“It’s become apparent nobody wants to work in these hard times.”
Such statements have become emblematic of the Great Resignation and the years around the Covid-19 pandemic when workers quit en masse, refused to return to offices and embraced self-employment the most in more than a decade. The latest jobs report provided only more evidence: the labor force participation rate fell to the lowest level this year, and many restaurants, hotels and other businesses are still struggling with painful staffing shortages.
It turns out the quote comes from an editor of the Rooks County Record in Stockton, Kansas, lamenting coal mines shut down by strikes in April 1894. But it echoes recent sentiment: a Forbes story published in January, for example, cites a poll of executives that found one in five agreed with the statement “no one wants to work.”
In a viral Twitter thread, political scientist Paul Fairie of the University of Calgary, curated a collection of newspaper clippings from each decade decrying the death of the work ethic. While the last few years have their own unique characteristics — not the least of which includes a global pandemic — the thread captures the timelessness of the sentiment.
“It’s a conversation about work — about Covid and inflation and the pace of the economy right now — that caught people’s interest,” Fairie said of the response the thread generated. “It’s that point of, there’s nothing especially wrong with workers today.”
While there’s been a revival recently of the notion that people simply don’t want to work, it’s a long-running trope in American history, Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University said.
“You find a lot back in say, the 1870s. There was a recession in 1873 and there was a ‘vagabond scare,’ they called it at the time: People were hitting the road to avoid a working life and trying to sort of bum around the country,” he said. “Really what was happening is often these are migrant workers looking for work elsewhere, but in the public imagination at the time, there was this idea that there are people that just don’t want to work.”
In the same way, McCartin said, tropes about today’s labor shortages in industries like trucking, health care and the service industry get linked to the idea that people don’t want to work. “But that sidesteps the key issue, which is that a lot of jobs, for the amount of wear and tear and the hard labor involved — they just don’t pay enough,” he said. “Very often what this kind of rhetoric, whether it’s people don’t want to work or there’s a labor shortage, what that often speaks to is that wages simply aren't attractive enough for workers.”
A $15 hourly wage no longer cuts for most workers in in terms of covering basic expenses, especially as housing costs surge.
“Ten years ago, when the fight for $15 began, it seemed like Nirvana,” McCartin said. Now, the living wage for a family of two working adults and two children is $24.16 per hour, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Minimum Wage Calculator. To make a living wage, a single parent with two kids earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 would need to work 235 hours per week — almost six full-time minimum-wage jobs. While wage gains remained strong last month, raises aren’t keeping pace with inflation.