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If you read the underlying report that drove the unemployment pull quote you can see they spend a lot of time explaining that the labor shortage is driven by an

If you read the underlying report that drove the unemployment pull quote you can see they spend a lot of time explaining that the labor shortage is driven by an increase in the population not looking for work. It speculates that increase is attributable to obvious pandemic causes like needing to provide child care, deal with sick family or older family. https://lmi.mt.gov/_docs/Publications/LMI-Pubs/Labor-Market-Publications/EAG-0321.pdf https://lmi.mt.gov/_docs/Publications/LMI-Pubs/Labor-Market-... Missoula public schools were still operating with a remote day per week when those numbers were collected, it’s really hard to work with a young kid in need of care an extra day per week. So it’s not surprising the workforce size reduced. In light of this, this change seems particularly cruel.

addicted 6y ago
Who needs evidence when you have ideology.
- silicon2401 6y ago
  This is a surprisingly insightful phrase in this day and age. So much can be explained by this, at least when it comes to human and societal behavior
- jl2718 6y ago
  > It speculates ... I can’t tell which ‘side’ you are referring to.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    This bill is clearly not one that is particularly compassionate. They're not creating new social safety nets. Do you really need us to spell it out?
    - floatingatoll 6y ago
      I’ll spell it out for the unaware, especially those in non-US countries that lack context. There’s a lot of assumptions built into this summary, and it is not clear whether it’s fully accurate or not, but it does help convey the viewpoint you’re referring to in a more comprehensive fashion. America was and continues to be built in large part by wage theft and labor exploitation. We don’t provide the social support services that are taken for granted in first-world countries like Canada, because doing so conflicts with the strongly-held belief — the ideology — that the best way to support the poor is to ensure that they’re employed in a job, no matter how terrible the working conditions or pay. Workers are told that this is a “ladder of success”, but upward mobility has stalled due to the wealth being drained out of the system into the ultra-wealthy and their families. Workers are encouraged to work for local businesses, who are themselves going bankrupt and collapsing at the swordpoints of Walmart, Amazon, and Covid. Health care costs have skyrocketed, health insurance is only offered to a subset of the workforce, and minimum wage doesn’t cover rent, food, and health care (pick one only). So, Montana is canceling unemployment as a way to force people to work at jobs they otherwise wouldn’t work at. This forces people back into the modern enslavement system, and takes for granted that enough employers are left in Montana to hire those workers. Rather than assessing whether enough jobs exist for their citizens and then requiring businesses to pay a reasonable wage that covers living costs, or offering benefits to attract workers, the state of Montana will simply block unemployment benefits. Employers that offer miserable wages, no health insurance, and poor working conditions are expected to see an increase in workers applying for those roles, further weakening the negotiating position of workers versus employers. The best analogy, then, for the perceived cruelty of these motivations is, in these modified words of the consultant from “Office Space”: “We fixed the glitch. So they won’t be receiving an unemployment check anymore. So it’ll just work itself out naturally.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUE0PPQI3is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUE0PPQI3is
      - keeganpoppen 6y ago
        looks like we've found David Graeber's account... ;P
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - jl2718 6y ago
      Hmmm... I was trying to point out that speculation may be more ideological than evidentiary. Was that missed, or am I the one driving in the slow lane?
Avshalom 6y ago
There's also the obvious "problem" that when every employer in the state/city is trying to hire simultaneously then employers of last resort will be the last applied to.
- eatbitseveryday 6y ago
  hire*
- Avshalom 6y ago
  Another obvious question to ask is what's the student population deficit vs previous years. Montana has several large schools in small cities. So if students never showed up thats thousands of people worth of work force that probably don't show up well on surveys
newacct583 6y ago
Indeed. Literally from the article: "Montana's unemployment rate was 3.8% in March". That's higher than it was before the pandemic! How is that even remotely consistent with a "severe labor shortage"?
- numbsafari 6y ago
  Per the parent, unemployment is not the same thing as workforce participation. If someone has decided to stop looking for work so that they can stay home and care for a sick family member, or take care of a child, then they are no longer counted towards the unemployment rate, even though overall workforce participation has declined.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    No, that's the U-3 number which is intended to measure people actively seeking work. It's true there's a lot of subtlety with measuring and understanding unemployment statistics, but this argument is just spin, it doesn't hold. The simple truth is that workforce participation in Montana (and the rest of the US) is actually quite high right now, especially given the pandemic context. This policy is simply misguided, period. It targets the wrong people for the wrong things to solve a problem that doesn't exist. And it's actively harming the people who elected the government. All because the people making decisions choose to believe spin and not truths.
    - after_care 6y ago
