How the business lobby created the “labor shortage” myth — and GOP used it to slash benefits – By Jon Skolnik (Salon) / May 19 2021
Republican governors weaponized weak jobs report to cut unemployment aid — as the result of a year-long strategy
Earlier this month, the Department of Labor released a less-than-stellar jobs report that sent politicians, economists and leaders in corporate America scrambling for answers. That report details an approximate 71% drop in job growth paired with a slight hike in unemployment, falling far below analyst expectations of a month-over-month boom. This prompted many “mainstream” or conservative pundits, along with Republican elected officials, to point toward a prime suspect: unemployment insurance.
Their logic is simple: if people are getting paid to do nothing, they have no incentive to do anything. But Democrats have argued that the reality is far too complicated to chalk up to one factor. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen attributed the disappointing jobs report to a lack of proper child care and lingering fears about the pandemic. Others have pinned the blame on employers, citing low wages and poor working conditions as reasons why Americans might be more hesitant to rejoin the workforce.
Nevertheless, over the past two weeks week, a narrative about “labor shortages” and the allegedly corrosive effects of overly generous unemployment benefits, has been force-fed to the American public. Within a matter of days, at least 16 state governors — including such nationally prominent Republicans as Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Doug Ducey of Arizona and Brian Kemp of Georgia — seized the opportunity to slash or eliminate aid to the jobless, even as the U.S. struggles to recover from the effects of a global pandemic.
Given how effective this “labor shortage” narrative was in driving reactionary GOP policy, it seems worth unpacking exactly where and how it arose. Several observers on the left have argued that it emerged from “explicitly ideological think tanks and explicitly ideological right-wing projects,” as Henry Williams, co-founder of the Gravel Institute, put it in an interview with Salon. It then “trickled outward” through mainstream media sources, effectively cleansed of its right-wing roots.
