As employment growth sputters, there has been story after story celebrating the fact that many working people are telling the boss to take this job and stuff it. The pandemic has evidently caused scales to fall from the eyes. Workers, having experienced life off the job for several months, decided that grueling work for crap wages wasn’t worth it. So they voted with their feet. Now, in the service sector, employers are having to raise wages—even above the $15 minimum that we still don’t have—to get workers at all. It’s a heartening story. Or is it? Look a little deeper, and you realize that in hyper-individualist America, this is the free-market remedy for lousy jobs and low wages. When demand (for workers) exceeds supply, prices (wages) must rise. But these decisions by individual workers are a reflection of class consciousness that has been only modestly raised. There is not a shred of solidarity in it. It’s also the case that tens of millions of workers in low-wage jobs, a paycheck away from destitution, don’t have the option of just quitting. Tens of millions of others don’t have the alternative of working for themselves at home. Try doing that as a nurse, home care aide, nursing home worker, pre-K teacher, public-school teacher—or anyone else in the caring economy (except maybe shrink-by-Zoom therapists). Though tight labor markets and individual acts of rebellion make a nice story, raise some wages, and give employers like Walmart and Amazon a satisfying comeuppance, let’s face it: There are only two basic sources of better wages for all workers—trade unions and government labor regulation. Rebuilding the labor movement, and grasping which party supports regulation of wages and working conditions and
the right to organize, will take more than individual acts of rebellion. It will take raised political consciousness and solidarity.
