Advocates push to change economic policy to help the underpaid

12th July 2021   ·   0 Comments

By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer

Eight days after Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards signed a bill that at the end of July will terminate the state’s payment of a federally sponsored, $300-a-week boost to COVID-19 pandemic unemployment benefits – making Louisiana the first Democratic-led state to stop paying the extra benefits from Washington – the New Orleans City Council took another step toward the gradual implementation of a living wage in the city.

On June 16, Edwards formally approved the bill passed by the majority-Republican state Legislature that ends the weekly federal $300 unemployment supplement. An attempt at balancing out the loss of the federal benefits for the state’s unemployed was made in the form of increasing the state weekly unemployment benefit by $28, to $275 a week total, beginning in 2022.

Then, on June 24, the New Orleans City Council’s Economic Development and Special Projects Committee unanimously approved a measure that increases pay for city contract workers from the current $11.19 per hour to $13.25 by 2022 and to $15 an hour by 2023. The measure now must be officially voted on by the full City Council.

A $15 per hour minimum wage is what worker advocates locally, statewide and nationally cite as representing a true “living wage” that would allow all workers to sufficiently make ends meet. The City Council committee’s action June 24 follows a series of earlier efforts to steadily implement and advocate for a living wage for all workers connected to the city administration, and several council members have previously voiced support to the idea of a living wage as a vital way of boosting the local economy as a whole and improving the lives of all workers.

While the two recent measures weren’t administratively connected – one was a piece of state legislation targeted at pandemic benefits, while the other was a city ordinance regarding a living wage – several elected officials and community advocates who spoke to The Louisiana Weekly following the pair of governmental actions stressed that many issues like unemployment benefits and minimum wages are intrinsically linked and must be analyzed and addressed holistically because the economic situations of the working and middle classes, as well as their socioeconomic fates, are complex and multilayered.

And advocates say that false stereotypes of people who need public assistance programs serve to obfuscate the real issues and prevent wholesale, systemic change from occurring. Primary among those muddying arguments is that people who rely on federal unemployment benefits are choosing to stay unemployed by declining to apply for open jobs and opting to continue receiving unemployment benefits.

Bolstered by news reports of employers who, now that citizens by the thousands are receiving the COVID-19 vaccine and the local economy is starting to open back up, claim that they have dozens of new job openings but no one applying for them, many elected officials have argued for the discontinuation of federal pandemic unemployment benefits in Louisiana by asserting, whether subtly or bluntly, that laziness and refusal to work at all are stopping those on public assistance from filling all the open jobs.

But in June, just weeks before the state Legislature passed and Edwards signed off on the end to the $300-a-week federal unemployment supplement in the state, New Orleans-based advocacy organization Step Up Louisiana released a media fact sheet to counter the notion that continued federal benefits would stop people from seeking work.

The Step Up fact sheet, citing studies by the Economic Policy Institute and other organizations, argued that contrary to reports of labor shortages, there’s actually a job shortage in which not enough quality employment opportunities don’t exist.

In addition, Step Up says, the oversimplified notion that continued supplemental federal unemployment prevents people from seeking gainful employment ignores the complexities of unemployment and people’s prospects for work.

Such complicating factors include the continued lack of adequate child-care services for parents attempting to find employment, and the very real probability that many of those now-open jobs – including the thousands of gigs in the tourism and service industries on which the New Orleans economy hinges – simply don’t pay well enough to allow folks to make ends meet and pay all their bills, which brings the debate back to the push for a living wage across the board.

Moreover, Step Up asserts, ending the federal weekly unemployment supplement in favor of simply increasing state benefits overlooks the reality that Louisiana’s own unemployment insurance benefits aren’t sufficient to support people out of work in the state.

Gabby Bolden-Shaw, a labor organizer with Step Up Louisiana, called the ending of the federal unemployment benefit “a bad decision. I think the decision was made to force people back to work, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

She added that new jobs must include a wage sufficient to pay a worker’s expenses, including those like child care that are needed in order to allow parents to even go back to work. “It’s not that people don’t want to come back to work,” she said. “It’s that they want to come back to work with a living wage. [Employers] need to start paying a decent wage.”

