WORKERS WANT TO WORK, AND TO GET RESPECT.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: VOX POPULIST

As a writer, I get stuck every so often trying to find the right words to tell my story. Over the years, I've learned when to quit tying myself into mental knots over sentence construction, instead stepping back and rethinking where my story is going.

This process is essentially what millions of U.S. families are going through this year, with record numbers of workers shocking bosses, politicians, and economists by stepping back and declaring, "We quit!"

The mass exodus of workers that we've seen during the pandemic is tied to very real abuses that have become ingrained in our workplaces over the past couple of decades--poverty paychecks, no health or child care, unpredictable schedules, under-staffing, forced overtime, unsafe jobs, sexist and racist managers, tolerance of aggressively rude customers, and so much more.

The corporate system has cheapened employees from being valuable human assets to a bookkeeping expense that must be steadily eliminated.

Meanwhile, corporate bosses across the nation have been sputtering in outrage at workers this summer, spewing expletives about the fact that, while the U.S. economy has been coming back, workers haven't.

"Labor shortage!" they squeal, accusing the workforce of mass laziness. In their view, millions of furloughed workers got used to lazing around during the pandemic shutdown and now won't return, leading to an abundance of unfilled jobs for everything from restaurant work to nursing to construction work. Thus, the bosses and their political dogs bark that "you people need to get back in the old harness and start pulling again."

Adding a nasty bite to their bark, GOP governors in more than two dozen states have cut off people's unemployment benefits, hoping to force them back to work. Some businesses have proffered signing bonuses, free dinner coupons, and other lures, while even such notoriously mingy outfits as McDonald's and Walmart have upped their wage scale to draw workers.

Still, to the astonishment of the economic elite, record numbers of current workers in all sorts of jobs and in every section of the country are voluntarily walking away. There's even an official economic measurement of this phenomenon called the "Quits rate," and it is surging beyond anything our economy has experienced in modern memory. In April, four million workers quit; in May, another 3.6...