The realities of the alleged "labor shortage"

This really expertly takes down the crap about “labor shortages” being frantically bellowed by the rich man’s whimpering, groveling propagandist curs, including in political office.

Longtime labor organizer and senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies Bill Fletcher Jr. explained to me in an email interview that claims of a labor shortage are an exaggeration and that, actually, “we suffered a minor depression and not another great recession,” as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. In Fletcher’s view, “The so-called labor shortage needs to be understood as the result of tremendous employment reorganization, including the collapse of industries and companies.”

Furthermore, according to Fletcher, the purveyors of the “labor shortage” myth are not accounting for “the collapse of daycare and the impact on women and families, and a continued fear associated with the pandemic.”

He’s right. As one analyst put it, “The rotten seed of America’s disinvestment in child care has finally sprouted.” Such factors have received little attention by the purveyors of the labor shortage myth — perhaps because acknowledging real obstacles like care work requires thinking of workers as real human beings rather than cogs in a capitalist machine. - LA Progressive

Some things shouldn't go back to "normal"

I seem to have unthinkingly taken for granted that everyone would realize now that many don't have to, for example, waste irreplaceable hours of their lives sitting in traffic every damn day, any more. Silly me.

But the problem with “getting back to normal” seems to be two-fold. One problem is that some people don’t want to go back to normal. As Anders Melin and Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou noted in Bloomberg, “A May survey of 1,000 U.S. adults showed that 39% would consider quitting if their employers weren’t flexible about remote work.” Working from home has created a culture of families that eat lunch together, of pets that enjoy midday strolls, of life that is just a little bit calmer. My husband, who used to spend one week a month in California for work, no longer makes his regular cross-country trips. As Sigal Samuel writes for Vox, “The pandemic has proven that remote work is totally feasible for many jobs, validating people’s suspicions that our standard model of office work is arbitrary, unnecessarily taxing, and ultimately exploitative, sometimes forcing people to choose between their well-being and their career.” Why go back to the elements of normal life which were, in themselves, completely pointless? - Vogue

There is a lot of PPP money left

And time is getting short.

One of the areas where the American Rescue Plan actually pulls back from previous coronavirus relief bills is on small business grants. There’s a roughly $25 billion fund for independent restaurants in there, and $15 billion in grants for businesses in low-income areas. And it funds a Community Navigator program to help smaller businesses access relief. But there’s nothing like the hundreds of billions of dollars that has funneled through the Paycheck Protection Program so far. That means the Biden team can turn its attention to implementation, which could be better at this stage.

The current round of forgivable loans ends March 31—again, I still do not understand why there’s an end date on these programs—and to date, PPP has furnished $687 billion in loans to 7.5 million recipients. Another 250,000 applications are under review.

Most of the loans in this round have been “second draws,” from businesses that previously got a loan and seen serious drops in income. About $164 billion has gone out since the reauthorization in the December relief bill. That’s out of $284 billion available. So a little more than two months after reauthorization, about 56 percent of the available funds have been used. That takeup seems kind of low, especially considering that there are only three weeks left to apply. For context, in the previous three-week stretch, only $40 billion was approved, one-third of what’s available. - The American Prospect

Brutal long-term financial impacts of the pandemic

A lot of this could have been avoided, with better leadership and policy from the start. Maybe someday more voters will finally learn.

Still, about half of non-retired adults say the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak will make it harder for them to achieve their long-term financial goals, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Among those who say their financial situation has gotten worse during the pandemic, 44% think it will take them three years or more to get back to where they were a year ago – including about one-in-ten who don’t think their finances will ever recover.

The economic fallout from COVID-19 continues to hit some segments of the population harder than others. Lower-income adults, as well as Hispanic and Asian Americans and adults younger than 30, are among the most likely to say they or someone in their household has lost a job or taken a pay cut since the outbreak began in February 2020.1 Among those who’ve had these experiences, lower-income and Black adults are particularly likely to say they have taken on debt or put off paying their bills in order to cover lost wages or salary. - Pew Research

A sharp rise in U.S. poverty

This article has it all. Note that it's not based on "official" U.S. poverty figures, which are grounded in obsolete metrics.

The facts and numbers from numerous sources reflect the reality of deprivation in America, and help to confirm what has been called the “sharpest rise in the U.S. poverty rate since the 1960s.”

The Washington Post summarizes: “According to Nielsen data, the American Payroll Association, CareerBuilder and the National Endowment for Financial Education, somewhere between 50 percent and 78 percent of employees earn just enough money to pay their bills each month….[this was] before the coronavirus pandemic….[since then] the number of first-time unemployment claims has exceeded 1 million per week, an unprecedented number in U.S. history.”

There’s much more evidence of Americans in trouble. An NPR review states that “survey after survey for years has found that most people in the U.S. live paycheck to paycheck.” One of these is a survey reported by CNBC, which concluded that “63 percent of Americans have been living paycheck to paycheck since Covid hit.” Both Schwab’s 2020 Modern Wealth Survey and a recent Harris Poll found that a sizable majority of Americans are suffering financial stress during the pandemic. The American Psychological Association concurs. In Bankrate’s latest polling numbers, 6 out of 10 Americans would be unable to afford an unexpected $1,000 expense. - Nation of Change

Standardized testing, this year, would be even more counterproductive than usual

It would be downright idiotic, really. What it would do is give ammo to public school bashers, who are already taking advantage of the effects of the pandemic with despicable, shameless fervor.

Bernie Burnham, the vice president of Education Minnesota, which is the state’s influential teachers union, said in a written statement that the “biggest concern right now for educators is students’ socioemotional and physical health.”

The union — which represents more than 70,000 teachers — is working on a set of recommendations for supporting students when they return to school buildings, Burnham said, including improving technology and internet access; providing mental health services; planning for potential future closures; and cancelling standardized tests in the spring.

“At best, the deeply flawed MCA (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment) tests give a snapshot of how groups of students are progressing compared to how groups of students were doing historically. Everyone knows this isn’t a normal year. The time and money wasted on testing could be better spent educating our students,” Burnham said in the statement. - Minnesota Reformer