Bolden-Shaw said that the myths and false narratives about a supposed unwillingness to work are frequently rooted in racism. She said that when elected officials and their supporters refer to citizens being unwilling to forgo an easy unemployment check for gainful work, such statements are thinly-veiled “dog whistling” about Black people being too lazy to work.

Such insinuations continue to bolster the systemic racism that limits or prevents much-needed public assistance from reaching communities of color that are struggling valiantly to regain their economic footing as the pandemic recedes and people seek quality work.

“The stigma that Black folks are lazy just isn’t true,” Bolden-Shaw said. “We want to go back to work. But there are no jobs to go back to.”

She added that many workers in the service industry in New Orleans have yet to be recalled to the jobs that were closed by the onset of the pandemic, and when the employees are called back, it’s often for just a limited time, or a reduced and insufficient wage.

Bolden-Shaw said that even though thousands and thousands of Louisianians have been vaccinated, society still hasn’t reached the herd-immunity level of safety that would allow the economy to re-open fully. Without that, she said, “the crisis isn’t over.”

“Who says we don’t end up back where we came from before we get out of it,” she said of the economic challenge facing so many unemployed Louisiana workers, “and what do these people do from there?”

Also connected to the issue of supplemental unemployment benefits is the federal rental eviction moratorium that was first instituted last year to protect people who had lost their jobs or suffered other negative consequences from the pandemic crisis from being ousted from their homes if they can’t pay rent.

The eviction moratorium has been extended multiple times as the pandemic lingers on, most recently by the Biden administration last month. The moratorium is now scheduled to end July 31, and many experts believe that will be the last time it will be extended.

If that is the case and no more extensions are forthcoming, workers in Louisiana who are struggling to find quality jobs and achieve financial stability might now suffer two severe economic blows at the same time – losing federal UI benefits and the end of eviction protection.

Local housing advocates thus worry that currently unemployed or underemployed Louisianians will not be able to keep up with rent without the now ended $300 weekly federal UI supplement and, as a result, will end up homeless.

Andreanecia Morris, executive director of HousingNOLA, said the implications of Edwards’ move on the strained New Orleans housing situation are obvious.

“Ending the unemployment benefits will worsen an already bad situation,” she said. “[UI benefits] have kept people out of the lines for rental assistance [applications] and shortened the line for foreclosures.”

Like Bolden-Shaw, Morris said the implicit racism of the arguments for ending federal UI benefits – essentially, that workers are choosing “cushy” unemployment benefits over employment out of sloth or apathy – are reflective of the larger, systemic racism in American society.

“That racial prejudice has seeped into it,” she said of the unemployment debate. Morris said elected officials’ misperception of the reality facing the unemployed is leading the officials to make unwise and dangerous policy decisions on so many issues – issues like minimum wage, housing assistance and unemployment insurance – that are interconnected and form a complex, bleak whole picture for the state’s workforce.

“None of this makes any sense,” she said. “There’s this bureaucratic indifference to people’s real situation.”

Similar concerns for the status of unemployment insurance benefits locally and nationally were reiterated by a new Economic Policy Institute position paper issued June 24 by a coalition of national advocacy groups, unemployed workers and think tanks calling for a federally led, systemic reform of the country’s unemployment insurance system.

The executive summary of the position paper asserted that “the current federal-state UI system, financed by state and federal taxes, is crumbling. It fails to serve many workers, ramps up too slowly and unevenly to stabilize the economy during recessions, and sets perverse incentives for states and employers that undermine program integrity.”

The reform proposal also cited the implications of the UI system’s failures for people and communities of color and struggling blue-collar workers. “Many workers, especially low-wage and involuntary part-time workers, are left out entirely, and workers of color are overrepresented in both these groups,” it stated. “Exclusionary eligibility rules are just one of many racial disparities state control creates.”

It added that short-term UI programs like the ones created federally in 2020 and 2021 in response to the pandemic crisis are just bandages that do nothing to permanently and definitively reform and strengthen the unemployment insurance systemwide. And once again, the summary said, “workers of color, who are bearing the brunt of the coronavirus downturn, are at risk of being left behind.”

