Those of us who actually work for a living know the value of having a steady job with a steady paycheck and having to put in long hours. The work may be grueling, and sometimes it pushes you to the breaking point, but you know that at the end of the day you’ll get paid for that work.
But we also know how hard it can be when that work is no longer there. When you have to spend time to look for work instead of actually working, and you see every opportunity that you may think you’re qualified for go to someone else… or sometimes to nobody at all.
Going from employment to unemployment is traumatic. You’re not just getting a paycheck when you work. You also invest a good portion of your time, your energy, your identity, and even your life, into that job. You bring your meals to work, you engage in conversations with your co-workers, you risk your life in daily commutes, and you even balance your family obligations with that work. Even if it’s not the job that you want or the job that best uses your talents, you still identify yourself with that job. It literally is a part of your life.
And then… it’s gone. That’s not you anymore. Whether you are laid off or you are fired, that part of your life ends.
It ends, but all the other obligations that you have don’t end. You still have bills to pay. You still need to put food on the table. You still have medical costs, car maintenance, mortgages, credit card debt, and loans to pay off, and none of the entities behind those things will care that you’re suddenly out of work. They still want their money.
Think you might need more education? That’s not free. That costs money that you don’t have anymore. That was another fun little con game from the Great Recession. People were digging themselves further and further into debt trying to get a degree that still didn’t give them that promised job. And, from personal experience, I came across plenty of folks with masters and doctorates that still ended up out of work and fighting for jobs alongside those with a GED.
If you’re lucky, you might find new work elsewhere relatively quick. But if you’re in the middle of an economic slump, a mini-recession, a Great Recession, a depression, or even a full-blown economic collapse, you’re having to compete with a lot of other people for that same opening, and some of them will be more qualified than you will ever be, and some will be younger and fresh from college and willing to work harder and cheaper. And the longer that you’re out of work, the harder it will be to get work, because a certain “employment” business decreed during the Great Recession that if you’re not employed again in six weeks, you are “unemployable”. That means you may be perfect for the job but the potential employer will still reject you for no other reason than because you were out of work for longer than six weeks.
So if you’re out of work after a while, you start sacrificing things like your retirement plans, your savings, your thoughts on vacations or getting a new car or a new anything. You start tapping into whatever stock holding you may have had. You look into tapping into your 401K. You empty out your savings account. You start hocking whatever precious metals you may have like an old family ring or jewelry or a coin collection, and you also borrow against your credit. Anything to keep the bills paid and the food coming and a roof over your head until you can get that new job.
My father knew about this in the recession of the 70’s and the mini-recession of the late 80’s. I knew about it during the mini-recession of the late 80’s and the Great Recession of the late 2000’s. We both knew the value of work and also the hardships of being unemployed and struggling to get work.
That said, I’ve also heard all of the lies and delusional fantasies being whipped by a certain political faction and a certain political party when it comes to the subject of work and unemployment. Lies and delusional fantasies that show their malicious nature when it comes to the American people, both in the past and the present.
We are still in the first half of 2021, as of this article’s posting, and we are a little over a year into a once-in-a-century global pandemic that has killed millions, is still killing millions, devastated businesses worldwide, and has left millions more out of work. It is still running roughshod in places like India, where medical services are beyond overwhelmed and a steady supply of oxygen is now worth more than gold.
Yes, there are vaccines. They’re being distributed. And, for some places in the United States, the rate of infection and the number of deaths are slowing or even stopping. These are all good news.
But that doesn’t mean that the pandemic is over with. There are countless millions that have not gotten the vaccine and have not worn masks or practice social distancing – even if it is physically possible. The virus is still spreading, and there are several variants of that virus now because of those millions that refuse to wear masks and social distance from others. It’s like thinking you can go back to an area that was still in the middle of a wildfire simply because some parts of that wildfire are no longer spreading.
On top of that, we have idiot governors making the decision to “open up” their states and businesses and expecting everything to go back to business as usual immediately. These are from the same political faction and the same party of fiction that have spent the past year questioning the science, challenging the emergency measures to keep businesses closed and measures to keep people home to minimize exposure to the virus. Even worse, their followers are the ones that hate masks, refuse to social distance, refuse to admit the danger even exists, and are refusing to get vaccinated because of their delusions propped up by some Facebook comment.
So now we have this delusion that somehow the economy is going to snap back because people are getting vaccinated. That means more business, that means more people back at work, that means the service industry roaring back with a vengeance. Supposedly.
Except that businesses are whining about a supposed “lack” of people willing to work at the jobs they’re offering. The latest jobs report didn’t help matters either. And now their friends in the party of fiction and delusional fantasy are quick to pin the blame on those who are unemployed because they’re getting that needed government assistance that keeps food on the table and bills paid and a home over their heads.
