Over the four weeks of coronavirus shutdown, more than 17 million Americans working in retail, transportation and other service-related industries lost their jobs. And, as much as we’d like to deny it, “a lot of” those jobs are “gone for good,” said entrepreneur and former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
Speaking at an Axios virtual event on Wednesday, Yang warned that businesses that laid off workers may not be able to hire them back even after the pandemic is over.
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“Macy’s just furloughed the vast majority of their 130,000 employees. How many of those employees do you think they are going to rehire [after the pandemic]?” He asked, rhetorically. “Do we really think every Macy’s is going to suddenly reopen and be back at 100 percent capacity?”
“We are at unprecedented levels of joblessness,” he added. “…So we need to make very dramatic moves to allow millions of Americans to have the dollars that they can feed their families with in the days to come.”
Early Wednesday morning, Yang proposed on Twitter that the federal government should give every American a monthly stimulus check of $2,000 “for the duration of this crisis,” highlighting the fact that the onetime $1,200 payment the government has started handing out isn’t going to be enough to cover basic living expenses if the pandemic drags into May or even the second half of the year.
I’m for $2,000 for every American adult for the duration of this crisis. #MoneyForThePeople — Andrew Yang🧢🇺🇸 (@AndrewYang) April 15, 2020
To make the stimulus check bigger and a monthly payment, it means trillions of dollars of additional government assistance on top of what Congress has already signed off.
“This, to me, is a necessary investment,” Yang explained his tweet during the Axios call. “When your house is on fire, you don’t worry that much about the water you are using to put it out. We have an equivalent of a $21 trillion fire on our hands, and we have to do everything we can do help people get through this.”
“In the absence of this kind of stimulus, you will see unthinkable things happening,” he added. “I mean, unthinkable things are happening right now.”
On Wednesday, fresh data from the Census Bureau showed that U.S. retail sales plummeted 8.7 percent in March from a year ago. It was twice as much as the worst fall during the 2008 financial crisis and the largest monthly decline on the Census Bureau’s record since 1992.
Almost every retail category, except grocery stores and other “essential” businesses, saw a major decline due to business closure. Clothing and accessories stores, for example, saw sales plunge 50 percent in March; the furniture and home furnishing category was down 26.8 percent; sporting goods fell 23.3 percent; and electronics and appliance declined 15 percent.
tanglwyst on April 18th, 2020 at 12:11 UTC »
I wholeheartedly agree with him. I used to work for JC Penney as a visual display manager in Moscow, Idaho in the 90s. That place ended up closing permanently about a decade later. They had survived being in business for like 60 years, including moving from Main Street to the Mall. Some of my coworkers were at the previous store location and were department managers.
But when rent at the mall went to $15K/month and we were losing money to shrinkage (theft), they appointed a Shrinkage manager, and tried to keep everyone employed. However, Corporate told our manager, who was a sweet person, to "cut higher paid employees who had reached the top of their wage tier, and hire new employees for minimum wage."
In a 2 university town (U of I and WSU), businesses had thousands of applicants for any low wage job. Finding people for day shifts meant hiring college students who had classes MWF and TTh, never giving anyone more than 34 hours a week. This stopped anyone from getting benefits. Anyone currently getting benefits was cut to part time or encouraged to retire. By the time most students got their Bachelor's, they had worked a food service job, a retail job, and a delivery job, and often more than one.
This meant people who cared about the store were let go and people who were just cycling through every wage slave job in the area (common) were hired. We had so much theft due to employees ignoring customers, the store closed a few years after I left.
This is the most common practice at every wage slave retail job. It rarely improves customer service or saves the store. All this was before Amazon and online retail was the norm. Even so, the only department that earned money was Catalog. People always preferred getting their stuff any other way but the store.
These practices are why. And I saw Wednesday that JCP is filing for bankruptcy. Yang points to Macy's as losing hundreds of thousands of jobs. None of them are likely to reopen since online sales are better for the company and they use preexisting systems. If you can cut out all the expense of a mall and still sell to people, you will. So what if the employees are the cost? They were too expensive to keep anyway and you can just hire new workers at the warehouses to keep up with online demand. And if you keep them at 36 hours a week, you never have to pay benefits.
OhmazingJ on April 18th, 2020 at 11:11 UTC »
Here in Las Vegas many of what our economy survives off of is likely to be crushed for a reasonably long time to come. This may certainly be something we need otherwise it might force many of us to have no choice other than to leave our city.
Nardelan on April 18th, 2020 at 10:22 UTC »
I think he’s definitely right about many jobs being gone for good. I think a lot of employers realized they can be just as effective with employees working remotely.
That means instead of paying someone in California or NY $150k a year, they can get away with someone in the Midwest to do the same job for $75k a year.
The employer can save on office space costs and worst case scenario they can start to offer those same jobs contract work and eliminate healthcare or paid time off.
The Gig Economy is expanding and with it, taking healthcare, sick time, and paid time off from people.
Take a look at the Jobs section of Craigslist lately. There are Uber/DoorDash/Instacart type jobs popping up for every field. This is just a few but there are several more:
Lawncare Movers Appliance Repair Laborer Gutter Cleaning Retail assembly Lowe’s and HD just started using contract workers for assembly instead of employees. It’s just a sign of more positions being outsourced to contract workers to cut costs. *Edit- it appears som parts of the country have been doing this for a while but it just started near me.
All Gig work with no benefits at all.