truck drivers. Jobs that require time, money, and training. Jobs that cannot be filled overnight.
Oh, and did we forget about the price hikes and price spikes and inflation? And with the obscene surge in real estate sales, housing and rental prices are going through the roof, which means it is costing more and more for people to live. No, that $12-an-hour job at Burger King won’t let you rent an apartment anymore, even if you work 16 hours a day and live off nothing but water and cold ramen.
Let’s get brutally honest here... “the market” is sending a message loud and clear to Big Business.
Raise the wages.
You want people waiting tables and flipping burgers? $12-an-hour will not do. $15-an-hour may even be pushing it. And, yes, that means raising wages on your current employees as well. You can’t have people already working at $17-an-hour suddenly training some newbie getting paid $18-an-hour for the same job.
Some places are already starting to raise their wages. McDonald’s recently announced raising wages and adding all sorts of other perks to get people to flip burgers. “Too Big To Fail” Bank of America already announced back in May that they will gradually raise their starting wages to $25-an-hour. That’s good news, but there needs to be more.
I know, I know... Big Biz don’t want to do that. That would cut in on their precious profit margins. And for the longest time, inflation has been kept low, which has allowed employers to keep wages obscenely low so they could maximize their profit potential. This has literally been going on for decades. But “the market” is telling you that isn’t acceptable anymore.
Inflation is rising, prices are rising, it is getting harder and harder for people to just get by. You can get your cronies in government to take away unemployment coverage completely and it still will not get those people to accept your poverty wages. You’re seeing people rage quit now. Do you really want to see them angry and broke?
“The market” is a nice little excuse to justify bad business behaviors. But if you’re really putting value in it, then you need to pay attention when it also tells you something that you don’t want to hear. Today is one of those instances.
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