Lisa Benson for May 07, 2021

That’s right, Lisa. Most, if not all Americans are “lazy bums” who would rather eat a “free” lunch than work. Or, so say Mitch McConnell and Co. .

The free lunch crowd can be found in the house and senate.

Well, when the Jobs Jobs Jobs are hiring . . . but at less than minimum wage (as little as $2.13/hr if they get tipped $30/month or more) – is it any surprise that nobody is interested in working their a$$ off for less than living expenses?

Nobody paying a living wage is screaming about how they just can’t find anybody to hire, are they? It’s all restaurant owners who want to pay sub-minimum and let their employees starve.

Oh dear, poor Lisa has bought right into the meme about “free stuff” that, of course, only applies to Those People and not to the Righteous Right.

What else would you expect from a “defender” of ‘Government of, by, and for the Rich!’

Of course, the “Free Lunch” won’t last nearly as long as the jobs could…

A friend of mine has a Republican son, who often complains about the number of people on welfare. “Why don’t they get jobs?”

Friend reminded him that most people on Social Services are the Working Poor.

Nah. Not possible.

“How much do you pay new hires?” After doing a few quick calculations, he realized the company was simply not paying a living wage. Most of the employees were, indeed, the working poor. She wondered how it was possible a reasonably bright fellow in his late 40s could not figure this out without her prodding.

Lisa is right up to a point. Yes, there are unemployed that enjoy staying at home and drawing employment compensation. When a person can stop filling the tank of their vehicle necessary to get to work, stop with the dry cleaning needed for the work, stop with eating out for lunch at work, and so on, why not just stay home and draw the very generous EC. When I was last on EC, I only got 30 cents on the dollar so I was driven to find a job, any job. But now a person can afford to wait around till something really good comes along.

Now, Lisa’s analysis fails when one takes into account that all this wouldn’t be necessary if we had a true living minimum wage, say fifteen dollars an hour. But, that’s not something she and her ilk are going to be willing to consider. On the positive side is that those who have been long out of work and are not benefitting from getting EC, they can now more easily find work from employers that’re more than happy to hire from the bottom of the worker pool.

Same false premise.

For those people who are offering jobs that can’t cover rent, let alone food, health, or anything more, they might not deserve to have those jobs filled. People shouldn’t have to work 3 or 4 jobs (while qualifying for food stamps and assistance) in order to make the bare necessities.

The assumption here is that a large number people don’t want a job, don’t want to do anything productive, and have no pride. That’s a very pessimistic view tinged with a large degree of arrogance—“Not me or any of my relatives or friends, of course.”

No doubt some people are taking advantage of the situation but how could that be prevented while still helping the folks who really need it? I guess Lisa would just say “sorry ’bout cha” and let them live on the street. Another “Compassionate Conservative”.

The kind of person who would rather collect unemployment than work is the person who you wouldn’t hire in the first place.

Low income people do need to get back to work at dead end jobs with no benefits and that don’t pay a living wage. Otherwise salaried people with benefit packages might have to wait longer for a Egg McMuffin. And their lives are actually important and worth something!

Seriously though, this situation has renewed my faith in the intelligence of people. It shows that for economic decision making, Americans are rational actors.

During the last 18 years of my working life, I was the owner of a small chain specialty food stores (Coffee beans, chocolate, appliances and tea, etc). Employee availability ran in cycles. Some years potential employees were crawling out of the woodwork – I placed help wanted newspaper ad for a sales clerk. When I arrived at the store, before opening, 35 people were lined up on the sidewalk. The last year I was in business (1997) workers were impossible to find. Macy’s was offering big bonuses to new hires if they stayed thru Christmas and the UPS drivers were recruiting during their deliveries. I went through the last Christmas season short on store manager – not fun! I saw several of these cycles – but never saw them coming.

Some jobs pay so little that even working two jobs does not bring enough to cover the cost of rent, food and transportation. Also, some employers only hire part time help so they don’t have to offer any benefits, such as holidays and sick time, much less medical.

The Free Lunch has only been for the wealthy for several decades now.

Just for some historical context, socialist programs have always called for full employment, not a free lunch.

It still comes back to the fact that if businesses had not been doing things on the cheap and had been paying their workers a living wage before the pandemic they might just be more inclined to return to work after it.

Does it ever occur to you that maybe you all should pay better if you want people to work for you?

The average construction labourer salary in Australia is $53,625 per year or $27.50 per hour. More experienced labourers may earn up to $67,860 per year. The old Biblical saw, ‘the labourer is worthy of his hire’, means just that, someone should be properly recompensed for effort. Maybe the entire wage structure needs re-structuring?

