The inequality pandemic

A young woman contacted the offices of The Louisiana Weekly with a dilemma a few days ago. Her principal restaurant job was on hiatus for the quarantine, and even if it were not, working for mandated minimum hospitality wage of three dollars per hour, processing takeout orders without tips, would not earn enough to pay her bills.

Nor did the $650 per week unemployment cover her basic necessities, even though it amounts to a much higher sum than before the coronavirus lockdown—thanks to the $600 federal supplement. However, she was prohibited from making ends meet. Warned that if she earned even an extra $80.00 per week doing odd jobs, the excess income would endanger the $2600.00 per month she is receiving from being laid off from her main source of income. Caught between an amount already insufficient to pay her current expenses and the inability to earn more, (with apologies to Joseph Heller), she faced the “Catch-22” of the COVID-19 economy.

Another subscriber related that she retained her job, but her boss offered “the bargain” of merely taking a 25 percent pay cut to stay employed. Still, she earned more than her unemployment counterpart. Few of us, though, could endure a sudden reduction of income by a fourth without panic. The sole factor that bridged the drop in the income in both situations was the $1200 one-time payment authorized under the CARES I Act. It partially plugged the gap for the unemployed and underemployed. Its democratic ubiquity made little distinction (other than for those couples earning over $150,000 or claiming “Married-filing-separately”). The check came whether one was employed or not, faced extra expenses with children home or not, or just tried to make do with one’s business’ client base beyond reach.

Despite the booming economy prior to the pandemic, one cannot ignore that conditions were not so financially great for most of the population. Real wages have remained stagnant for almost two decades outside the upper 20 percent within the professional class, just as housing and insurance costs skyrocketed across the board. Jobs may have been plentiful, but too many paid too little even as the average person worked too much. Moreover, education proved not the palliative as in the past. A nearly minimum wage shirt-folding position at a retail shop like could only be secured through the possession of a ‘Bachelor of Arts’ from the local university. “Go to school, and you will achieve the American dream” had come to mean less and less for the multitudes that had played by “the rules.”

As long-time LA political consultant Sidney Arroyo noted recently, “We never had a booming economy if 80 percent of the population could not afford to miss two paychecks.” However, the old leftwing solutions of raising the minimum wage and union guarantees of income have begun to fail society as well. When a robot could replace your job for no pay, no matter how hard you worked, somehow Bernie Sanders’ pledge of a $15 hourly wage rings empty. The twin threats of artificial intelligence and robotization redundancy have convinced many workers to just hold their tongue. Better to take a meager hourly payment rather than have him automate your job out of existence is the rationale of many.

Rather than supplement your income, as one struggled for improvement, most benefit systems have penalized those who attempted to remain employed. Earn too much, lose your safety net. A choice of the quiet desperation of government-mandated poverty often proved the only alternative to insufficient wage slavery. Work ethics insulted in either case; the pride that one took in the craft, dribbling away.

The failure of the old wage-focused welfare state comes as automation renders human labor redundant. The irony of technology, which has made our lives more comfortable, also stands to make many of us unemployed. Real policy answers have seemed absent. That is until $1200 began arriving in each of our bank accounts last month.

Andrew Yang’s national campaign for a Universal Basic Income has drawn support across the political aisle. Many progressives liked the idea of a minimum income floor, and some conservatives saw the issuance of a monthly check far preferable to a bureaucratic welfare state, which restricts basic initiative to work. Government does little well, save for its most popular program, Social Security. It is universally popular. So, what if every citizen, not just our senior citizens, received a monthly check, and still were free to work, supplementing his or her basic income without restriction?

Republican-turned-Libertarian Justin Amash proposed at the dawn of the quarantine that every American should receive a check for at least three months, so sure was this one-time Tea Party Congressman that the economy would be slow to recover. Instead of giving trillions to business executives and subsidizing major corporations, send the money directly to the people. ALL OF THE PEOPLE.

The next CARES Act should include the continued issuance of $1200 checks through the autumn, at least before Congress considers any more corporate bailouts. More importantly, the various Presidential campaigns should also debate if Andrew Yang’s idea of instituting a Value Added Tax to underwrite these checks on an ongoing monthly basis constitutes such an outrageous concept. If ‘struggle’ has become the default position for the average working class voter in keeping their home, car and dignity, with ‘Robbie the Robot’ standing ready to push him or her out of the assembly line or retail counter, the battle to stay gainfully employed may soon grow worse. Even a restaurant server has no job security. One corporation offered automated waitresses for sale last week to American restaurants—out of COVID-19 health concerns, of course.

“[BEEP] [BEEP], may I take your order please? No need to tip. This robot works for free!”

This article originally published in the May 4, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.