https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/which-states-will-cut-off-unemployment-benefits-and-300-bonus-this-week-what-to-know/
In our previous blog post I wrote about the effort of Reactionary Republican governors to force people in their states back to work by arbitrarily denying them enhanced unemployment benefits offered and paid for by the Biden administration. As of June 12, the cut off had already begun.
https://www.businessinsider.com/republican-states-cutting-unemployment-benefits-expanded-300-weekly-biden-stimulus-2021-5
Of the 25 governors who have cut off the extra benefits all of them but one are Republicans and all but a couple are in deep red, very conservative states. And they all took this action arbitrarily: there was no debate in the state legislatures, no town hall meetings, no consultations with Washington. In short, a typical Reactionary Republican politician thing to do. By the end of summer all of the other Reactionary Republican governors will have cut off benefits to their people.
The standard line of all these governors is that enhanced unemployment benefits make people lazy and unwilling to work. These politicians, like so many Reactionary Conservatives, note that the enhanced benefits that Biden and the Democrats (no thanks to Republicans) have created means that sometimes people make more from unemployment than they do from their jobs. Hence, you must take away their unemployment benefits and force them back to work or they will just stay home watching TV and drinking beer.
Democratic governors do not believe this about their constituents. I guess that Republican leaders have a lower opinion of their own people. Doesn’t seem fair or right, but that is the Republican party for you.
It is no secret that Republicans always protect and promote the interest of big businesses and profit strongly from this. After all, the number of Reactionary Republicans who take campaign money from the likes of Koch brothers, Robert Mercer, and the Restaurant Association is huge and definitely for the benefit of big business - not ordinary workers. After all, you can’t beat cheap labor. And if you can’t beat cheap labor then you must always wage war on workers and their rights. How else ya gonna keep that labor cheap?
It seems that there is also another reason at work here, namely, the greed of the Republican governors in lining their own pockets by forcing people back to work at their lousy old poorly paid, sometimes dangerous and never very rewarding jobs.
Among the Reactionary governors who are lining up to force people to work against their will by arbitrarily cutting off their benefits is Jim Justice of West Virginia.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-billionaire-governor-whos-been-sued-dozens-of-times-for-millions-in-unpaid-bills
Jim Justice is known in West Virginia as “Big Jim”, and is the wealthiest man in the entire state. And I am sure that there are people in that state who will assure you that Jim Justice was and is a grifter who knows how to use his political position and personal holdings to make money off of the public. Like Donald Trump, but on a smaller scale.
Justice was a very rich man even before he became governor. He grew up in his family’s business and acquired various coal mines, farms, and other enterprises over the years. He also racked up millions in fines for various labor-related violations as well.
The situation of businesses needing to have people forced back to work is one that Jim Justice understands very well.
https://www.wvgazettemail.com/freepass/welcome-to-the-greenbrier-the-governor-owned-luxury-resort-filled-with-conflicts-of-interest/article_710d8e70-7e8d-5f87-9a67-bbbc927574d8.html
In addition to his many other businesses Jim Justice is the owner of the famous Greenbrier Resort (pictured above). This is a swanky combination hotel and golf resort (revitalized when the state offered up millions of dollars to bring in the PGA golf tournament), which Justice owns and at which he likes to hold government functions.
See how this works? Of course you do: Jim Justice owns the Greenbrier resort. The resort needs to hire people but there aren’t enough applicants. Justice can’t make money. So Justice ends the federal unemployment assistance and just like that - BAM, the Greenbrier has the people it needs and the money can start flowing to Justice.
Yeah, no wonder the gov is the richest guy in the state.
But wait! Why aren’t people who are unemployed not rushing to be hired? Maybe West Virginians (who have spent decades involved in coal mining, the hardest jobs in world) are lazy. Or maybe there could be very good reasons for them to want to wait to return to work.
Remember the reasons that we discussed in the last blog: people are not in a hurry to return to work because they have no day care for their children, or must home school their kids because they can’t send them to in-person classes, or because they are taking care of elderly parents, or even because they are still suffering the lingering effects of a covid-19 infection that did not kill them. Or maybe they want to investigate returning to school or just retiring.
Or maybe they just don’t want to go back to the same old lousy, dead end job they had before.
The Greenbrier Resort is like many other Justice-owned businesses: it is manpower intensive (meaning that it requires a lot of employees relative to the amount of money or big equipment needed). A lot of people working means a lot of wages to be paid and that is not good for your profits.
West Virginia is a low wage state. It is slightly above the federally mandated minimum wage rate of $7.25/hour (while many deep red conservative states are not). Their rate is $8.75/hour.
This rate has not changed since 2008. If you labored 40 hours per week (no guarantee since employers hate to hire people full time), four weeks a month, 12 months per year you would make a gross income of only $16,800. And you would have been living on this thin gruel for almost 13 years!
A very low minimum wage sets a very low base for all other wage rates. This, of course, influences the pay at the Greenbrier (a world class resort, according to them) and helps keep it very low. The average wage is $9.79/hour, which is a full 17% below the national average. A full year of non stop work would get you $18,796, gross income. Oh! That’s to die for!
Actually, it is even worse than that. The state of West Virginia allows for certain categories of work to be exempt from the minimum wage: this includes seasonal workers, people over 62 who draw Social Security (using the government to lower the wage they can get away with paying you), golf caddies, certain types of drivers, and many more.
