Union Made In USA
If you have been anywhere near social media these past couple of months, you have seen businesses, especially restaurants, hanging signs that lament the lack of workers and blaming people for not wanting to work anymore. The signs mostly read something like this:
This is a misread of what is going on, according to The American Prospect.
In reality, according to the article, there is no consensus on the reasons for the labor shortage. It could just as easily be driven by a lack of child care preventing parents from returning to work, fears of contracting the coronavirus in workplaces with lax safety protocols, and most of all, terrible pay and poor conditions making arduous low-wage work unattractive.
But there are other shortages in the economy, which are less likely to go away quickly. They are actual reductions in the supply of goods and services, which has an impact on the labor market, but also on the psyche of the nation.
Since the gas lines of the 1970s, we have lived without shortages. Americans are mostly blissfully unaware of how changes in production, logistics, and the failures of the financial plumbers and bureaucrats make the economy run. Now, we must confront the fact that we have a problem of inadequate production alongside unequal distribution, and figure out what to do about it.
But that doesn’t fully explain our current challenges either. In fact, our real shortage is in imagination, in the ability to conjure up a society where everyone is cared for. That’s going to require some redundancy in our supply chains, yes, to protect against disaster. But more than that, it’s going to require a dismantling of the negligence with which elites have managed our economy.
Read more HERE. It is worth your time.
