Lawmakers Consider Incentives to Get People Back to Work
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Here's your Money Briefing for Thursday, June 3rd. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. Help wanted signs from the windows of businesses across the country aren't bringing in nearly enough people.
How are employers describing the current hiring shortage and its scale?
Millions of Americans still out of work or staying home. One factor that's getting a lot of attention, the extra $300 in weekly federal unemployment payments.
The debate has kind of centered around the 300, should it stay or should it go? But beneath the surface, there's interesting conversations about, OK, how can we get workers to come back?
Coming up, our economics reporter Kate Davidson will discuss what employers are doing to lure workers back and proposals on the table in Congress and in state houses that would provide incentives to get people to return to work. That's after the break.
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When the May jobs report is released tomorrow, it's expected to show some improvement over April's hiring slowdown. But that'll still reflect millions of people remaining on the labor market sidelines, not ready to rejoin the workforce. It's ahead of businesses convince workers to come back. Our economics reporter, Kate Davidson, has been talking to business leaders and following the political debate in Washington. And she's with us now to discuss. Kate, thanks for taking the time to chat.
Thanks for having me.
So let's start with the trouble that employers are having filling slots. How big a problem has this become?
Well, we've certainly been hearing from employers for a while now, several months, that they've been having a hard time finding workers. In any sort of economic downturn, there's always a big debate about whether this is really a problem with employers engaging you know, they're really workers not willing to work or are employers just not offering enough money. But there is some data that can help us, you know, figure this out a little bit. So we know that job openings reached a record level at the end of March. There's 8.1 million job openings, and that's reflective of a widening gap between open positions and workers who are willing and able to take those roles. So there is some truth to this, but it's still sort of an open question about why this is happening.
You know, there's many millions of people out of work. You know, still a big hole here from this pandemic recession. But there's a question about why people aren't taking these jobs right now.
Now, we've heard talk for a while in Washington about ending the extra $300 in weekly unemployment benefits as a way to encourage workers to get back into the labor market. What's the latest on that?
This program that you just mentioned, of course, that's one of the reasons that employers and I think Republicans, business groups are pointing to for why workers aren't coming back. Since last year, actually, Congress agreed at the beginning of the pandemic to basically expand jobless benefits. They were giving people more money than they ordinarily would get in their weekly benefit checks.
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