Lazy Americans Just Don’t Want to Work?

 Vancouver, Canada’s New Medical Research Center 

     Funded by Djavad Mowafaghian, an Immigrant

Four-day 32-hour weeks, 40-hour weeks, long weekends, Americans prefer government support to working, Americans are lazy, impoverished and uneducated immigrants from Mexico and points south are taking our jobs… these are the litany of messages that have lambasted our purported work ethic for well over a century. That there are two jobs currently available for every jobseeker, that we have one of the lowest unemployment rates in our history, are just numbers to us.

A pretty typical statement: “It’s become apparent nobody wants to work in these hard times.” But Jo Constantz, writing for the August 11th Los Angeles Times, tells us that this quote “comes from an editor of the Rooks County Record in Stockton, Kan., lamenting coal mines shut down by strikes in April 1894. But it echoes recent sentiment: A Forbes story published in January, for example, cites a poll of executives that found 1 in 5 agreed with the statement ‘No one wants to work.’” But with rampant inflation, caused by an unfortunate confluence of events that no politician, on either side of the aisle, can stop in the immediate future, the issue is no longer getting a job; it’s whether you can make a living.

The last time Congress increased the minimum wage was over two decades ago… to $7.25 per hour effective July 24, 2009. That number is completely absurd, even at double: “A $15 hourly wage no longer cuts it for most workers in terms of covering basic expenses, especially as housing costs surge… ‘Ten years ago, when the fight for $15 began, it seemed like Nirvana,’ [Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University] said.

“Now, the living wage for a family of two working adults and two children is $24.16 per hour, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator. To make a living wage, a single parent with two kids earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 would need to work 235 hours per week — almost six full-time minimum-wage jobs… Although wage gains remained strong last month, raises aren’t keeping pace with inflation.” LA Times. This as income inequality rages, as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies earn more that three hundred times the earnings of their average employees. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “CEO-to-typical-worker compensation ratio (options realized) was 20-to-1 in 1965 and 58-to-1 in 1989.”

When the United States tightened its immigration policies at our southern border, farmers languished as their crops rotten on trees and in their field with no one to implement a harvest. Offers of $100/day to legal residents and citizens, a number that only pushed food prices higher, failed to produce the required stoop labor to gather those wasting crops. At the other end of the labor spectrum, finding sufficiently educated STEM workers, our colleges and universities have proven to be completely incapable of generated sufficient numbers of qualified graduates. There are literally millions of unfilled jobs in those fields. And as qualified applicants for US work visas were turned down, Canada and the UK opened their doors to such exceptional STEM labor, forcing many American companies to relocate their research facilities outside the US. We have managed to shoot ourselves in the foot with our immigration policies and continue to ignore that these immigrants are NOT taking jobs that Americans either want or are qualified to do.

The hard facts remain: housing is increasingly unaffordable to what used to be a working middle class, educational loans are imposing killer burdens on workers just trying to survive, food costs are soaring as oil companies rake in two or three times the profits that they generated just a year ago. Employers lament the lack of workers; McMartin notes: “‘You find a lot back in, say, the 1870s. There was a recession in 1873 and there was a ‘vagabond scare,’ they called it at the time: People were hitting the road to avoid a working life and trying to sort of bum around the country,’ he said. ‘Really what was happening is often these are migrant workers looking for work elsewhere, but in the public imagination at the time, there was this idea that there are people that just don’t want to work.’

“In the same way, McCartin said, tropes about today’s labor shortages in sectors such as trucking, healthcare and service become linked to the idea that people don’t want to work… ‘But that sidesteps the key issue, which is that a lot of jobs, for the amount of wear and tear and the hard labor involved — they just don’t pay enough,’ he said. ‘Very often what this kind of rhetoric, whether it’s people don’t want to work or there’s a labor shortage, what that often speaks to is that wages simply aren’t attractive enough for workers.’” LA Times.

But those rising cost-of-living factors are also a product of our social policies and rather old world, conservative political choices. Women were slammed by the childcare requirements that settled mostly on them during the pandemic. Unlike most of the rest of the developed world, the United States borders on being a third world country when it comes to childcare and paid maternity leave. Workers (mostly women) are often not paid enough to justify leaving the home, which requires their paying exorbitant childcare costs if they can find it (with woefully underpaid childcare workers). Our lack of universal healthcare also finds millions of Americans still falling into the cracks in our patchwork Affordable Care Act… with opt-in options that few red states will accept.

Mythology has pushed us to this unfortunate place. A rising tide has never been able to float all boats, and social programs that keep workers safe are not remotely hallmarks of “socialism.” Americans work more hours than most workers in the developed world. Emily Rose McRae, senior director of research at consulting firm Gartner, seems to have summarized the issue best by saying (in the LA Times): “The second part of the sentence often goes unsaid: Nobody wants to work — for what I want to give them.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and we seem consistently to bury our collective heads in the sand ignoring that simplistic solutions and sophomoric slogans NEVER… work even if they sound so soothing and right.