The worker shortage

Today let’s start my explanation of the thought process involved in creating the above cartoon with this piece of information from the ABC News website:

Thanks to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (hold on, gotta catch my breath because I typed that entire title in one go) a company’s shareholders get to vote on executive pay which sounds pretty good until you look into the details and find out the shareholder vote is not binding.

So it’s kind of like saying we set a strict speed limit on I-70, but the cops enforcing it don’t have cars.

Or badges.

Or guns.

When executives fly by going 104, the cops just hold up a sign saying: “We disapprove” and it sounds like our highly ineffectual cops don’t use their highly ineffectual sign all that often.

The ABC article said shareholders tend to go along with what companies want to give their executives, but that article was written in 2012 and the Kansas City Star recently published an article that said shareholders were now “setting records” for rejecting executive pay packages, supposedly because many companies want to exclude COVID-19’s impact when figuring out how much loot to give people at the top.

Which might come as a bit of a surprise to all the people who lost their jobs because of COVID-19’s impact.

So it’s a “Your life was totally destroyed because of the pandemic, but I don’t want to take a pay cut” kind of a deal and you gotta hand it to the executives for having chutzpah, which is Yiddish for: “Being a titanic asshole” – a fact I just made up, but is nonetheless, completely accurate.

(Also, who knew “chutzpah” started with a “c”? Man, the stuff you can learn on the internet.)

Once again, remember these votes are non-binding and it turns out expressing disapproval of 4.7% of these pay proposals is a “record” so maybe the journalists who wrote and edited the article got worked up about not much, which is actually a big part of what passes for journalism these days.  

But I fear I’m drifting off-target, which tends to happen occasionally, if by “occasionally” you actually mean each and every time I sit down to write, so how about we make a course correction and get back to that cartoon?

The We-Can’t-Afford-It argument

Recently, a number of businesses have complained that there’s a shortage of workers and the Biden Administration had some radical advice for them:

Offer workers more money.

Which a number of businesses will tell you they can’t afford.

Which reminds me that when I first worked in newspapers way back in the 1970s and they would nickel-and-dime the people at the bottom to death, a coworker said: “You ever notice when you want money they don’t have any, but when they want money they always seem to find some?”

Yes.

I have noticed that.

On more than one occasion I’ve had it explained to me that the workers’ money came out of one pocket (which happened to be empty) and the top executives’ money came out of a different pocket (which happened to be full), a metaphor that inspired the following question:

Who designed the suit?

Also, the excuse for giving CEOs everything but sex slaves (which might happen, but they probably wouldn’t put it in writing) is that these top executives are incredibly talented and in great demand and really, really deserve the money which would be a slightly better argument if all those highly-paid and brilliant CEOs were overseeing companies that were doing great, but the CEOs seem to get everything but sex slaves (which might happen, but they probably wouldn’t put it in writing) even when the companies are doing lousy and they’re firing frontline workers and selling the office furniture in a yard sale.

Alrighty then.

So when people who run companies talk about how hard it is to find workers after our bout with the Black Plague, I thought it was worth pointing out that some of the same people whining about the lack of workers are also fighting an increase in the minimum wage.

And since the politicians are trying to suck up to the anti-science mob by getting rid of mask mandates as quickly as possible, those frontline-minimum-wage-bottom-of-the-barrel workers will be asked to share air with people who decide to lie about getting vaccinated because in a country where $400 billion of owed taxes are not paid each year (got that from the Brookings Institute) we’ve decided to work on the honor system.

What could possibly go wrong?

And we can’t go on without mention of the brilliant idea to encourage vaccination by including vaccination status on dating apps, because as we all know, nobody ever lies on a dating app.

Bottom line:

I tend to be skeptical when companies say they can’t afford to raise the minimum wage and then the CEO drives off in a Maserati.

Meanwhile, some people are blaming the extra $300 a week in unemployment benefits for the lack of willing workers and in some cases they may have an argument, but part of the reasoning for that extra money was to jumpstart the economy and get things going again, an idea Republican don’t object to even a teensy little bit if you give the money to rich people instead of poor ones.

And according to the National Bureau of Economic Research (a name chosen because it totally does not sound made up and something that would appear in a movie about a dystopian future) there is no evidence that federal pandemic unemployment benefits had a substantial effect on employment after the $600 benefits expired back in July.

On the other hand, I tried to read the introduction to their study so I could understand their logic, but it was filled with phrases like “granular data” and “exploit variation in the proportional increase” and “labor markets differentially exposed” and “identification assumption” so the only thing 100 percent clear to me is these people have a big future working for some big league baseball team’s analytics department.

Economics are and possibly is (is it plural or singular?) complicated which is probably why George Bernard Shaw once said:

“If all the economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.”

Which some people think George didn’t actually say, so apparently economics and quotes about economics are complicated.

In conclusion

It would seem logical that increased unemployment benefits would shrink the pool of people willing to work, but crying poverty while giving top executives the keys to Ft. Knox seems just a bit “disingenuous” which is a polite way of saying “bullshit” and it also seems logical that companies would have an easier time finding workers if they increased the minimum wage.

Also:

A Maserati and a sex slave wouldn’t hurt.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/