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EXTENDED UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS ARE HURTING MAIN STREET
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Auchincloss). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2021, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Bost) for 30 minutes.
General Leave
Mr. BOST. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Illinois?
There was no objection.
Mr. BOST. Mr. Speaker, I am a small business man. We own a small business, my wife and I. I know many small business owners across America are struggling to reopen and rebuild after COVID-19 shutdowns. They simply can't find workers to fill the job openings.
Why? Because the Federal Government is disincentivizing people from working. Many people are making more money off unemployment insurance than they would if they were back at work, and that is having a crippling impact on Main Streets across America, including in my district.
People in Washington need to hear these stories. Southern Illinois is home to Belleville Boot Company, a military boot manufacturer founded in 1904. A year ago, they employed nearly 240 workers in Belleville. But after each round of stimulus checks, as good as they may be, they had fewer and fewer workers showing up. Now, their workforce has dropped to 26 percent, and they can't find enough workers to fill the openings.
In Alton, the Kreative Kids Learning Center has helped educate local children for 51 years. The owner, Keith, says that they currently have 21 employees but are desperate for more. He runs ads in the newspaper, online, and on social media, offering a good wage, yet he received zero applications--zero.
He has even had to turn children away because he is so short of staff.
In Carbondale, Illinois, Mary Lou's Grill has been a local staple since 1962, serving up the most famous biscuits and gravy in town. On a telephone town hall last night, Marilynn, the owner of Mary Lou's, shared that her food suppliers are unable to hire enough people to run their facilities. That potentially means food shortages and skyrocketing prices for restaurants and customers.
Before COVID-19, the Broadway Grille in Sparta, Illinois, had more applicants than they had positions to fill. But now, Justin, the owner, says that some former employees have told him they will not seek a job as long as they are getting unemployment benefits.
He is so short-staffed that he doesn't have enough people to answer the phone most nights. If he can't find workers soon, he isn't sure what he will do.
This is not just a southern Illinois issue. It touches every community across this country. That is why I have invited several of my colleagues to highlight how their districts have been impacted.
I will start, first off, by yielding to the gentlewoman from Indiana
(Mrs. Walorski), ranking member of the Subcommittee on Worker and Family Support. She has many stories I am sure she can tell.
Mrs. WALORSKI. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for hosting this critical Special Order to discuss the ongoing impact of enhanced unemployment benefits on Main Street businesses, the American workforce, and our economic recovery.
Like many of my colleagues, I have seen ``help wanted'' signs all over my district. I have heard from local job creators about the difficulties they face in hiring workers they need just to stay open. Many have told me they can't even get people to show up for an interview.
Enhanced Federal unemployment benefits made sense last year as a way to keep those who lost a job and to reduce the economic impact of government-imposed business closures and stay-at-home orders. But now, we are facing a much different situation today.
Safe and effective vaccines are bringing us closer to defeating COVID-19. Employers have updated their facilities and operations so workers can safely return back to work. Businesses are fully operating.
Now is the time to reconnect unemployed workers with their jobs, but enhanced jobless benefits are discouraging Americans from returning to work, making it impossible for businesses to hire.
The Democrats' partisan $1.9 trillion spending bill extended supplemental unemployment benefits of $300 per week until September 6. At this level, nearly 40 percent of jobless Americans can make more on unemployment than they can by returning to work.
Main Street businesses shouldn't have to compete with the Federal Government for workers. In fact, they can't compete with the Federal Government for workers. The labor shortage currently is crushing small businesses, which are fighting to keep their businesses alive while coming out of a pandemic.
In late March, I hosted a virtual roundtable and heard from a Hoosier who owns a small insulation company. He told me: It has been quite the burden to have all these tools on hand and all these trucks in the driveway and to put people in the seats to get them to be able to drive to homes to provide insulation when nobody wants to come to work.
Just last week, we saw the undeniable impact of these misguided policies when the monthly jobs report showed hiring slowing to a crawl in April in this country, despite millions of job openings.
My biggest fear is that we will see permanent job loss across our economy as small businesses close their doors because they can't hire workers that they need.
But it is not too late to avoid this outcome. I recently joined Ways and Means Republican leader Kevin Brady in introducing the Reopening America by Supporting Workers and Businesses Act. Our bill would turn extra unemployment benefits into a back-to-work bonus that would incentivize these workers to come back to work instead of staying on unemployment. The legislation would also reinstate the Federal requirement that those receiving unemployment benefits be engaged in actively searching for a job.
The American people have faced unprecedented challenges since last spring. Now, safe and effective vaccines have given us renewed hope that we can defeat COVID-19, rebuild our economy, and return to normal life.
