Ezra Klein’s discussion on workers and the economy

So I’m going to do another short post on his thinking on work and workers. I think he does podcasts but I actually read the transcripts and he usually pick really interesting topics to talk about with his guest speakers. I think I have a couple more posts centered on his topics coming up. This time the title is very provocative and caught my eye: “Employers Are Begging for Workers. Maybe That’s a Good Thing.” Isn’t that some title?

Before I begin writing my thoughts on this topic, I do want to say that I wanted to do this post last weekend, as I try to write something once a week, but I was trying to complete something else and it took me most of the weekend. I was up late Sunday. I hoped then to write something Monday, but I had an evening session and then crashed afterward from exhaustion. So the hope was that on Tuesday, I would get it done, but I also had an evening appointment. By Wednesday, I did begin to work on this post but it took longer to develop.

Anyway, the whole point of that paragraph is to say that there may be some weekends where I have to do something else before I can do a post. I’m trying to get this other stuff done before I can go back to normal business.

Okay, that’s out of the way…

“This is a moment when an implicit but ugly fact of our economy has been thrown into unusual relief: Our economy relies on poverty — or at least the threat of it — to force people to take bad jobs at low wages. This gets couched in paeans to the virtues of work, but the truth is more instrumental. The country likes cheap goods and plentiful services, and it can’t get them without a lot of people taking jobs that higher-income Americans would never, ever consider. When we begin to see glimmers of worker power in the economy, a lot of powerful people freak out, all at once.”

“Employers Are Begging for Workers. Maybe That’s a Good Thing”, New York Times, Ezra Klein, June 8, 2021.

I’ve heard of that idea that we have poverty because our public policy is designed that way or something to that effect. But the way Ezra puts it feels more true. We can’t have cheap goods unless there is someone really to receive little pay. That’s an ugly fact.

In the ’80s or ’90s, Walmart was taking over towns and destroying small businesses because customers wanted those cheap prices and one stop convenience. The customers could have gone to the small local businesses but they didn’t. They wanted the cheap stuff, and so local businesses couldn’t compete and started to die.

And there are so many “stories” about working hard and how it is good for you. Hard work strengthens your character! Or how about the tales of some outstanding heroism in war, trying to survive some battle, and coming home injured and trying to rebuild life. It was tough but by golly, I did it.

Or maybe I worked long hours and succeeded in building my business by dint of prodigious effort.

We glorify work, we glorify working long hours. Work is the end all and be all.

Those kind of stories. But those stories remind me of that saying over the entrance to a concentration camp (maybe Auschwitz): “Work will set you free.”

Not a good juxtaposition.

There’s a lot to unpack in Ezra Klein’s discussion.

“I want them, I want them fast, I want them cheap. I want the service with a smile. And those ones have implications for people who are living in or near poverty. And that means that there’s a kind of upwardly redistributive nature to the societal level exploitative characteristic of poverty.”

“Employers Are Begging for Workers. Maybe That’s a Good Thing”, New York Times, Ezra Klein, June 8, 2021.

Ezra Klein is having a discussion with Jamila Michener and they cover a lot of ground: man-cession and he-covery; which social problems our political class chooses to solve (grinding poverty or inflation/deficits); why the bottom 70% don’t band together to vote the same; concept of deservingness.

The concept of deservingness was fascinating.

“I was talking to people in states that hadn’t expanded Medicaid and saying,

“oh, do you want your state to expand Medicaid. And often, people would say yes, for people like me, for people who are hard working and who really need these benefits and who aren’t trying to take advantage of the system. But I don’t know how I feel about expansion writ large. I don’t just want anybody to be able to get these health benefits from the government. I don’t just want anybody to be able to get this cash assistance or this food assistance, only people like me who really deserve it.”

And often, those tropes or those ideas are racialized, and really, what it means is, like, only white people. But even when they’re not racialized, they reflect like these internalized notions about deservingness. And those notions mean that it’s less likely that people who are low income are living in poverty are going to even be inclined to make common cause with other folks like them, because they’re thinking in their mind sometimes really negative things about those other folks.”

“Employers Are Begging for Workers. Maybe That’s a Good Thing”, New York Times, Ezra Klein, June 8, 2021.

If automation were to destroy a lot of jobs without creating lots of new good paying jobs, then the idea of universal basic income would be hard to successful implement and sustain because of our society’s concept of deservingness. Jamila and Ezra had a discussion on how policy makers would have to figure out how to work around this deservingness concept to bring the American public around to the idea of such a social net. The cultural attitude toward deservingness would be a very difficult idea to overcome.

Although, maybe under the right conditions, that cultural idea could change, but I think it would have to be under really adverse conditions. For example, before the pandemic, very few companies were really sold on working from home until the pandemic proved that working from home is possible and that some companies actually saw greater profits. Right now, a lot of companies are rushing to get people back into the office but those who actually prospered under the WFH tenet are not rushing as quickly.

All in all, that discussion was really, really fascinating.