Log in Subscribe

Private business shouldn’t have to compete with feds

Posted

Prior to COVID, businesses were already competing for and retaining reliable workers.

Back then at least it was the free market with businesses competing against each other.

Today, as the pandemic begins to lessen its grip, there are many, many openings for workers in restaurants, convenience stores and many other industries throughout the country.

But as the economy reopens, those businesses find themselves competing at a severe disadvantage because of a federal program which gave recipients an extra $1,200 a month in unemployment benefits that was implemented at the height of last year’s mass COVID layoffs.

Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt is putting an end to the extra $300 a week funded through the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion bill approved in March and extending through early September. That funding will be cut off June 26.

To incentivize unemployed people to return to the work, Stitt said the state will offer a $1,200 stipend for the first 20,000 workers who get off unemployment and work at least 32 hours per week at a qualifying job. Claimants can begin applying on June 28.

Not all people are staying home because of the more generous unemployment benefits. Some are still wrestling with child care, or the lack thereof. And some fear contracting COVID, which should change with increased vaccination rates.

But some are staying home because they can make more through unemployment compensation than from working at jobs they weren’t all that excited to have in the first place.

The idea people might pass up an honest job to stay at home with healthy compensation rubs some the wrong way.

It’s true that some industries struggling the most to find workers aren’t known for high wages. If they want to employ reliable workers they’re going to have to meet some reasonable demands. But they shouldn’t have to compete with the government in an already tough and changing market.

“Common sense tells you that if you want people to go back to work then the government can’t be an unfair competitor by paying people not to work,” Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa said in 2020.

The same is true today.

Comments

No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here