Nobody Wants To Work?

We’re all frustrated with short-staffed stores and restaurants and waves of supply chain shortages. From friends to Facebook posts to cable news, the relentless bleat drones on, “Nobody wants to work. They all want to sit at home and collect unemployment.”

I’ve no doubt such people exist, but they’re a very minor cause of our labor shortage.

 

Let’s start with a reminder: there was already a shortage of workers before Covid.

 

Many women delayed returning to work for quite good reasons. It sad but true that women earn less than men. So, when someone in a family needed to stay home to tend to young children whose school had closed and gone online, it was often a woman. 

 

And those short-staffed kid’s summer camps and vacation locations we saw this year? In previous years tens of thousands of foreign students came to America as temporary guest workers during their summer holiday. None could come the past two years.

 

But I hear no recognition of this, only the self-righteous cry, “Nobody wants to work.”

 

There is one big group not returning to work for convoluted reasons.

 

Thanks to a steady dose of misinformation, some people are afraid to get the vaccine. Yet, as our country approaches three quarters of a million people dead from Covid and hospital ICUs overloaded with the infected, its dangers are hard to ignore. So there’s a class of worker needlessly afraid of the vaccine, but also afraid to go back to their day care job, filled with sneezing, coughing, drooling babies and toddlers who can’t yet be vaccinated, or their restaurant job with unmasked patrons and their germy drinking glasses and eating utensils. And as a result, even if they wanted to go back to work, day care costs have risen 50% since Covid arrived. So your day care bill of $200 a week before Covid is now $300 a week. 

 

Some people can’t afford to go back to work.

Let’s acknowledge another gruesome reality: 700,000+ Americans have died from Covid. Hundreds of thousands of them had jobs.

And how about former president Trump’s attitude toward immigrants and guest workers in the three years leading up to Covid? He wasn’t just hyper aggressive about turning back illegals, he also dramatically reduced LEGAL immigration.

 

I get more than a little confounded that most of this, “Nobody wants to work,” is coming from conservative folks, the ones who so frequently remind the world they’re Christians, followers of Jesus. So WWJD? Barking ill-informed, harsh condemnations at low-income workers likely wouldn’t make His list, considering His teachings urged us to help those with less. 

 

And if we plotted a map of America with anti-vaccine hotspots, where hospital ICUs are packed to the gills with the infected and unvaxed and laid it atop another map showing which areas voted Trump and which voted Biden, looking for correlation, we find that Trumpers are overwhelmingly the ones slowing our return to full employment. Their political movement demands no obstacles to a completely opened economy, yet their wallowing in vaccine misinformation is the single biggest obstacle. They also demand schools open with no mask or vaccine mandates, making yet another class of worker-parent whose child may have compromised health conditions consider staying home with their child to protect them from the anti-maskers’ and anti-vaxers’ potentially infected children.

 

Holding such contradictory points of view and then insisting, “Nobody wants to work,” when folks don’t meet your impossible expectations layers idiocy on top of an international pandemic. 

What’s more, Covid forced many folks into soul-searching about how they want to live and work. Young Americans are sick of stressful, low wage jobs at companies that pay mega millions to their CEOs and boards of directors, a seeming re-creation of the Victorian-era, Gilded Age income model. Labor statistics show those young workers put in more hours, get fewer benefits and have less buying power than their parent’s generation did at the same age. In fact, 4.3 million people quit their jobs in August, mostly in food service, hotels, and schools.

There’s a smug, self-congratulatory sound to the belligerent claim, “Nobody wants to work.” The accuser is inferring that they, themselves are blameless for labor shortages. Well, don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back. If you’re indifferent to those working stressful, low-income jobs, if you’re spreading Covid and vaccine misinformation, if you’re unvaccinated, and if you’re happy with less legal immigration, you’re as much a part of the problem as someone who, “Doesn’t want to work.”