Elaine Chao tells workers it is their patriotic duty to help the economy and take a job
Conservatives maintained that the supplemental benefits enacted due to COVID discouraged people from working. This dovetails with their belief that working-class Americans would rather be takers than makers. And are all just wannabe Welfare Queens who would sit around, living off handouts, if given the chance. However, now that supplemental benefits have mostly ended and employers are still looking for workers, we can dismiss that nonsense as the usual right-wing, anti-worker propaganda.
Faced with this dearth of workers, Elaine Chao, ex-Labor Secretary, and current Mrs. Mitch McConnell, has a solution. She says patriotism demands workers take a job. This is closer to socialism than it is to free enterprise. But no surprise there. Corporate America worships at the free-market altar when it comes to profit, product safety, the environment, and working conditions — hence the push to deregulate and the license to pollute. And if the demand for their product increases you can be sure that the price will go up. But this capitalist approach to free markets has no fan in Chao when it comes to labor.
In a free market, if you cannot attract workers at the salary you offer, you have to increase wages. You learn this tenet of the free market (aka demand economy) in the first semester of Economics 101. But Chao prefers the precepts of the command economy - the economic philosophy of communism — to determine wages.
Conservative economists say increasing wages will lead to inflation. But as they also believe that you can shrink the deficit, while cutting taxes, and increasing defense spending, we should take their prophecies with a grain of salt. It is also hypocritical to point to worker wages as the cause of inflation when CEO salaries have gone up exponentially, without one bleat about inflationary pressure.
Here is a suggestion. Tie the average salary of hourly workers to the pay of the CEO. If their salary goes up 10%, so does that of the line-workers. That would make CEOs equally "patriotic." It will never happen, of course. When the pandemic slashed the number of airline passengers and threatened jobs, no airline CEO took a pay cut.
Conservatives have it backward. Increasing worker pay would lower the price of goods. Currently, pandemic-driven disruption to the supply chain is the leading cause of inflation in the US. Unclog that blockage by hiring workers (at the market rate) and prices would rapidly fall. It would be like taking a plunger to a blocked-up sink. The longer businesses resist paying workers what the market says they are worth, the longer the US will suffer inflation.
Chao’s call for workers to ignore the free market when it would benefit them is symptomatic of America’s least spoken prejudice. Many Americans have felt the sting of discrimination — minorities, women, the disabled, and the LGTBQ+ community. But not mentioned among the victims of bigotry are American workers. In the 1950s, one wage-earner in the family generally could earn enough to support a household with two cars and some money for a vacation. And their children had a shot at going to university without incurring lifelong debt.
But now, the conservative anti-union campaign has been so successful that wages have stagnated for decades and two-income families are the norm. Orwellian ‘right-to-work’ laws have hamstrung the ability of unions to negotiate a living wage. Whenever you see a state advertising itself as ‘business-friendly,' you can bet that it is ‘labor-unfriendly’.
Conservatives have been smart enough to brainwash some of their victims into being eager participants in their own ruin. What do I mean? The conservative campaign against government workers’ benefits and salaries provides an example. These employees are among the last to enjoy the pay and benefits that many workers enjoyed in the 1950s. But conservative propaganda has the working-class Republican voter braying for blood. And demanding cuts to the compensation of public-sector workers. They might as well shoot themselves in the foot. Downward pressure on the wages and benefits of any group of workers is downward pressure on all workers. A sinking tide lowers all boats if you will.
And should conservatives succeed in reducing the number of public-sector employees, that would increase the number of workers looking for private-sector jobs. Another chill on wage growth.
If the Democratic party wants the voter to see them as pro-worker they must campaign on the punitive effect of right-to-work laws and other anti-union measures. Labor unions offer workers a tool to get their employers to offer decent pay and benefits. But while liberals have the better policies for working Americans, they are left in the dust by the conservative ability to ‘message’.
Chao says that getting underpaid is patriotic. Democrats should counter that paying a market wage is patriotic. And that expecting workers to earn less than the market rate is socialism. And hammer home that, while tech company CEOs are swanning off to space, their companies are doing everything to defeat unionization. Every liberal on TV should promote a pro-union, pro-worker message. Let the working class know that, with unions, they could put more money into their savings. Make owning a house more likely. Buy a new car.
Leading the charge should be the Labor Secretary*. But who even knows who it is? I am sure many Daily Kos readers do. But I will warrant fewer than 1% of workers do. C’mon Democrats — do better.
* Marty Walsh
Bonus. In the UK in 1979, the Conservatives won the general election. This ushered in 11 years of Thatcherism. And 18 years of Tory governments. At the time, British election law forbid political advertising on television and radio, leaving billboards and speeches as the only way for the parties to advertise themselves. Consequently, no one thought to hire marketing professionals. The Tories did. They hired the fledgling advertising company Saatchi and Saatchi. Which produced a memorable political advertising campaign playing off their opponent’s name and Britain’s then high rate of unemployment, “Labour Isn’t Working”.
The Democrats need a similarly simple, straightforward pro-worker campaign.