      You stated your viewpoint, and claimed that the other point of viewpoint is “spin”. However you haven’t made a compelling argument why the opposing viewpoint is spin and why yours is better.
      - alexilliamson 6y ago
        Nor did the parent cite and actual number for the "quite high" workforce participation rate.
    - 6y ago
socruel 6y ago
Yes, so cruel to force you to earn your own living instead of being supported by others who didn't get the chance to have offspring and be subsidized for it prior to the pandemic The disease doesn't affect kids. Open schools and get people back to work. I'm tired of working so I can pay peoples' welfare. I'd sure like to not work and get paid, too, but that's not reality. Someone needs to tell the children at r/antiwork that, too. Wowwww flag the opposing opinion real mature HN
ABeeSea 6y ago
With Republicans, you can always assume that the cruelty is the point. See for example, forced child separation for the nursing babies of asylum seekers.
- Vaslo 6y ago
  And with Democrats you can always assume naivety and manipulation is the point. Those forced seps started with Obama and are still continued under the current socialist Democrat administration. I know you will try and make an excuse here for how it was worse under Trump. Doesn’t have anything to do with this chain but since you brought it up, I can’t let it go without correcting.
  - ABeeSea 6y ago
    That’s not what the inspector general of the DoJ says. This was a policy instituted by Trump’s DoJ. Why would AG Jeff Sessions say “We need to take away the children”, if that was already happening? > The five U.S. attorneys along the border with Mexico, including three appointed by President Trump, recoiled in May 2018 against an order to prosecute all undocumented immigrants even if it meant separating children from their parents. They told top Justice Department officials they were “deeply concerned” about the children’s welfare. >But the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, made it clear what Mr. Trump wanted on a conference call later that afternoon, according to a two-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s inspector general into Mr. Trump’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy. >“We need to take away children,” Mr. Sessions told the prosecutors, according to participants’ notes. One added in shorthand: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.” >Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants. > The Justice Department’s top officials were “a driving force” behind the policy that spurred the separation of thousands of families, many of them fleeing violence in Central America and seeking asylum in the United States, before Mr. Trump abandoned it amid global outrage, according to a draft report of the results of the investigation by Michael E. Horowitz, the department’s inspector general. > Though Mr. Sessions sought to distance himself from the policy, allowing Mr. Trump and Homeland Security Department officials to largely be blamed, he and other top law enforcement officials understood that “zero tolerance” meant that migrant families would be separated and wanted that to happen because they believed it would deter future illegal immigration, Mr. Horowitz wrote. > “The department’s single-minded focus on increasing prosecutions came at the expense of careful and effective implementation of the policy, especially with regard to prosecution of family-unit adults and the resulting child separations,” the draft report said. The cruelty was absolutely the point. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/us/politics/family-separation-border-immigration-jeff-sessions-rod-rosenstein.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/us/politics/family-separa...
AuryGlenz 6y ago
I'm in Minnesota, but I've had friends that own small businesses have people refuse to come back to work and they've straight up told them it's because their unemployment benefits pay them roughly the same amount (or more) as they'd get for working. The local turkey processing plant has a huge sign on bonus right now for the same reason, just to try and coax people back to work.
- pmastela 6y ago
  Have the small business owners increased the hourly wages in light of this?
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    I don't think it's particularly healthy that we expect the meager cashflows of small businesses to compete with the money printer at the federal reserve.
    - mindslight 6y ago
      Sure but this has been the monetary policy for the past two decades - eg all of that surveillance valley "disruption". National brands get limitless ZIRP investment money, while local owner-equity businesses get run out of business. The new change is that some of the money printing is being used to help individuals, rather than traditionally undermining them.
    - sixothree 6y ago
      Small businesses can't afford to pay $1200 per month?
      - missedthecue 6y ago
        It's much more than $1200. It's $300 state and $300 federal, weekly, so $2400 a month. But business can't offer $2500 and rake in the applications. When you're getting $2400 a month for sitting around watching movies all day, it is going to take a lot to move the needle and make you want to go back to work.
RickJWagner 6y ago
I was born and raised in the midwest. I totally understand why Montana would do such a thing, and I believe the move will be popular. Red states are different than blue states, and that's ok. What seems cruel/perveted/bigoted/anarchistic/mean-spirited/unpatriotic in one place is not in the other. It has a lot to do with the unspoken social contract of the region. The best news: If you're stuck in a state that doesn't fit you, it's a free country, you can move to one that better aligns.
- kasey_junk 6y ago
  Just for context I was born in & have spent most of my life in the Midwest of the USA. My observation about cruelty was the double dealing on display with the governors quotes. It implied that the data said it was the benefits causing the lack of employees when their own labor bureau was saying it was pandemic related issues.

