Something may be changing with the American worker mindset

The New York Times reports on worker attitudes toward the low paying jobs that dominate some sectors of the economy. Most conservatives blame worker reluctance to take low pay jobs on extended unemployment benefits. However, most economists do not believe that is the main issue for most workers. Instead, workers have reassessed their lives and are tired of being treated rather badly for low pay and long commutes. The NYT writes:

Work-force development officials [in St. Louis, MO] said they had seen virtually no uptick in applicants since the governor’s announcement, which ended a $300 weekly supplement to other benefits. And the online job site Indeed found that in states that have abandoned the federal benefits, clicks on job postings were below the national average.

Of course, it’s early. But conversations with employers who are hunting for workers and people who are hunting for jobs in the St. Louis area revealed stark differences in expectations and assumptions about what a day’s work is worth.

“Clearly part of the problem now,” she said [Katharine G. Abraham, University of Maryland economist, former commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics], “is that what employers and what workers think is out of whack.”

[Accordong to employers,] there were good jobs available but not enough good workers to fill them, those who were reliable and were willing to work hard.

That’s not the way Elodie Nohone saw it. “They’re offering $10, $12, $13,” said Ms. Nohone, who already earns $15 an hour as a visiting caregiver and was hoping to find a higher-paying opportunity. “There’s no point in being here [at the job fair in St. Louis].”

The labor market’s deeper problem, said Francine D. Blau, an economist at Cornell University, is the proliferation of low-paid jobs with few prospects for advancement and too little income to cover essential expenses like housing, food and health care.

The pandemic focused attention on many of these low-wage workers, who showed up to deliver food, clean hospital rooms and operate cash registers. “The pandemic put their lives at risk,” Ms. Blau said, “and we began to wonder if we are adequately remunerating a lot of the core labor we need to function as an economy and society.”

Hundreds of jobs were being offered at the fair. A home health care agency wanted to hire aides for $10.30 an hour, the state’s minimum, to care for disabled children or mentally impaired adults. There were no benefits, and you would need a car to get from job to job. An ice rink, concert and entertainment center was looking for 80 people, paying $10.30 to $11.50 for customer service representatives and $13 for supervisors. But the jobs last just through the busy season, a few months at time, and the schedules, which often begin at 5 a.m., change from week to week.

In St. Louis, a single person needs to earn $14 an hour to cover basic expenses at a minimum standard, according to M.I.T.’s living-wage calculator. Add a child, and the needed wage rises just above $30. Two adults working with two children would each have to earn roughly $21 an hour. [$50,000 a year, or about $25 an hour is roughly the median earnings of wage and salaried employees in the United States]

In recent decades, a declining share of the country’s income and its productivity gains has gone to workers. And for adults without a four-year college degree, the options are especially bleak. From 1974 to 2018, for example, real wages for men with only a high school diploma declined by 7 percent. For those without that diploma, wages fell by 18 percent.

Among job seekers interviewed at job fairs and employment agencies in the St. Louis area the week after the benefit cutoff, higher pay and better conditions were cited as their primary motivations. Of 40 people interviewed, only one — a longtime manager who had recently been laid off — had been receiving unemployment benefits. (The maximum weekly benefit in Missouri is $320.)

Justin Johnson already had a job when he showed up at an Express Employment Professionals office. He was working at a pet feed company, earning $14 an hour to shovel piles of mud or oats. But that week temperatures topped 90 degrees every day and were heading past 100.

“The supervisor pushed people too hard,” Mr. Johnson said. He had to bring his own water, and if it was a slow day, he got sent home early, without pay for the lost hours. He accepted an offer to begin work the next day at a bottle packaging plant, earning $16.50.

Whether workers will be forced into the pre-pandemic situation as time passes is unclear. Interviews with job applicants indicate that wages, hours and commute times matter most to most job seekers. In the St. Louis area, few are willing to work for less than $14 an hour. That is the minimum to cover basic expenses for a single person. Time will tell how this will play out.