Let's not put our recovery at risk by pushing workers to the sidelines of this economy. Let's get Americans back to work, Main Street businesses back on their feet, and the American Dream back on track for every single American.
Mr. BOST. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Williams).
Mr. WILLIAMS of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I rise to voice my concerns about the current state of the economy and the worker shortages that employers face due to the Democrats' extended unemployment benefits.
As a small business owner for 51 years, I have seen a lot. I know firsthand how challenging a year of government-mandated shutdowns have been for business owners.
The enhanced unemployment benefits in last year's CARES Act were meant to be temporary and targeted to the effects of this COVID-19 pandemic. Now, over a year later, and thanks to the success of Operation Warp Speed and the Trump administration's focus on vaccine development, the economy is ready to fully open. Yet, millions of Americans who can return to work are choosing a government paycheck over earning an income.
Unemployment was never meant to be a full-time job. We are telling people it is a career, for crying out loud, and living off the government for more than 26 weeks while you are capable of working will only delay our economic recovery.
In Texas' 25th Congressional District, hundreds of small businesses are feeling the effects. They simply cannot operate their businesses if employees refuse to return to work. States need to enforce unemployment laws. If employees are offered a job and they refuse it, unemployment benefits should immediately expire.
Enhanced weekly payments will continue to eliminate the incentive to return to work. Under no circumstances should they continue past September.
Vaccines are widely available if people so choose, but there are no longer excuses to remain on the sidelines.
{time} 1915
Before the pandemic, we had the greatest economy in modern history. Certainly the best I have seen in 51 years. For all the right reasons, and with thanks to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed by President Trump and Republicans, we had more jobs than people.
However, under President Biden and House Democrats, we have more jobs than people, because what they ultimately want is to make Americans reliant on the government. It is simply called socialism. It is victims versus patriots.
In God we trust.
Mr. BOST. Mr. Speaker, I thank the former speaker because of his experience in small business and running a business for a majority of his life.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from West Virginia
(Mrs. Miller).
Mrs. MILLER of West Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to share stories of employers across the country who are struggling to find and hire employees.
According to April's disastrous jobs report, there are 8.1 million job openings in the United States. Employers can't fill them and, as a result, can't operate their businesses effectively.
The extended unemployment handouts my colleagues across the aisle keep reauthorizing incentivize workers to stay at home and collect unemployment rather than go to work.
I have talked with countless small business owners who cannot compete with these handouts and are facing a grave workforce shortage.
I recently visited with manufacturers in Minnesota. They have had to reduce their output on medical device orders by 20 percent because workers, who they pay between $14 and $16 an hour, are making more on unemployment and choosing to stay at home.
Paying people not to work won't help us recover from COVID-19. We must encourage people to get back into the workforce and not stay on the sidelines.
The opportunity to work hard and get ahead is a pillar of the American Dream. Pursuing a career, providing for a family, and supporting our communities, these are the things we should encourage and celebrate.
We have got the vaccines. Now it is time to get back to work.
Mr. BOST. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from South Carolina (Ms. Mace).
Ms. MACE. Mr. Speaker, for the last eight years, Charleston, South Carolina, has been named the number one city to travel to. Even despite the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen thousands of folks come and visit our beautiful, historic city.
In the next 10 days, Charleston is going to welcome a PGA Tournament in Kiawah, South Carolina. There is opportunity everywhere. Our airports are full. We are seeing a record number of travelers this month and this year alone. People are on the roads driving to our beautiful city. Yet with all of this great tourism that we are having, we are having a massive labor shortage.
Take, for example, one of my friends, Wade Boals, who owns Saltwater Cowboys in Mt. Pleasant, a beautiful waterfront restaurant where you can enjoy sunsets and a great cocktail or adult beverage of your choice. Rather than be excited about all this tourism, he is desperate to find help, desperate to find workers and staff to work his restaurant. So imagine a restaurant that once had 20 employees now has three, and the demand on those staff who see no end in sight right now.
But he is not alone. In the State of South Carolina, there are 85,000 jobs available in the last 30 days, and we have 116,000 people on unemployment today. If you want a job, you can have a job. And Wade is offering great benefits, great salary, right on the waterfront. There is no better place to work than Mt. Pleasant, right on the water.
The $1.9 trillion COVID relief package, meant as a short-term financial solution to help those most in need, has really turned into an entitlement. We are making people dependent on the Federal Government for their day-to-day life, when opportunity is all around them every day, even in the middle of the pandemic.
It turns out, when you pay people to stay at home and not go to work, they actually do that; they stay at home.
Wade is just one example. There are examples everywhere. Literally everyone in every industry that I talk to, businesses large and small, are having the same problem. Employers are desperate to find employees.
