In the past five weeks the United States has lost more than 22 million jobs. It took two years in the Great Depression to reach that level of misery.
It is clear that most on this board don’t understand that we are now entering a devastating period of mass unemployment, corporate failures and a disintegration of the American dream, so let me offer you a glimpse into the future.
1) The coming unemployment crisis will worsen for workers who remain unemployed. Yes, companies will rehire workers. They’ll use this opportunity to replace their former workers with cheaper and more contingent labor. Lowering labor costs is easy when the economy is stalled and workers are grateful for any opportunity.
2) More broadly, the crisis will accelerate some long-running market trends toward industry consolidation (which reduces one’s choice of potential employers).
3) Same with greater automation (in which machines replace human labor), and worker precarity (which happens when the convenience of employers and customers entirely overrides the well-being of individual workers).
4) Even with the payroll subsidies that the stimulus legislation provides to small businesses, the prolonged shutdown will destroy mom-and-pop businesses that suffered from decades of brutal competition with the likes of Walmart and Amazon.
5) There was a sense that customers prefer human interaction, but social distancing has enhanced the appeal of self-service kiosks—and even delivery drones.
6) Once the pandemic subsides, people may go back to their old habits, but corporations do not typically let such opportunities for cutting costs go to waste—as we have seen whenever efforts to organize workers prompt employers to suddenly bring in more computers and robots, outsource work to contractors, or move jobs entirely offshore.
7) Real Estate will tank. Many service jobs can be done from home, employers are finding. And downtown real estate and utilities are expensive.
8) Companies will not hire back older/more experienced workers because companies want to cut labor costs.
9) During the second phase of the coronavirus recession, America’s temporarily strengthened social safety net will revert to its usual bare-bones form as the money runs out. Every worker for him/herself.
10) The broader group of freelancers, temps, and subcontractors who have few legal protections will be the first to go when the economy sputters.
11) The safety net is in tatters, and it wasn’t enough to begin with.
12) And tens of millions will lose their health insurance. Of course, the good news is they won’t be able to afford food for long enough to need the health insurance. So there’s that.
13) Companies won’t have access to capital. Inflation will go up. Too many people for too few resources.
14) Nearly 300 million guns in this country.
Given how employers are likely to act in response to the economic downturn, many of those now laid off may well remain unemployed for a prolonged period. The old stigmas against unemployed workers will resurface, as memories of the coronavirus crisis fade and people find new reasons to fault others for not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
Even during the Great Depression, a global economic catastrophe that drove the U.S. unemployment rate to 25% at its worst (it’s now 17%) resentment of the unemployed grew as the doldrums persisted. Critics of the Roosevelt administration excoriated the long-term unemployed as malingerers and reprobates and assailed New Deal programs as socialist schemes to tax the middle class into poverty.
In my opinion, we are completely and totally screwed. It’s too late to switch the economy back on as the desperate protestors want to do. In three months, the articles will be general astonishment at the inability of the American economy to bounce back as the death knell sounds for millions of unemployed and underemployed. The media elite, the political elite, the rich and those who fed the shelter-in-place-until-America-is-ruined concept who lied about all of us being in this together will have created a second-tier, ripped-apart-at-the-seams nation. Martial law will be declared within a year. And we’ll deserve it.
That's my opinion. Would love to hear from you how wrong I am and why. And since I am the low-watt bulb on this board, I would love to hear your fix and how America will quickly return to 3.5% unemployment and 3%+ GDP growth.
It is clear that most on this board don’t understand that we are now entering a devastating period of mass unemployment, corporate failures and a disintegration of the American dream, so let me offer you a glimpse into the future.
1) The coming unemployment crisis will worsen for workers who remain unemployed. Yes, companies will rehire workers. They’ll use this opportunity to replace their former workers with cheaper and more contingent labor. Lowering labor costs is easy when the economy is stalled and workers are grateful for any opportunity.
2) More broadly, the crisis will accelerate some long-running market trends toward industry consolidation (which reduces one’s choice of potential employers).
3) Same with greater automation (in which machines replace human labor), and worker precarity (which happens when the convenience of employers and customers entirely overrides the well-being of individual workers).
4) Even with the payroll subsidies that the stimulus legislation provides to small businesses, the prolonged shutdown will destroy mom-and-pop businesses that suffered from decades of brutal competition with the likes of Walmart and Amazon.
5) There was a sense that customers prefer human interaction, but social distancing has enhanced the appeal of self-service kiosks—and even delivery drones.
6) Once the pandemic subsides, people may go back to their old habits, but corporations do not typically let such opportunities for cutting costs go to waste—as we have seen whenever efforts to organize workers prompt employers to suddenly bring in more computers and robots, outsource work to contractors, or move jobs entirely offshore.
7) Real Estate will tank. Many service jobs can be done from home, employers are finding. And downtown real estate and utilities are expensive.
8) Companies will not hire back older/more experienced workers because companies want to cut labor costs.
9) During the second phase of the coronavirus recession, America’s temporarily strengthened social safety net will revert to its usual bare-bones form as the money runs out. Every worker for him/herself.
10) The broader group of freelancers, temps, and subcontractors who have few legal protections will be the first to go when the economy sputters.
11) The safety net is in tatters, and it wasn’t enough to begin with.
12) And tens of millions will lose their health insurance. Of course, the good news is they won’t be able to afford food for long enough to need the health insurance. So there’s that.
13) Companies won’t have access to capital. Inflation will go up. Too many people for too few resources.
14) Nearly 300 million guns in this country.
Given how employers are likely to act in response to the economic downturn, many of those now laid off may well remain unemployed for a prolonged period. The old stigmas against unemployed workers will resurface, as memories of the coronavirus crisis fade and people find new reasons to fault others for not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
Even during the Great Depression, a global economic catastrophe that drove the U.S. unemployment rate to 25% at its worst (it’s now 17%) resentment of the unemployed grew as the doldrums persisted. Critics of the Roosevelt administration excoriated the long-term unemployed as malingerers and reprobates and assailed New Deal programs as socialist schemes to tax the middle class into poverty.
In my opinion, we are completely and totally screwed. It’s too late to switch the economy back on as the desperate protestors want to do. In three months, the articles will be general astonishment at the inability of the American economy to bounce back as the death knell sounds for millions of unemployed and underemployed. The media elite, the political elite, the rich and those who fed the shelter-in-place-until-America-is-ruined concept who lied about all of us being in this together will have created a second-tier, ripped-apart-at-the-seams nation. Martial law will be declared within a year. And we’ll deserve it.
That's my opinion. Would love to hear from you how wrong I am and why. And since I am the low-watt bulb on this board, I would love to hear your fix and how America will quickly return to 3.5% unemployment and 3%+ GDP growth.
Audaces fortuna iuvat
