Like 2.5 million other restaurant workers, I lost my job overnight not long after the World Health Organization designated COVID-19 a pandemic. Thanks to the CARES Act, the federal government expanded state safety nets by adding a supplemental $600 a week in unemployment benefits. While President Donald Trump allowed that extra benefit to expire in 2020, the most recent relief package passed by the Democratic-run Congress and the Biden administration put a $300-a-week benefit back on the table until September 6 for workers affected by the pandemic. There's no reason for workers to come back to their old jobs earning the same poverty wages, especially since more than 100 million Americans remain unvaccinated, and there's still a stable safety net in place until autumn.
It's not that unemployed restaurant workers don't want jobs — we just have more options now. In the manufacturing sector, where jobs typically come with higher pay and have higher rates of union representation, hiring is rapidly expanding at levels not seen in decades. Amazon, which pays a $15-an-hour minimum wage, added roughly half a million positions in the past year alone. The chief financial officer of Costco, which raised its minimum wage to $16 an hour, recently said the company had been "inundated" with job applications.
And it's important to remember that there are still more than 700,000 new applications for unemployment across the country each week (compared with a little over 200,000 before the pandemic), so jobs are still relatively scarce. The supplemental federal unemployment benefit is extremely necessary given how strained the US economy still is.
Being indoors and in close proximity to other people during a pandemic is dangerous work. Restaurant workers have a much higher chance of dying from COVID-19 than workers in other sectors, according to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. And any restaurant worker who takes on a job risks losing it again as the virus continues to surge around the country.
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It's not that unemployed restaurant workers don't want jobs — we just have more options now. In the manufacturing sector, where jobs typically come with higher pay and have higher rates of union representation, hiring is rapidly expanding at levels not seen in decades. Amazon, which pays a $15-an-hour minimum wage, added roughly half a million positions in the past year alone. The chief financial officer of Costco, which raised its minimum wage to $16 an hour, recently said the company had been "inundated" with job applications.
And it's important to remember that there are still more than 700,000 new applications for unemployment across the country each week (compared with a little over 200,000 before the pandemic), so jobs are still relatively scarce. The supplemental federal unemployment benefit is extremely necessary given how strained the US economy still is.
Being indoors and in close proximity to other people during a pandemic is dangerous work. Restaurant workers have a much higher chance of dying from COVID-19 than workers in other sectors, according to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. And any restaurant worker who takes on a job risks losing it again as the virus continues to surge around the country.
Restaurant workers should keep collecting unemployment instead of going back to work for poverty wages
Why would restaurant workers choose to go back to getting paid like dirt? Until employers raise wages, they're fine where they're at.
