Extra $300 unemployment didn’t hurt Missouri workforce. Pandemic opened workers’ eyes

Which of these recent stories got it right?

Was it The New York Times piece, “Where jobless benefits were cut, jobs are still hard to fill?” It talked to Missouri workforce development officials who saw “virtually no uptick in applicants” since Gov. Mike Parson ended federal unemployment supplements of $300 a week.

Or was it The Wall Street Journal story the day before? That one also cited Missouri, and concluded that “Americans are leaving unemployment rolls more quickly in states cutting off benefits.”

There’s anecdotal evidence that cutting off the federal supplement has goosed the labor market. Daniel Mehan, president and CEO of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry, pointed to one local business serving the convenience store industry that had been struggling to find anyone willing to take jobs it had open. When the extra $300 ended, he said, “they had 120 applicants the next day.”

But even his counterpart at the Kansas Chamber, Alan Cobb, says that a year of disruption has also brought about a new workforce reality.

And in view of both the strong June U.S. jobs report and all the “help wanted” signs, it’s clear that many who once plugged away at thankless work that pays next to nothing are in no hurry to get back to those gigs. When Taco Bell is dangling a signing bonus in front of prospective employees, you know a paradigm has shifted.

Scrubbing tile or stretching pizza dough at Kansas’ current minimum wage of $7.25 — the same as the federal rate, unbelievably the same since 2009 — pays a full-time employee a not-so-grand total of $15,080 a year. With no sick time, no parental leave and no vacation. In a city where rentcafe.com says average monthly rent for 896 square feet is $1,071. Does that show your business really values its employees’ toil, or should reasonably expect their productivity or motivation?

The pandemic “has altered a whole lot of people’s point of view about their careers,” said Cobb, who has heard of professionals deciding to trade shuffling PowerPoint decks for living out of their cars on the open road. And if a household can muddle through financially while a former low-wage worker pursues higher education or job training, it may well be willing to endure some lean months for the promise of decades of future prosperity.

As McDonald’s deploys touchscreens in place of order-takers and Amazon turns to robots, not human hands, to fill shipping boxes, the need for low-skilled, low-paid workers will only decrease.

But there’s also evidence that businesses are not doomed to pricing themselves out of the market if they offer higher wages. Even in Los Angeles, where the cost of living is sky-high, ordering a Double-Double at In-N-Out Burger will set you back just a bit more than $4, while the company’s starting pay is north of $16 an hour. So at least some employers have cracked the code.

In the Kansas City area and elsewhere, that extra $300 has undoubtedly changed a lot of lives, if only for the 11 weeks it lasts. And if your bottom line wouldn’t feel a major bump from $3,300, maybe imagine yourself in the shoes of a fellow human being for whom that sum opened up a whole new world of possibilities.