President Joe Biden has well-crafted speeches. In this one, he made it clear that employers need to step up and pay a living wage.
President Joe Biden, a living wage by another means?
As I listened to Joe Biden’s speech, I was taken aback at first. It seemed for a while that he would let the Republican and neoliberal narrative win the day. I thought he was joining the bandwagon to castigate those people receiving the extended unemployment purportedly instead of available jobs.
I rewound the feed and listened to the entire speech. His team crafted that speech perfectly. He first defends the American worker as those put in dire straits by the past derelict administration.
“We are not going to turn our backs on our fellow Americans,” Biden said. “22 million people lost their jobs in this pandemic, through no fault of their own. They lost their jobs to a virus and to a government that bungled its response to the crisis and failed to protect them.”
He pointed out that America is still short 8 Million jobs from the start of the pandemic. He said the unemployment benefits are a lifeline for most. He said no one should take their eyes off the ball.
“If you are receiving unemployment benefits,” Biden said. “And you are offered a ‘suitable job,’ you can’t refuse that job and just keep getting unemployment benefits.”
And he infers the suitable job by admonishing business and employers. He said employers needed to assist in getting their employees vaccinated. And he admonished them to pay a living wage.
This was a good speech. It could have gone after the false narrative of slave-driving corporations harshly. Instead, he had a tone that attempts to nudge them. Not to worry, those of us who are activists will.
We’re emerging from a pandemic, which topped off the increasing disaster of a decade of increasing wage stagnation. Now, conservatives want the workforce to return to work for even less benefits and $10k less per year wages, leaving the aging workforce to decide, blood pressure medications or allow an abdominal aortic aneurysm to rupture (one sure ain’t getting that fixed during one’s first year returning to work!).
One ponders, take it up the butt again for god-king Emperor and the wealthy or regale the world of the details of how to retain a supercritical mass in a modern boosted fission device for long enough to allow most of the assembly to fission…