addicted 6y ago

Who needs evidence when you have ideology.

silicon2401 6y ago
This is a surprisingly insightful phrase in this day and age. So much can be explained by this, at least when it comes to human and societal behavior
jl2718 6y ago
> It speculates ... I can’t tell which ‘side’ you are referring to.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  This bill is clearly not one that is particularly compassionate. They're not creating new social safety nets. Do you really need us to spell it out?
  - floatingatoll 6y ago
    I’ll spell it out for the unaware, especially those in non-US countries that lack context. There’s a lot of assumptions built into this summary, and it is not clear whether it’s fully accurate or not, but it does help convey the viewpoint you’re referring to in a more comprehensive fashion. America was and continues to be built in large part by wage theft and labor exploitation. We don’t provide the social support services that are taken for granted in first-world countries like Canada, because doing so conflicts with the strongly-held belief — the ideology — that the best way to support the poor is to ensure that they’re employed in a job, no matter how terrible the working conditions or pay. Workers are told that this is a “ladder of success”, but upward mobility has stalled due to the wealth being drained out of the system into the ultra-wealthy and their families. Workers are encouraged to work for local businesses, who are themselves going bankrupt and collapsing at the swordpoints of Walmart, Amazon, and Covid. Health care costs have skyrocketed, health insurance is only offered to a subset of the workforce, and minimum wage doesn’t cover rent, food, and health care (pick one only). So, Montana is canceling unemployment as a way to force people to work at jobs they otherwise wouldn’t work at. This forces people back into the modern enslavement system, and takes for granted that enough employers are left in Montana to hire those workers. Rather than assessing whether enough jobs exist for their citizens and then requiring businesses to pay a reasonable wage that covers living costs, or offering benefits to attract workers, the state of Montana will simply block unemployment benefits. Employers that offer miserable wages, no health insurance, and poor working conditions are expected to see an increase in workers applying for those roles, further weakening the negotiating position of workers versus employers. The best analogy, then, for the perceived cruelty of these motivations is, in these modified words of the consultant from “Office Space”: “We fixed the glitch. So they won’t be receiving an unemployment check anymore. So it’ll just work itself out naturally.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUE0PPQI3is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUE0PPQI3is
    - keeganpoppen 6y ago
      looks like we've found David Graeber's account... ;P
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - jl2718 6y ago
    Hmmm... I was trying to point out that speculation may be more ideological than evidentiary. Was that missed, or am I the one driving in the slow lane?

Avshalom 6y ago

There's also the obvious "problem" that when every employer in the state/city is trying to hire simultaneously then employers of last resort will be the last applied to.

eatbitseveryday 6y ago
hire*
Avshalom 6y ago
Another obvious question to ask is what's the student population deficit vs previous years. Montana has several large schools in small cities. So if students never showed up thats thousands of people worth of work force that probably don't show up well on surveys

newacct583 6y ago

Indeed. Literally from the article: "Montana's unemployment rate was 3.8% in March". That's higher than it was before the pandemic! How is that even remotely consistent with a "severe labor shortage"?

numbsafari 6y ago
Per the parent, unemployment is not the same thing as workforce participation. If someone has decided to stop looking for work so that they can stay home and care for a sick family member, or take care of a child, then they are no longer counted towards the unemployment rate, even though overall workforce participation has declined.
- newacct583 6y ago
  No, that's the U-3 number which is intended to measure people actively seeking work. It's true there's a lot of subtlety with measuring and understanding unemployment statistics, but this argument is just spin, it doesn't hold. The simple truth is that workforce participation in Montana (and the rest of the US) is actually quite high right now, especially given the pandemic context. This policy is simply misguided, period. It targets the wrong people for the wrong things to solve a problem that doesn't exist. And it's actively harming the people who elected the government. All because the people making decisions choose to believe spin and not truths.
  - after_care 6y ago
    You stated your viewpoint, and claimed that the other point of viewpoint is “spin”. However you haven’t made a compelling argument why the opposing viewpoint is spin and why yours is better.
    - alexilliamson 6y ago
      Nor did the parent cite and actual number for the "quite high" workforce participation rate.
  - 6y ago

socruel 6y ago

Yes, so cruel to force you to earn your own living instead of being supported by others who didn't get the chance to have offspring and be subsidized for it prior to the pandemic The disease doesn't affect kids. Open schools and get people back to work. I'm tired of working so I can pay peoples' welfare. I'd sure like to not work and get paid, too, but that's not reality. Someone needs to tell the children at r/antiwork that, too. Wowwww flag the opposing opinion real mature HN

ABeeSea 6y ago

With Republicans, you can always assume that the cruelty is the point. See for example, forced child separation for the nursing babies of asylum seekers.