“They’re getting paid more to stay at home than working those jobs,” is what the script from the party of fiction says.
Folks, I’ve heard this same pack of lies from this same group during the Great Recession, when millions of people who were unemployed for longer than the six-week period and became “unemployable”, and the so-called “financial experts” were praising a supposed “jobless recovery”. The same whine then of “people getting money to do nothing” is being regurgitated today.
Yes, the “unemployment numbers” went down back then, but that wasn’t because of people getting work, and it sure as hell wasn’t because any of them, “gave up”. It was because people lost unemployment assistance. The “unemployment rate” does not measure actual unemployment. It only counts those that actually receive financial assistance from unemployment insurance, and it assumes that you are “employed” if you’re not receiving it.
Receiving unemployment assistance – something that I strongly suspect nobody in the party of fiction knows a damn thing about – is not “free money”. Depending on the state, you have to check in on a regular basis to keep the benefits going. You may even need to show how much time you spent on any given week looking for work, and the places you applied for, and the outcome of each place you applied. You literally have to work on getting work in order to receive assistance because you are not working. They are sure as hell not staying home and “doing nothing”!
Understand as well that the party of fiction could very well end that needed assistance on a whim, just like they did during the Great Recession. Two state governors entrenched in the party of fiction have recently announced that they are doing just that for their own citizens. On a federal level, they can shut down the government or refuse to raise the debt ceiling, shutting off the money needed for those programs, and they have a long and sorted history of doing just that. For families struggling to keep things going while looking for work, that partisan game can hurt them just as much as the pandemic did a year ago.
Oh, and the hold on student loans and evictions and foreclosures? Those will end, if they haven’t already. And it will seriously hurt people when those pauses do end. That’s not hypothetical.
Something else to think about… with all of the businesses supposedly reopening, and the demand for students to go back to school, has anyone heard a peep about resuming daycare facilities? After-school services?
Think of all of the parents that were able to work before the pandemic because they knew their kids would be looked after. Do you think any of them would be willing to work again as long as their kids are staying at home doing virtual education and there are no care services for the kids to be taken to afterward?
Listen, folks, I was a latchkey child before the term even was coined. I know all about having to fend for yourself because your parents are off working. But even I know that today’s parenting does not allow parents to leave their little kids alone the whole day unsupervised. You want them to work? You better get daycare restored first.
And now let’s talk about those jobs that are going unfilled.
How many of those openings pay minimum wage? If you were working $17-an-hour before the pandemic and you got laid off, would you really be wanting to work eight-plus-hours a day at fast food franchise for less than half that? Lenders don’t care if your pay is suddenly halved. They want their money. The grocery store doesn’t care if suddenly you’re not making the money you’re used to. If you can’t pay for the food, then you don’t get to take it home for your family. No wonder food pantries are still being depleted!
Something else to consider… For 22 states, unemployment assistance without the original temporary $600 boost, never mind the current $300 boost, was still under the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. So you want to tell us again how people are supposedly “making more staying home”? Because that seems to be yet another piece of fiction from the party of fiction.
Let’s get brutally honest here… if the party of fiction and the political faction that thrive in nothing but lies and deceit really want people working again, then they need to tell their cult followers that they have to end their bullshit denial and mask up and take the vaccine. Let’s end this pandemic with a roar instead of a prolonged whimper. And they also need to tell their business buddies that they need to raise wages. And I mean for everyone, new workers and old.
Complaining that getting unemployment is more than what a minimum-wage job offers is not a condemnation on the assistance. That’s a shame of the business for not paying enough. And that’s something that has been going on for quite some time.
And don’t give us the crap about “whatever the marketplace will bear”, because that is another lie. When a company is obsessed with profits and they purposefully keep wages low to maximize their profit margins, that’s not the “marketplace”. That’s just profiteering.
Why don’t you look up the name Dan Price and his company Gravity Payments? A few years back, he made the decision to pay everyone in his company the same $70,000 a year wage as he gave himself. He rejected the whole “marketplace” lie and gave everyone in his business the same living wage as himself. All the people in the party of fiction and the talk radio idiots were screaming “socialism” and demanded he stop doing that. Guess what happened? His payroll doubled and his revenues tripled. His employees can afford to do more than just make ends meet. They can buy that new car, or get that new house, or save for their retirement, or go on that vacation, and, at least until the pandemic, it didn’t hurt their business.
“Marketplace” my ass.
It’s not going to be easy getting out of this pandemic. You can’t expect people to suddenly jump into work at a fraction of what they used to get and do to so in an environment where they still run the risk of infection, hospitalization, and even death. To expect them to do otherwise is not only malicious, but negligently homicidal. And for a political party of lies and deceit and fiction to try to force people to do so in the name of business is nothing short of aiding and abetting genocide.
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