Everywhere, even in the supply chain--you look at what is happening this week with our supply chain. Truck driver shortages, a shortage of CDL drivers. Many of those folks are on unemployment right now, rather than go back to work. We have enormous needs in every industry across the country today.
The reality is that no business, large or small, could ever waste as much money as our Federal Government does. When I look around us here today, I see a House of Representatives that has the slimmest majority in a generation, and I see a U.S. Senate that is evenly split 50/50, yet we are chasing radicalism. This is not a referendum on socialism or radical policy. This year should be a referendum on both Chambers working together, in a bipartisan way, to get our kids back in school and our people back to work and through COVID-19 successfully.
Mr. BOST. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Kansas
(Mr. Estes). I know that he has many comments that are vitally important to this issue.
Mr. ESTES. Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend, Congressman Mike Bost, for hosting this very important Special Order hour.
Today, we are more than a year out from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we are also 5 months out from when the first dose of vaccine was administered. Defeating the virus through a safe and effective vaccine has been critical in reopening our country and our schools and getting Americans back to work. But the recent partisan policies of the left discourage work and create an employment gap in the country.
I hear about this regularly in my district in Kansas. Small businesses, who were hit hard by the pandemic, were forced to shut down, had stay-at-home orders, and are now struggling to find workers to get back reopened.
One of those small business owners, Jessie Sterling, shared with me her experience of struggling to have full employment while she raises her young children, something that was much more difficult when the schools were closed.
While her business has seen customers return, many of her employees have not. Unfortunately, most of Jessie's employees opted to stay home and collect expanded unemployment benefits rather than return to the workforce. The additional $300 means that most of the part-time employees are now making more on unemployment than they were making at their job. While Jessie is responsible for the education and care of her children, she now has the additional stress of picking up extra shifts to cover for the employees who aren't coming back.
But it doesn't have to be this way. We need to shift our focus from the early days of the pandemic, when it made sense to expand these unemployment programs, to encouraging a return to work.
Just yesterday, our neighboring State of Missouri opted out of the enhanced unemployment benefits, a move that will help encourage work and a return to normalcy. Today, my colleagues, Congressmen Tracey Mann and Jake LaTurner, called on Kansas Governor Kelly to do the same thing.
Our American spirit is built on resilience, hard work, and ingenuity. We have had many struggles over the past year, but our history has shown us that we will overcome, not through a heavy reliance on a big Federal Government, but a reliance on faith, on families, and our own work ethic. We need to encourage all Americans to pursue these ideals and get our economy back to work.
Mr. BOST. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Newhouse), a person who really does understand small business and farming, who understands what it is like to employ people and how important those employees are.
Mr. NEWHOUSE. Mr. Speaker, these are trying times for our country, specifically for small business owners and their families who, in some cases, are watching their livelihoods literally disappear right before their eyes.
The jobs report that was released on Friday was cited as the
``largest miss'' compared to economists' expectations since 1998. The United States filled only 266,000 jobs of the estimated 1.3 million that were predicted to be filled. That is more than one million jobs less than expected. The unemployment rate actually rose for the first time during this recovery.
For over a year, our businesses have been shuttered and our schools closed, making it impossible for parents to return to work and for hardworking individuals to earn an honest living.
To make matters worse, many of our local businesses simply cannot find the labor they need because Federal unemployment benefits discourage workers from returning to the workplace, further hindering the recovery of our local economies.
President Biden dismissed these figures as merely a snapshot in time, refusing to see that they represent the very real struggles our small businesses and communities are facing.
Just this weekend, I hosted our annual job fair in central Washington, and the changes that I saw were stark. Dozens of employers, who represented everything from the agricultural industry to law enforcement offices, restaurants, distribution centers, to government contractors handling nuclear cleanup, were all looking to hire hundreds of people.
And guess what?
Less than 100 applicants showed up.
Two years ago, we had 500 attendees competing for many of the same kinds of jobs.
Now, I know that our small businesses are the economic engine of our economy, and we must ensure that we can get that engine restarted as quickly and as safely as possible. It is time we reopen our economy, get our kids back into the classrooms, empower the entrepreneurs who are the backbone of our economy, and allow America to recover.
Mr. BOST. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Hagedorn).
Mr. HAGEDORN. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for holding this Special Order. It is really a very important issue all across the country. And it really doesn't matter which district a Member of Congress represents; you are going to have these same problems.
Mr. Speaker, I spent the better part of last 2 weeks, during our district work period, traveling southern Minnesota, meeting with all sorts of businesses, meeting with labor, talking to the chambers of commerce. I can tell you that, under normal circumstances, it is tough enough to run a business and it is tough enough to be productive and successful in small business. But when you have bad government policies--and that is what we have here--it makes it extra tough. In many cases it is limiting production.
