The way to understand the whole ‘nobody wants to work these days’ rhetoric is: The person using it isn’t paying enough or is otherwise presenting enough red flags that people don’t want to work for them Because this looks bad, they then need to present the situation such that it’s not me, it’s them. They’re lazy. The whole point to saying this shit is to try to shame prospective employees into accepting what you offer, or to shame them for not taking your offer.

One way to understand the times we’re in: If you compare average income in the 1930s (normalized to 2023 dollars) to average income today, believe it or not today’s average income buys you less than 1930’s average income did. If you do the same math to 1960s money, today’s median wage has less purchasing power than the minimum wage did in 1968.

There has been one time in the last century when a high-school educated worker could get an entry-level job and be able to afford a home and be able to support a family on a single income, and it was the 1950s and 60s. That timeframe owes its existence to the New Deal, and to the postwar fiscal policies (including high top marginal tax rates and public investment in technology, infrastructure, science, etc.) of the early post-war era. The people so desperately trying to restore the 1950s seem to be trying to get there by un-doing the civil rights era, as if the squeeze on labor’s buying power today wasn’t the straightforward product of rolling back the New Deal, busting unions, gutting antitrust regulation, and restoring oligarchy rule.