To find workers, there’s a free-enterprise solution right at employers’ fingertips: raise pay, improve conditions, and show respect.

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

By Jim Hightower | June 9, 2021

This article first appeared in OtherWords.

At a recent congressional hearing on America’s so-called “labor shortage,” megabanker Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, offered this insight: “People actually have a lot of money, and they don’t particularly feel like going back to work.”

Dimon is a billionaire who may be unaware that most people are living paycheck to paycheck. Since COVID-19 hit, millions have lost their jobs, savings, and even homes. Relief measures have helped, but ordinary people are not exactly lollygagging around the house, counting their cash.

Instead of listening to the uber-rich class ignorance of Dimon (who pocketed $35 million in pay last year), Congress ought to be listening to actual workers explain why they’re not rushing back to the jobs being offered by restaurant chains and such.

These workers would point out that there’s no labor shortage — there’s a wage shortage.

More fundamentally, there’s a fairness shortage.

It was not lost on restaurant workers, for example, that while millions of them were jobless last year, their corporate CEOs were grabbing millions, buying yachts, and living large. Yet more than half of laid-off restaurant workers couldn’t even get unemployment benefits because their wages had been too low to qualify.

Then there’s the high risk of COVID exposure for restaurant employees, an appalling level of sexual harassment in their workplace, and demeaning treatment from abusive bosses and customers.