Trevor Noah
On Tuesday’s Daily Show, Trevor Noah discussed the difficulty restaurants across the country have faced in finding enough workers as business gets back to pre-pandemic speed. The shortage of job applications is largely down to workers finding better pay, hours and benefits in other jobs.
But that hasn’t stopped numerous commentators on Fox News and elsewhere blaming the lack of applicants on laziness and government benefits. To quote the former Bush staffer Karl Rove on Fox New Sunday, paraphrasing the entire line of thinking: “Why work if you can get that kind of money and stay home and Netflick?”
It turns out that when restaurants say, "Nobody wants to work," what they actually mean is, "Nobody wants to work for the starvation wages we are willing to pay them.”
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 19, 2021
Here's why workers are demanding more than just enough to scrape by. pic.twitter.com/d2xBvQfDna
“I get where these pundits are coming from,” Noah deadpanned. “If the average person could have their jobs, phew, they’d be crazy not to take them. I mean, who wouldn’t want to spend 10 minutes a day sitting in a chair complaining about how other people don’t want to work? That’s a great gig.
“These Republicans might be right about one thing,” Noah added. “Generous unemployment benefits really might be one reason people aren’t rushing back to their old jobs. But that doesn’t mean they’re just sitting around ‘Netflicking’ – first of all, it’s been over a year. They’ve already finished Netflix.”
Second, many workers have used the unemployment benefits as a rare reprieve to look for better-paying work, with more manageable hours and childcare arrangements, in other industries, such as warehouse, shipping or medical marijuana production. “Those unemployment checks are not subsidizing laziness,” Noah said. “They’re giving workers the rare opportunity to look for a job that’s more than just a way to survive to their next paycheck.”
The benefits have also provided crucial leverage over restaurant chains that are finally having to alter sub-par compensation policies to retain workers – the Texas chain Whataburger, for example, added 50,000 jobs with emergency pay and increased 401k matching, Taco Bell began offering paid family leave and Chipotle increased wages with added mental health care benefits.
The policy changes demonstrate, Noah concluded, that “when they were saying ‘nobody wants to work,’ what they actually meant was ‘nobody wants to work for the starvation wages that we were willing to pay them.’”
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert taped the Late Show from his pandemic-standard storage closet in New York’s Ed Sullivan Theater – “but that storage closet itself is in a larger area I like to call reality,” he added, “a place our Republican brothers and sisters have chosen to no longer inhabit, especially when it comes to the 2020 election, their lie that it was stolen, and the inevitable aftermath of the January 6th Capitol riot.”
Colbert zeroed in on leading “refugee from reality” Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, who this week rejected the House bipartisan commission to investigate the 6 January attack after calling for – and receiving – equal GOP representation.
“Make no mistake, McCarthy opposes this commission because he knows what they’re going to find: that the Capitol riot was perpetrated by his party’s followers at the behest of a president he supported, based on an election lie McCarthy himself helped spread,” Colbert said. “It’s the same reason I opposed my wife’s bipartisan commission on ‘who ate the last slice of pizza?’”
McCarthy’s refusal to call the insurrection what it was doesn’t square with his reaction on 6 January, when he reportedly got in a shouting match with Trump on the phone. “Yet, McCarthy still defends him. Forget the riot; we need a bipartisan commission to find Kevin’s balls,” Colbert joked. “Obviously, McCarthy can’t just issue an official statement that says, ‘I <3 the coup.’ So instead, he came up with a bunch of bogus excuses why his opposition was all Nancy Pelosi’s fault,” accusing the Speaker of playing “political games”.
“Yes, political games,” Colbert mused. “Pelosi is playing chess while the GOP is playing a dangerous game of Nahtzee!”
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel addressed a major Hollywood rumor: that Amazon was in talks to buy the movie studio MGM. The sale “shouldn’t be a surprise – Amazon is in talks about buying everything,” Kimmel said. “It won’t be long until you say, ‘oh whatever happened to my cousin Tim?’ ‘Oh, Amazon bought him.’
“If this deal goes through, Jeff Bezos will own James Bond,” he added. “How come none of the other villains thought of owning James Bond?”
The deal is said to be worth $9bn, “which after taxes, works out to … $9bn for Jeff Bezos,” Kimmel quipped. “What Amazon is gonna do is they’re gonna slither down from a tree, they’re gonna wrap themselves tightly around MGM, and squeeze. And then in phase two they will stretch their jaws very wide and swallow [MGM] whole.”
