The Worker Shortage That Isn’t: or, Why There Is an Ongoing Strike by American Workers

The Alleged Worker Shortage Here in the US: Or, why we need to increase wages if we ever want to resuscitate the economy

(Luke 10: 7) by Rev. Paul J. Bern

Here you have it in a nutshell — national strike. That’s what the US economy is facing. That’s why people aren’t working. They’re just not calling it a strike. People are fed up to here with dull, dead-end jobs that serve no useful purpose except to make someone rich. People are staying home and drawing unemployment, and some have started side businesses to replace their old incomes. It’s just that nobody is calling it for what it is — a peaceful revolt within the American workplace.

There can be no room for doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the US economy. It is much the same the world over, with the shipping industry having nearly been ground to a halt because the workers at the sea ports worldwide all have Covid. Education here in America has been crippled for the same reasons. And so, people have begun working and learning from home. Here we are many months down the road and we find out that working from home is far preferable to the old way of doing things (the jury is still out on education so I will decline to comment).

The small businesses that survived the Covid pandemic are having a terrible time finding workers. The big businesses can’t get people back to the office after having tasted freedom from the office and from those horrible daily commutes. At the rate people are quitting their jobs, I foresee a complete bust in commercial real estate, with the property managers unable to find tenants. There’s no way to tell how much such a scenario would affect the stock market, but the outcome would be severe.

I can see only one thing that would alleviate our current situation, and that would be to raise the minimum wage at the federal level. Here in Atlanta, Ga. where I currently reside, the minimum wage is still stuck at a paltry $7.25 per hour. I challenge anybody reading this posting to go and try to live on that for a month. There’s no way possible to get people back to work unless the business community resolves to pay…