How horrible, ugly and mean is a person who believes that those on unemployment are there because they think that they can get free money?

The max you can get is about $550 a week. The minimum is $35. Most folks fall somewhere in between. Depends on how many kids you have, how much you used to make when you were working things like that.

You don’t automatically skyrocket to the $550 level. It is usually a significant drop in income for those that do.

Lisa, if you can PROVE that people are passing up jobs in order to remain on unemployment, I will humbly beg your pardon. But until then, I think it’s just a nasty bit of garbage. Poor shaming. Elitist dreck.

Oh yes. Let’s ignore all the other factors and try to make it seem hard working Americans are shiftless. Lisa and her ilk are the true disgrace.

Before Reagan destroyed the middle class a person could support a house and family on one job.

Is that the Republican Party’s lunch counter to our left? They keep saying our free lunch will trickle down, “any day, now”.

The reality is the restaurants and casinos are short of minimum wage workers refusing to work 30 hrs a week with no benefits. Getting rid of the 300 dollar benefit will force them into taking those jobs regardless what their profession was before the pandemic. Starvation is an effective motivator.

Let me see, Um….. I remember a guy explaining that this was going to happen………… The chickens have came home to roost.

I see that you don’t like the situation Lisa, so please create a series of comics supporting vaccination, and then once enough people are vaccinated, the government won’t have justification for spending money to keep people at home.

There are so many things that need doing, so much neighborhood cleanup to compensate for the drive-through citizens who drop their trash out of their cars as they go, things we could build or repair, to say nothing of the opportunities to work on programs to make more living environments available to humanity like the O’Neill colonies, that it seems obvious that the government could hire people to be doing these things, at wages that private business would have to meet or exceed to get any employees. Competition for labor would drive us into a living wage for all, and that is where government could shine. Rather than setting a national minimum wage, when the cost of living varies by where you live, the government could have useful occupations funded in all states at local cost of living wages to ensure an alternative to businesses who decline to pay workers a living wage for their labor.

Blaming Reagan for destruction of the middle class is pointless, though. It was the businesses that took US dollars to China to buy factories, workers, and ultimately products for cheaps due to the artificial mechanism of the foreign exchange rate (FOREX) that forced other businesses to move in order to compete, and unemployed much of our middle class, forcing people into a ‘service economy’, in which ‘servants’ were considered largely unskilled labor that could cheaply be replaced at any time. Indeed, if they complained, they could be replaced with Latin American illegals even more cheaply, since US dollars were worth more in their native currencies.

Ben Franklin opposed tariffs because he felt anyone here could just get a few acres of land and farm for a living if nothing else was available, and he didn’t want to pay locally for the production plus shipping costs for goods from Europe if they could be made locally for less. The self-supporting small family farm carved out of the wilderness is not so much of an option these days.

Note that I am NOT advocating the usual business of giving government monies to private businesses to then hire people to do these tasks. We see only too well how badly that works here in the neighborhood with a local daycare that doesn’t care, and teaches kids, by example, to be selfish and only concerned with personal wishes and comforts, while injuring and trampling on the rights of others. The daycare puts on a good show when visited by the officials who rate it, but the neighborhood gets the impact of what they really do on a daily basis. The daycare receives monies to make improvements to the children’s environment that don’t materialize. Where does the money go? The issue of fraud is raised. The business owners get to raise their own salaries/profits by hiring ‘teachers’ with little or no qualifications for as little money as possible. This is not an ideal system.

It might be better to have government directly employ people for the various desired projects, and thereby make the people executing the projects directly accountable to GAO oversight. So long as we keep multiple political parties alive and well, we can have zealous oversight of any attempt to put someone’s favorite incompetent nephew in charge. (Yes, we are aware of the issue of patronage- remember Nathaniel Hawthorne?)

So let the government hire people for public projects, perhaps learning from Amazon how to monitor their activity level, thereby giving those people the self-respect that goes with honest employment, and eliminate the cry of ‘free stuff!’.

Does that work for anybody?

A friend of mine who says this and that and the other thing and some other people are saying that to so it must be real.

‘Come and get it, $7.50 an hour with no benefits, no job security, no nothing’.

LOL

Same in our small city. My company can’t hire enough people to meet the demand, and all the fast food places plus WalMart and others are hiring. My company will probably have to hike their wages to get people. Not sure that’s going to happen…Most full-timers are having to work 50 hours/week. Thank goodness I went to part-time last fall.

People aren’t leaving for better jobs? The are waiting for more money from Uncle Joe and company! 7 million jobs being offered, only 270,000 people showed up!

pay a living wage and you wont have a problem hiring people.

stop trying to get rich off of cheap labor loser!