We are seeing companies, like United Commercial Upholstery in New Ulm, having to turn away work. They actually could do three times more work right now if they could find another 50 employees. But it is impossible.
It really doesn't matter if it is skilled work or unskilled work; it is just across the board.
I was up in Lonsdale, Minnesota, in Rice County, and talked to their chamber of commerce, talked to the packaging company, which is the biggest employer in town. They have production disruptions across the board. They just can't find the employees.
Recently, in Rochester, I was at Crenlo Industries, where they make these high-end cabs for heavy production equipment--Caterpillar, John Deere, those types of things. They have line employees, and they want to get those cabs worked through the line.
Guess what happens?
Employees don't show up. They can't fill the jobs. They have lots of disruption.
We are seeing these supply chain disruptions all across the country, skyrocketing costs for materials and others. A lot of this is tied to these bad policies.
What I do appreciate is some of the Governors across the country who have taken it upon themselves to say: You know what we are going to do? If you don't look for qualified work, if you don't accept work, you are going to lose your unemployment compensation benefits.
Unfortunately, in Minnesota and some other States, you have Governors that want to hang onto emergency powers and still not make those requirements.
I think at the Federal level, in my Small Business Committee and other committees represented here, we should look at how we can tie those benefits to make sure that there are those strings attached and we do everything possible to get folks back in the workforce. It is time. And I know that that is always best for folks to have good, high-
paying jobs, and be upwardly mobile and self-sufficient.
{time} 1930
Mr. BOST. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Donalds).
Mr. DONALDS. The inflation report came out this morning, 4.2 percent increase in inflation. You have got to ask yourself what happened and how did it happen so fast?
Well, one of the key things we are seeing in this economy is very clear. What we are seeing is that the pool of workers is actually quite small compared to the demand for product from people who, frankly, have been locked down for over a year who are ready to go out and spend a lot of money that they have saved, get back to normal life, but there aren't the necessary workforce in order to produce the level of goods that the economy is demanding. So then, of course, the price of every individual unit is now going up because you have a scarcity of supply.
How did this happen? Well, when this body passed a coronavirus spending bill, or the American Rescue Plan or however you want to call it, when we put in an additional payment of direct checks to individuals, not to mention extended unemployment benefits that are 100 percent to what their wages were before the pandemic, and you let that run through the later part of this year, you are going to see exactly what we have seen all across America.
You have seen too many workers not filling their shifts. I will give you an example. I was at a McDonald's drive-through, 24-hour drive-
through in my district about 12:30 in the morning. I was hungry. The first drive-through I went through, there was nobody there working. They cordoned off the drive-through. Has anybody in America ever seen a McDonald's 24-hour drive-through closed? It was closed because nobody was there.
The second McDonald's I went to, there was one worker in the shop. He said, ``It is going to take me 30 minutes to fill your order because nobody else is here, and I am making breakfast for the morning shifts.''
We have to pull back some of these benefits. We have to, because the way you miss a jobs report by 750,000 jobs is by paying people to stay home. That is not working for our economy. It is not working for our small businesses, and we are starting to see the effects in inflation, and it is only going to get worse unless we act swiftly here in the Nation's Capitol.
Mr. BOST. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume to close. I thank the gentleman for his comments. I want to thank all of my colleagues who joined me and joined us here tonight. Thank you to my friend Representative Jackie Walorski for cohosting this Special Order.
We all agree that it was necessary for Congress to step up and act quickly to help hardworking Americans laid off or out of work during the widespread pandemic shutdowns. But here we are, three vaccines later, the States are loosening restrictions. We need to refocus on where we are going, on what we are doing, on making sure children go back to school and people go back to work.
I am proud to support Ranking Member Brady's Reopening America by Supporting Workers and Businesses Act. Instead of paying people to stay home, it will allow States to provide back-to-work bonuses and increased funding for reemployment services.
In April's dismal jobs report, which was mentioned earlier, it is an indication we have a long way to go. It is a time that we need to get our economy back on track and our people back to work. Every time we go down the street, if you listen to the people who spoke here tonight, jobs, help wanted, help wanted, help wanted, and no help to be found. Why? Because as good as an intention as we had when we passed the unemployment extensions, Mr. Speaker, what we are doing is we are prolonging this situation where we can actually get back to work. We can take these things off, we can actually be safe going to work. We are being vaccinated. Things are gearing back up.
Let's not go down the path of government entrapment. Let's go back to what America is about: People seeking employment when jobs are there, to bettering their family when jobs are there. Not through government programs, but through the opportunity of actually working every day to provide for their families and to provide their children and grandchildren with opportunities.
We are going to have to do that because we have spent a lot of money this last year, quite often in making sure that our American citizens were taken care of. And rightfully so. But now it is time to go back to work.
With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 82
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