Fareed Zakaria points out that striking workers is a good thing. After all, the American employer treats its workers worst than all industrialized countries.
Zakaria hits the nail on the head
Once again, Fareed Zakaria provides the unfortunate truth. He first points out that Americans are leaving their jobs in record numbers.
“About four million workers have quit their jobs every month,” Zakaria said. “It is a trend economists have called the great resignation. … The scale of resignations this year is beyond anything on record. Many believe it echoes what we’re seeing with the strikes.”
And why are they quitting their jobs?
“Workers seem to be unhappy with long hours low pay and generally poor working conditions,” Zakaria said. “And a record number of job openings gives them the freedom to demand more or walk away.”
And here is the best explanation for the exodus and the complicity of corporate greed in America, something not very evident in other wealthy countries.
“As the MIT professor David Autor recently wrote in the Times, the US economy has long been plagued by a glut of bad jobs,” Zakaria said. “Take a look at pay low skilled; American workers are some of the lowest paid in the industrialized world. They make almost one-third less per hour than their counterparts in Canada. Low-skilled Norwegian workers are paid more than twice as much. But pay isn’t the only problem. MIT’s auto writes: American workers also receive less notice and severance when they’re fired compared to workers in other wealthy countries. They take less vacation unlike their peers in most other rich countries> They don’t have guaranteed paid parental leave.”
Workers now have the upper hand.
“Autor says that the labor shortages we’re seeing the record job openings alongside record resignation are a market phenomenon that compels companies to improve on some of these policies to attract workers,” Zakaria points out. “We’ve already seen this in terms of pay average hourly earnings for workers have risen by more than a dollar in the past year.”
And guess what? This reality is good for the economy. It leaves space for the entrepreneurial spirit and compels a more equitable distribution of both income and wealth.