Food For Thought
If you made more from unemployment than you do working a minimum wage job, what incentive is there to return to work?
That’s a question facing a ton of the workforce and businesses that have been negatively impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. As part of Coronavirus relief packages, impacted individuals could potentially receive an additional $300 on top of their unemployment, and that’s leading to a lot of people making more money sitting at home than they do working 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job. Most states are ending those additional unemployment benefits to drive people back to the workforce, and some businesses and franchises are getting creative with how to entice people to come back to work.
A McDonald’s franchise owner in Illinois is offering free iPhones to people that meet employment criteria and work there for at least six months. The minimum wage in Illinois is $11 an hour and that particular McDonald’s has a starting wage of $13 an hour, so it’s having an extremely hard time finding people to start working there. I applaud the creativity of that particular franchise owner, even though I wish there were more specifics about the free iPhone, but I think this illuminates a much bigger dilemma.
It’s very troubling that minimum wage in 2021 is still so low. It’s worrying that an additional $300 a month makes such a huge difference in so many people’s lives. And it’s frightening that instead of simply raising wages, employers are willing to do any and everything except pay people more money. We also need to address pay and how we compensate everyone that was considered an “essential worker” this time last year. As housing costs are skyrocketing, and the CEO wage gap is higher than ever before, we should be able to afford offering everyone a living wage.
If we truly want to become a great nation, we should start to look at how we treat our citizens and empower them to change their socioeconomic outlook if they’re willing to work hard in return. Food for thought.
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