On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Labor Secretary Marty Walsh stated that in order for small businesses to get their employees back to work, “the biggest thing is going to be COVID-19, quite honestly, making sure that we’re getting people vaccinated and making sure that we’re getting them tested. We have to get beyond the virus.”
Co-host Willie Geist asked, “[I]f you talk to anybody running a small business, let’s say a restaurant, they say, I just can’t get people to take the job. I’ve raised my wages. I’m out running plates. I’m busing tables. I’m cleaning dishes. I’m doing everything I have to do to keep this thing afloat. But a lot of my employees that I had before are now going to work in an Amazon warehouse or something like that. So, what do you say to these small business owners who are doing what they think they have to do? They’re raising their wages. They’re trying to stay afloat. When will those people start coming back into the small businesses? What changes the dynamic in this economy we see right now?”
Walsh responded, “I think the biggest thing is going to be COVID-19, quite honestly, making sure that we’re getting people vaccinated and making sure that we’re getting them tested. We have to get beyond the virus. We have to continue to move forward so that we can get out of virus — out of the virus time that we’re living in right now. And I think that’s going to be one way. I think — also, I think lots of people are deciding what’s good for their future, what’s good for their family. I know in the places where you do have Amazon factories or FedEx factories or UPS factories, they’re hiring lots of people, particularly now with the holidays coming and they’re taking — they’re denting the job market, if you will, for some of these other industries. But this isn’t anything new. This has happened for the last ten years in this country. But we do have to — we have to work to make sure that we’re offering opportunities to people for job training. We need to make sure that if people truly — people are going to have to go back to work. There [are] very few people in America, I think, sitting on their couch saying, wait a second, I don’t want to go back to work. Their unemployment is out. They’re going to have to get back to work. And I think the biggest way back is by defeating the virus.”
He added, “When I say defeating the virus, I mean moving beyond the virus.”
Geist then asked about the struggles business owners are having filling jobs in places with high vaccination rates.
Walsh answered, “I think a lot of people are basing their decision — people who aren’t going back to work — on, is that industry going to be — allow me the opportunity to be able to put food on the table and raise a family. And I think that, again, a lot of these cities aren’t fully open yet, a lot of these restaurants aren’t at capacity. And a lot of people that work in these industries expect to earn a living, whether it’s through tips or through their wages, their salaries that work in these places, and a lot of these businesses have not recovered to…full customer base yet. And what we’re doing here, the president laid out a plan in January to get people vaccinated. We’re working, he gave me a mandate, basically, at the Department of Labor to do everything we can to get people back to work. We’re averaging about 640,000 jobs per month since the president took office.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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