young people who haven t had the job experience, these people aren t worth $15 an hour, in most cases. he just came out and said it, the poor, the minorities, the disenfranchised, young they re not worth it. i m afraid you re was wrong. because the economy this is how it is. labor scares. some are having to do just that. some businesses have quote found a way around the worker shortages which is raising the wages to $15 an hour more. like this ice cream parlor between january and march, so he decided to more than double the starting wage to $15 an hour plus tips to see what would happen. the shop was suddenly flooded with applications. more than 1000 piles over the course of the week. this is of course elemental economics. when something is plentiful, it is likely to be cheap. when it is scarce, it is going to cost more money. so, another way to say labor shortage is just to say worker
power. and worker power has been largely missing from the u.s. economy for literally 40 years, if not more. since the reagan era and the last great bout of inflation in the seventies when it induce punishing recession, we have seen a vast transformation of the american global economy. recreated in reagan s shadow and you economy that offers this bargain, consumer goods are cheap, everything from burritos to flat screens tvs, to all the stuff you can buy an amazon, or a target because it isn t made by other people in other countries. it brought all of these goods cheaper than they were ever. for years people defending this model, said look how cheap the tvs are. how can you say people are poor when they have smartphones. but, there s another part to this bargain, the key part of this bargain is the cheap goods go together with low wages. you re getting those goods from folks making little money but as our workers are competing
with them. the only things that are not cheap, on top of it all, the pillars of middle class life, education gets more expensive, as does housing and health care. we might be on the precipice of a momentous change right now. we retransform that bargain away from cheap consumer goods and a low wage economy to a high wage economy, and that might mean that burritos cost $10.40 instead of just $10. it may also mean that you buy a new television less often. and other consumer goods cost a bit more, some services might cost more. there might be a trade-off like that, economics is about trade-off. i think it is a trade-off most americans are willing to make. in fact, if americans agree on one thing, overwhelmingly in a very poor lies era when no one agrees on anything is raising the minimum wage. 62% supported to $15 an hour according to a recent survey. in fact if you go back to that republican party post, if you reverse the republican party s
we never talk about the prices of ceo make going up, we never talk about the or a lawyer needing to make $350 an hour paycheck, we only talk about this problem when you talk about low wage, working class workers and that is the problem that we brought into covid and the shared experience of workers understanding that we don t have to take that anymore, that we can raise expectations, you are starting to see the power of the working class come into play here. let me get the argument on the other side was not a crazy one, and not unground it in some genuine economic literature and intuition which is if we have is government subsidies, the bonus on unemployment insurance which allows people to make more than they would on unemployment, we are taking way of that incentive and if we want to get the economy back we need to get people in the labor, force patch employers with employees
you put the top they don t spend much of their paycheck or compensation. people at the bottom spend it. one of the biggest problems we ve had in this economy for the past 40 years is you ve got a majority of american workers without the means to keep the economy going. i want you to talk about, from your perspective as a union president, what a tight labor market does for your bargaining power. there s different ways workers can have power. one is to organize the unions. macroeconomic conditions can give them power. if unemployment is low if labor is scarce, they have more power. if there is tons of people out of, work people banging down the doors, there s a labor surplus, they don t. does it matter to people in organized labor what those macroeconomic conditions are? it does, chris. the fact of the matter is we have to grow the labor movement. it s what president biden is saying and he is absolutely right. if we don t grow that sustained