Millions Of Low Paying “Jobs” Are Available, But Most Americans Can’t Afford To Take Them
Francesco Abbruzzino, The Uncensored Report, LLC
There are more job openings in the United States than ever before, but the vast majority of the available “jobs” pay so little that most Americans don’t want them. If working extremely long hours for some employer is not even going to lift you out of poverty, then you are probably better off taking whatever government assistance that you can get until a decent paying job eventually comes along. For example, if you get a job that pays 10 dollars an hour and you work full-time hours every week, you will earn somewhere around $1,600 a month before taxes. Needless to say, you can’t survive in most U.S. cities on $1,600 a month these days. It would have been tough to make it on $1,600 a month before the pandemic, but now we are in a highly inflationary environment. Housing costs are absolutely skyrocketing, health insurance premiums are at extremely ridiculous levels and food prices have been rising aggressively. The higher the cost of living gets, the less attractive low paying jobs are going to become.
Having said that, it is still good news that the number of job openings is sitting at a record high right now…
Job openings in the U.S. rose slightly in May to a record 9.21 million, reflecting an insatiable demand for labor as the economy fully reopens and businesses scramble to keep up with soaring sales for their goods and services.
The number of available jobs has set a record for three straight months. Job openings had fallen to as low as 4.6 million last year after the coronavirus pandemic briefly shut down much of the economy.
Having lots of jobs available is better than not having a lot of jobs available, but of course the vast majority of those “jobs” could not support a middle class lifestyle for an average American family.
Some have been using the term “labor shortage” to describe what is going on out there, but in reality what we are really facing is a shortage of jobs that people are actually willing to work.
Even though there are supposedly so many “jobs” available at this moment, the unemployment rate in this country actually went up last month…
“There’s simply no labor shortage when you’re talking about finding house cleaners for a hotel — there is a shortage of workers who want to work at what you’re offering,” said Sylvia Allegretto, a UC Berkeley labor economist. She said the country is experiencing a “wage and benefits shortage.”
A labor shortage implies there aren’t enough available workers to fill open jobs, but this is not the case nationally, or in California. National unemployment in June was 5.9%, up from 5.8% in May, in part because the number of people looking for jobs grew, according to data from the Labor Department on Friday. California’s unemployment is tracking higher, at 7.9% in May.
Of course it doesn’t help that being unemployed pays quite handsomely in many states these days.
If you can make more money doing nothing, it simply doesn’t make sense to work.