Common sense tells me you should offer higher pay

Laura Clawson of Daily Kos discussed the grumbling of employers who can’t find enough workers as things reopen. She began.

The big push is on to blame the American Rescue Plan for businesses not being able to find enough workers to fill their jobs. Business owners—restaurant owners in particular—are lining up to tell reporters how those darn lazy workers would rather stay home and collect unemployment than go back to work. Rarely do these stories of employer pain ask questions like, say, how much pay they’re offering or how careful they’re being with their workers’ health in the midst of the pandemic. Stories asking people why they’re hesitating to go back to work are mysteriously not so common.

If the employer isn’t going to keep the workers safe and isn’t going to handle misbehaving customers why work for them? Clawson quoted and commented on a few of the noisy employers. Even politicians are raising voices.

Sen. Marco Rubio—tweeting “Florida small business owners are all telling me the same thing, they can’t find people to fill available jobs. You can come up with all kinds of reasons & wave around all the Ivy League studies you want, but what does common sense tell you is the reason?” What does common sense tell me is the reason, Marco? Well, the maximum state unemployment benefit is $275 a week, which means that with the extra $300, people are getting $575 a week at most. That means if unemployment is paying more than work, the work is paying less than $14.50 an hour if they’re working full-time—and again, that’s the maximum, and in a state that’s become notorious for delays in unemployment benefits. Most people are probably getting significantly less, and a living wage for a single person with no children is $14.82 an hour in Florida. So I’m thinking that Florida employers need to offer higher pay. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about American capitalism,” Anne Helen Petersen writes, “it’s the skill and swiftness with which it translates resistance into personal, moral failure—which is precisely what so many of these business owners and politicians have done.” Exactly.

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, had a couple quotes worth mentioning. From Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg discussing Republicans and their cries of election fraud and their voter suppression:

Attempts to hijack elections may only be the secondary motive for these laws; the primary reason for them is for Republican elected officials to convince their strongest supporters that they are doing their best to repress Democrats and various Democratic groups. That’s why fictional election fraud is such a good issue for many Republicans right now. Opposing Biden and the Democratic legislative agenda, after all, would tend to unite the party. But a united Republican Party is the last thing that Republican radicals want. They need enemies; they need apostates they can label “Republicans in name only” to prove that they are the true conservatives.

From Charles Pierce of Esquire:

You have to have some appreciation for what a perfectly complete whole the conservative project is. By pressing every advantage, and to hell with good government and democracy in general, they have gained sufficient control of the process to defuse most progressive initiatives, to defang most governors if the state happens to go wild and elect a Democrat, and to arrange for the various judicial branches to be their ultimate backup. Accepting the fact that they lost an election is simply not within their comprehension anymore.

I’ve mentioned COVID and herd immunity a few times. Dr. Craig Spencer, writing for Elemental, explains what it is, and corrects some misconceptions. What he wrote about: * Herd immunity will significantly slow the virus when we get to somewhere between 60-90% of the population vaccinated. But we don’t know the exact number. * Every vaccine shot slows the virus. People aren’t vulnerable at 79% and safe at 80%. * Herd immunity does not mean the virus is gone, merely slowed enough we can resume a lot of activities. * We can reach herd immunity even if we don’t get 100% vaccinated, though at the current rate of refusal, we may not reach herd immunity. I’ve been hearing Republicans getting upset about critical race theory, Clawson reported they are trying to ban teaching it in several states. I’m glad Clawson included a definition.

The words “critical race theory” are being used as a fancy-sounding replacement for the lesson these Republicans really want to prohibit: that racism is real and that it’s structural and systemic. Critical race theory is an intellectual movement that holds, broadly speaking (and with many strains of thought within it), that, as Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic explain in the introduction to Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, racism is “the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country”; that “large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it”; that race itself is socially constructed; that “the dominant society racializes different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs such as the labor market”; that “no person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity” (an idea often discussed as intersectionality); and that people of color know things about their own experiences that white people should listen to. In the face of continuing disproportionate police violence against Black people and other people of color, and a pandemic that has disproportionately killed Black and Latino people, and economic inequality that has been exacerbated by the economic effects of the pandemic, Republican state legislators are insisting that the law should force teachers to teach essentially that racism ended after slavery, or maaaybe after something having to do with a watered-down account of segregation and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ... Again and again, we see that what Republicans are taking aim at isn’t actually critical race theory as its scholars and practitioners frame it. They’re just mad that kids might learn racism did not magically disappear the moment Dr. King said he had a dream. They’re terrified kids might grow up believing things need to change in U.S. society and law. And in their anger and terror, they’re trying to ban the teaching of actual facts from the schools, and use it as a rallying cry not just the Republican base but for “color-blind” nice white liberals. If we can’t think critically about U.S. history and U.S. laws and structures of power, we can never move forward. That’s what this push against “critical race theory”—which is hardly even about the reality of critical race theory—is all about.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos discussed the results of a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll:

So overall 60% of Americans say the president is either executing the right amount of bipartisanship or too much of it. This is helpful data for a White House now gauging how long it should spend trying to woo intransigent GOP lawmakers into cutting a deal on the historic investment President Biden wants to make in America's future. Fortunately, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has already driven a stake through the heart of those negotiations. Now Americans are telling Biden, We get it—it's the Republicans.