Vaslo 6y ago
And with Democrats you can always assume naivety and manipulation is the point. Those forced seps started with Obama and are still continued under the current socialist Democrat administration. I know you will try and make an excuse here for how it was worse under Trump. Doesn’t have anything to do with this chain but since you brought it up, I can’t let it go without correcting.
- ABeeSea 6y ago
  That’s not what the inspector general of the DoJ says. This was a policy instituted by Trump’s DoJ. Why would AG Jeff Sessions say “We need to take away the children”, if that was already happening? > The five U.S. attorneys along the border with Mexico, including three appointed by President Trump, recoiled in May 2018 against an order to prosecute all undocumented immigrants even if it meant separating children from their parents. They told top Justice Department officials they were “deeply concerned” about the children’s welfare. >But the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, made it clear what Mr. Trump wanted on a conference call later that afternoon, according to a two-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s inspector general into Mr. Trump’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy. >“We need to take away children,” Mr. Sessions told the prosecutors, according to participants’ notes. One added in shorthand: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.” >Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants. > The Justice Department’s top officials were “a driving force” behind the policy that spurred the separation of thousands of families, many of them fleeing violence in Central America and seeking asylum in the United States, before Mr. Trump abandoned it amid global outrage, according to a draft report of the results of the investigation by Michael E. Horowitz, the department’s inspector general. > Though Mr. Sessions sought to distance himself from the policy, allowing Mr. Trump and Homeland Security Department officials to largely be blamed, he and other top law enforcement officials understood that “zero tolerance” meant that migrant families would be separated and wanted that to happen because they believed it would deter future illegal immigration, Mr. Horowitz wrote. > “The department’s single-minded focus on increasing prosecutions came at the expense of careful and effective implementation of the policy, especially with regard to prosecution of family-unit adults and the resulting child separations,” the draft report said. The cruelty was absolutely the point. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/us/politics/family-separation-border-immigration-jeff-sessions-rod-rosenstein.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/us/politics/family-separa...

AuryGlenz 6y ago

I'm in Minnesota, but I've had friends that own small businesses have people refuse to come back to work and they've straight up told them it's because their unemployment benefits pay them roughly the same amount (or more) as they'd get for working. The local turkey processing plant has a huge sign on bonus right now for the same reason, just to try and coax people back to work.

pmastela 6y ago
Have the small business owners increased the hourly wages in light of this?
- missedthecue 6y ago
  I don't think it's particularly healthy that we expect the meager cashflows of small businesses to compete with the money printer at the federal reserve.
  - mindslight 6y ago
    Sure but this has been the monetary policy for the past two decades - eg all of that surveillance valley "disruption". National brands get limitless ZIRP investment money, while local owner-equity businesses get run out of business. The new change is that some of the money printing is being used to help individuals, rather than traditionally undermining them.
  - sixothree 6y ago
    Small businesses can't afford to pay $1200 per month?
    - missedthecue 6y ago
      It's much more than $1200. It's $300 state and $300 federal, weekly, so $2400 a month. But business can't offer $2500 and rake in the applications. When you're getting $2400 a month for sitting around watching movies all day, it is going to take a lot to move the needle and make you want to go back to work.

RickJWagner 6y ago

I was born and raised in the midwest. I totally understand why Montana would do such a thing, and I believe the move will be popular. Red states are different than blue states, and that's ok. What seems cruel/perveted/bigoted/anarchistic/mean-spirited/unpatriotic in one place is not in the other. It has a lot to do with the unspoken social contract of the region. The best news: If you're stuck in a state that doesn't fit you, it's a free country, you can move to one that better aligns.

kasey_junk 6y ago
Just for context I was born in & have spent most of my life in the Midwest of the USA. My observation about cruelty was the double dealing on display with the governors quotes. It implied that the data said it was the benefits causing the lack of employees when their own labor bureau was saying it was pandemic related issues.