What Steve Rattner Gets Wrong About The Pandemic And Jobs
By: Janet Ybarra
Tags: Republicans, Bernie Sanders, Covid 19, Economy, Unemployment

What Steve Rattner Gets Wrong About The Pandemic And Jobs

American workers are looking for something better than slave-wage jobs, as this protest for higher wages back in 2013 demonstrates. Photo: Annette Bernhardt, Wikimedia Commons

It’s sadly become a pervasive Republican talking point that , somehow, the American workforce has gotten fat and lazy on the $300-a-week supplemental federal unemployment benefit which Democrats have insisted on since approval of the first COVID economic impact legislation last year.

Republicans have been parroting this talking point — complaining that not enough American workers are coming off the sidelines, post-pandemic — and are blaming workers allegedly deciding to stay home and collect this supposedly lavish benefit rather than return to work.

Republicans somehow say this, despite the fact that the US economy is adding more jobs currently than it has ever before.

Yet the talking point has been so successful that the nation’s Republican governors — to a man and woman — have decided to cut their states' continuing unemployed populations off from receiving the federal supplemental benefit after this month.

It’s an act of utter cruelty. Without the federal supplement, the long-term unemployed and the so-called “gig workers” will receive exactly zero unemployment compensation in those Republican-led states.

And it’s a harmful talking point that’s now begun to spread even further.

Steve Rattner, a wealthy financier and corporate Democrat who headed up President Barack Obama’s auto-industry bailout back in 2009, appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program Monday and essentially echoed the same cruel, brainless argument:

“And I do suspect, although they haven’t really said it, quite frankly, that the Biden administration is aware that the difference in how these states behaved is what could well effect levels of unemployment. And I do think — look, anecdotally, I talk to businessmen all day, every day, pretty much. And to a person, they will tell you it is really hard to find people and they’re having to cut back on some of their sales and production because of that. And to the point that was made a second ago, it does appear that people are being more choosy about what jobs they take. There was a survey I saw the other day that something like half the people who are looking for a job want a job that allows for remote work. Well, obviously half the country can’t be working remotely, unfortunately. So I think the pandemic has, for at least a moment, somewhat altered people’s views about work and about whether they want to go back to work, whether they feel any pressing need to go back to work. And yes, I do think the $300 a week plus the stimulus checks, plus certain other benefits have played a role in all that."

Here’s what Rattner — and the Republicans, for that matter — get wrong in their bone-headed, plutocratic analysis.

First of all, there are precious few places left in this country where someone could support themselves comfortably — never mind children — on $300 a week.

Then, of course, it’s the height of hypocrisy and arrogance for Republicans and plutocrats to begrudge the working class $300 a week when they and corporate fat cat paymasters were gorging on industry payoffs of literally tens and hundreds of billions of dollars through the COVID economic impact legislative packages pushed through last year.

The $300 benefit was just a little something that progressives and Democrats fought to include so that the working class came away with some small protection out of what had been an orgy of corporate payouts and slush funds to make sure the super rich were okay.

The Word From Bernie

I’m going to let one of the original champions for the $300 benefit — which when it began was actually a $600 benefit — speak for himself on its behalf and its purpose.

“What this bill does say is: whether or not you are eligible for unemployment today, you’re going to get employment compensation. And that means many of the gig workers–people that drive Uber cars, many of the waitresses and waiters making starvation-minimum wages, many so-called independent contractors–they will be eligible for the extended unemployment benefit. “And now I find that some of my Republican colleagues are very distressed. They’re very upset that somebody who is making 10, 12 bucks an hour might end up with a paycheck for four months more than they received last week. Oh, my God, the universe is collapsing,” Sanders added, sarcastically. “Imagine that. Somebody is making 12 bucks an hour, now like the rest of us faces an unprecedented economic crisis with the 600 bucks on top of their normal unemployment check might be making a few bucks more for four months. Oh, my word. Will the universe survive?

That, of course, is the always acerbic Sen Bernie Sanders of Vermont. And, of course, he’s 100-percent spot-on, as he usually is.

But the truth is that the pandemic did expose some truths about the US economy and its workforce.

The truth is that there are workers in this country who can’t get back to their jobs, often the result of a lack of qualified caregivers for their children in order for them to get back to work.

President Biden, of course, was ready to help solve the problem, rightfully considering such caregivers as “human infrastructure” in his once-in-a-generation American Jobs Plan — but, once again, all Republicans could do was kvetch and balk at their inclusion.

But the pandemic revealed truths much darker about the US economy and the role of the American worker in it.

All that these workers heard for months last year as they would watch the news was Donald Trump and his Republican allies fairly screaming at them to get back to work right then — whether it was really safe or not.

And they saw congressional Republicans fighting for blanket immunity for businesses against any claims that their employees might bring over a COVID-unsafe workplace. But no similar fight to ensure that those workplaces were, truly, indeed safe.

So the message that the American worker took away from this spectacle is that Corporate America — and their Republican representatives in Congress — don’t value them at all as human beings with intrinsic worth.

No.

Workers got the message that they are seen — entirely and only — as low-wage-driven fodder for their bosses' businesses and bottom lines.

No wonder they might be pissed.

And now, coming out of the pandemic and with the promise of a new Democratic president, America’s workers are tired of subsistence-level $7+ federal minimum wages (and, of course, much much lower for the so-called “tipped workers"), and held out hopes for a just and past-due increase in the minimum wage to $15 per hour.

And even that, the Republicans have fought — even though if the federal minimum wage had been indexed to rise with inflation all along, it would stand at more than $20 per hour today.

So there may be American workers out there who are human beings — after living through the trauma of the last year, and getting the message that they essentially don’t matter — who are not being totally enthusiastic about throwing the yoke back on for starvation wages. However, maybe the plutocrats ought not point fingers but look in a mirror to begin a reimagining of a more humane workforce.