The EPI sharply criticized states that have terminated the availability of the federal UI supplement, asserting that such a rash decision could be disastrous for workers and for the economy.

“Half of the states are now choosing to cut off their residents’ access to these programs early, causing extraordinary harm to vulnerable families and impeding economic recovery,” it stated. “GOP governors’ attacks on these critical emergency benefits are the most vivid and recent manifestation of recurring dysfunction in the UI system: The federal government has ceded so much control to states that it has failed to equitably protect working people.”

In signing off on the state termination legislation, Edwards became the first Democratic governor to do so. Meanwhile, on a city level, the issue of increasing the minimum wage remains a pressing one for New Orleans officials who are attempting. District B Councilman Jay H. Banks told The Louisiana Weekly that a living wage is needed to address other challenges facing the city, such as reducing crimes that might be committed simply out of economic desperation and financial frustration.

“People need to make enough so that they can adequately support their families,” Banks said. “We must be intentional in making sure that everyone has real options and opportunities to be successful so that the option of crime never enters their thought process.”

The Council has the support of many community advocates who view a living wage of $15 an hour for all as an ultimate goal. Robert “Tiger” Hammond III, president of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO, said employers’ failure to pay workers a sufficient wage reflects how crucially action is needed.

“The bottom line is, whatever [the minimum wage] is now, we are supporting a living wage,” Hammond told The Louisiana Weekly. “People just can’t live on $7.25 an hour. It’s just ridiculous.”

A representative from the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO spoke at the June 24 Economic Development and Special Projects Committee public hearing. Hammond used the analogy of the way a rising sea tide lifts all ships, both big and small, to illustrate his belief that increasing the minimum wage will benefit all members of society.

The gradual steps taken by the New Orleans City Council to improve the welfare of the city’s economically struggling citizens certainly might reverberate in Baton Rouge, where progressives were not only reacting to Gov. Edwards’ decision to end federal pandemic unemployment benefits, but also continued to fight for other measures to help the working and middle classes.

Members of the Louisiana state Legislature linked the issues of lingering unemployment and available jobs with the need for a higher minimum wage.

“I voted against the bill because it eliminates needed assistance to citizens,” said state Sen. Joseph Bouie Jr. (D-District 3). “However, the answer to an unavailable workforce is a living wage. Pay workers a decent wage and employers will have access to all the employees they will need.”

In an interview with The Louisiana Weekly, state Rep. Mandie Landry (D-District 9) echoed many of the thoughts given by Step Up Louisiana’s Bolden-Shaw. Landry said that while there doubtlessly are a few employers in Louisiana who can’t fill the job openings they might have, “it seems to be anecdotal,” not widespread. She said that employers who only offer the state minimum wage of $7.25 or not much higher shouldn’t expect possible employees to accept such low pay if a better opportunity exists, including unemployment insurance, whether federal or not.

Landry said the state legislators who voted to end the additional federal unemployment insurance benefits failed to see such essential facts of the realities facing out-of-work Louisianians, and she said she is extremely upset that Edwards went along with the state Legislature’s specious lines of reasoning.

She said the legislation to end the federal supplement was hurried through at the last minute, with legislators who opposed the move not getting a chance to research the measure and mount an effective push against it.

“We didn’t have any input, and we didn’t have any time to look into it,” said Landry, who also voiced strong support for a large-scale overhaul of the unemployment insurance system. “The governor decided by himself to [sign the bill].”

Although American society – and the Louisiana economy – are still struggling to put the worst of the devastating COVID-19 crisis in the past, Landry said that such challenging times actually hold greater opportunities for the working and middle classes to not only find long-term stability, but to improve their socioeconomic situations across the board and find a level of happiness and success that has always eluded them, even before the pandemic started.

“If you look at history,” she said, “workers have made the most gains after a pandemic. It shows employers that they have to treat their employees better, to pay them a better wage and provide health insurance.”

This article originally published in the July 12, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.