I don’t know how many people working at the Greenbrier are in these exempt jobs. But I am sure that Jim Justice and the managers at the Greenbrier know, and don’t hesitate to pay them less than minimum wage.
Service work (of which there are many kinds at any resort) has long hours, erratic schedules, demanding and abusive guests, few benefits and, at the Greenbrier, an average pay of only $8.79/hr. With all this, wouldn’t you take a little time to investigate another kind of job?
There’s another reason for delaying the return to the Greenbrier: getting sick - or even dying.
It seems that neither Jim Justice nor the people running the Greenbrier Resort are very careful about protecting the health and safety of their workers.
At the end of December of 2020 Jim Justice was pleading with people to be careful and to observe the safety protocols (for Covid-19) during the holidays. But then, a video of a New Year’s Eve party held at his own Greenbrier Resort was released on social media.
In the video you can see huge crowds of people mingling together, some with masks and many not. No one seems to be practicing social distancing and there is no sign of hand sanitizer being used or any other precautions being taken. This was just at the end of 2020 when Covid-19 was accelerating to frightening levels of deaths.
You can’t have a nice party at the Greenbrier Resort without lots of cooks, and servers, and bartenders, and cleaners and other people working the room. What protection was there for them? If you can’t depend upon a governor, who has pleaded with other people for caution against Covid-19, to ensure that you will have a safe working environment then who can you trust?
Justice owns the Greenbrier Resort, but has no day to day operational involvement. Does that let him off the hook? Hell no, because the person he put there to actually run the Greenbrier Resort, and was running it during the unprotected New Year’s Eve party, is his daughter, Jill Justice - who just happens to be a freaking doctor! She’s a family physician who actually works at the Greenbrier two days a week at Greenbrier Care, an outpatient clinic on the resort grounds that serves staff and local residents.
I can just imagine what some of those people whose benefits were cut and were forced back to work at the Greenbrier were thinking, “Ok, I still haven’t found a babysitter for the kids, mom’s still sick, the guy who owns this company is a hypocrite about the danger of Covid-19, the work is hard, I have to put up with guests bitching at me and the woman doctor who actually runs this place is going to make me work an unprotected party even though almost nobody in this state is fully vaccinated (only 36.1% ) - all for a lousy wage I can barely live on?”
No wonder people in West Virginia have to be forced back to work.
To be fair, Jim Justice of West Virginia is not the only Reactionary governor to wage war on ordinary working people by arbitrarily cutting their federal benefits in order to force them back to work. Conservative governors from other states are waging the same war against ordinary working people.
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu is also cutting benefits, citing the same stupid reason: businesses need the workers and can’t find them. So, of course, the only solution is to cut peoples’ benefits. Natch!
Do I need to mention that the Sununu clan has a family business?
As with Justice in West Virginia, it is not hard to see how forcing people back to work by an unemployment benefits cut is going to help the Sununu clan. The summer season is coming and there are lots of jobs to be filled - and they will be filled because the governor is going to see to it.
Perhaps as a sop to workers the governor has announced a $10 million program to offer one-time stipends for people returning to work at jobs paying less than $25/hour. But big deal: even though $10 million sounds like a lot it is not going to be much at all spread over thousands of workers, many earning minimum wage. And, of course, it is a one-time shot.
The minimum wage in New Hampshire is only $7.25/hour, the lowest in all of New England. This is a pathetic rate, and even if there are many people working for much higher wages, and you have no difficulties in returning to work, you may still want to hold off because you are of getting a sick, and dying (only 54% of New Hampshire residents are fully vaccinated).
Are there other Reactionary Republican governors out there that just might be tempted to cut federal benefits to “encourage” their workers to go back to work? Of course.
State financial disclosure records show that several other Republican governors who have cut benefits have business interest that might be affected by the moves. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum sits on the Board of Arthur Companies, a family, agriculture business currently advertising for truck drivers, general laborers and IT technicians. And Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves is a shareholder in his father’s company Southern Air Conditioning and Supply, a company that provides air conditioning and supply in Mississippi. Sounds like a bunch of companies that don’t pay very much, require a lot of hard work and likely never provide helpful things like child care or comprehensive medical benefits. I could be wrong this, but at least I don’t have to bet my life on any of it.
Speaking of betting your life: let’s hope everybody in North Dakota and Mississippi is real healthy and very good about avoiding infections at work. The percentage of people in North Dakota who are fully vaccinated is only is only 37.9%. The minimum wage is only $7.25/hour.
In Mississippi the rate of fully vaccinated people is only 28%, the lowest in the United States. The minimum wage is $7.25/hour.
Ain’t it great to live in a state run by a Reactionary governor who has a financial interest in cutting your federal benefits, ignoring your personal burdens, forcing you back to work, making you toil for lousy wages and leaving you potentially unprotected against the most lethal sickness in the last one hundred years?
Reactionary Conservatives pretend to care but don’t give a damn about ordinary working people or their problems. They don’t hesitate to wage war on their workers for the benefit of their big company donors. And blatant conflicts of interest that might be endangering their own people don’t seem to bother them at all.
There is only one way to get rid of these greedy, stupid, and immoral people.
Register with the Democratic party, vote progressive, work progressive, live (and stay alive) with progressives.