As the economy rapidly recovers, particularly in sectors such as entertainment and food service that were hard-hit during the pandemic, many employers say they’re having trouble finding workers at wages they’re willing to pay. So GOP-run states are cutting back unemployment benefits to force people to immediately take any available job.

But if an employer is having trouble finding workers, the answer is for them to offer more money. That’s how supply and demand works in a market economy: When the demand for labor increases, the price of labor increases as well.

Yes. Of course. Why isn’t that obvious? Yet Anna North writes at Vox that employers aren’t getting the memo.

Now, with vaccinations on the rise and summer approaching, a lot of employers are going back to business as usual.

Restaurant and other service industry employers are saying they can’t find workers, and some are blaming expanded unemployment benefits — even as many businesses continue to offer wages that feel stuck in 2019 and safety remains uncertain in an ongoing pandemic. …

… Hazard pay is long gone, and grocery store workers in some places are fighting for even the smallest wage increases. “We were there through the whole pandemic,” Heidy Lopez, a cashier at a Food 4 Less grocery store in the Los Angeles area, told Vox. But now, “you feel like this company doesn’t care.”

Ya think?

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickle and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America was published in May 2001, twenty years ago. I remember that one of her recurring points was that U.S. employers will do just about anything to fill jobs except raise wages. Even considering raising wages was worse than heresy, somehow. On top of that, for some reason U.S. companies maintain a middle management class of largely incompetent white men — and some women — most of whom couldn’t do the work they are supervising and whose apparent mission in life is making the workplace as inefficient and miserable as possible.

When someone works for less pay than she can live on … she has made a great sacrifice for you … The “working poor” … are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone.  [p. 221]

Some employees who continued to process meat, stock shelves, clean bedpans, and work cash registers throughout the pandemic got a little extra money in “hazard pay,” but that was discontinued long before the hazard had dissipated. And it appears a lot of workers who stayed home and got a bit of a reprieve from life on the shit farm also took time to think about their lives and what they were willing to put up with from now on.

I wrote about this earlier this month, in Are the Serfs Rethinking Feudalism?

Low-wage food service workers in particular have been rethinking the meaning of life and aren’t that eager to return, especially while the pandemic is still going on. “Many workers still don’t feel safe returning to work during a pandemic. Others don’t want to fight with patrons over health and safety guidelines. Some may have left town or joined another industry while they were laid off and will return when the timing and opportunity are right,” it says here.

There’s also copious data showing that a disproportionate number of employees not returning to work are women with children. Their day-care arrangements evaporated with the pandemic. Their older kids have been doing virtual school, and now we’re heading into summer vacation. Exactly how are they supposed to go back to their jobs, Mr. Employer? Have you ever even thought of that?

The “free market” conservatives running state governments decided the serfs just need to be forced back to work by cutting their enhanced employment benefits. As of five days ago, twenty-four states have announced that the extra $300 will go away some time in June (if it hasn’t stopped already) instead of the end of September. Yeah, that makes paying for day care so much easier.

Just wait; by August, Republicans will be blaming continued labor shortages on the monthly child tax credit payments. I’m betting Republicans even now are plotting to bring back sharecropping, as soon as they can come up with a new name for it.

Back to Paul Waldman:

You often hear them say that because unemployment was low when Donald Trump was president (the continuation of a decade-long decline that began under Barack Obama), that meant we were experiencing the best economy in history. But if you had an $8 an hour job at a fast-food joint where you had to sign a contract preventing you from getting a job at another fast-food joint, a job with meager benefits, no paid vacation, a boss who sexually harassed you, surly customers who berated you, and the constant threat of being fired, it probably didn’t seem like the greatest economy in history.

The “free market” advocates who run these businesses don’t want to see the government regulating their workplaces to give employees some say in the terms of their employment. Conservative/libertarian mythology says that free market capitalism creates the famous rising tide that lifts all boats, but the truth is that free market capitalism simply allows those with money to unmercifully exploit those without. It’s great if you’re in the moneyed group; not so much otherwise.