Build Back … Worse? NY Times Brushes Off Falling Wages and Inflation

The New York TimesSeems to have admitted defeat to the elephant in a room. As inflation rises, President Joe Biden’s economic policies are not working for workers.

Reporter Noam Scheiber at The New York Times wrote in a Feb. 1 article that “[e]Many employers are frustrated by having to fill open vacancies in a hurry. It is not clear that service workers are making long-term and meaningful economic gains.” This is a major reversal for the same publication that triumphantly declared: “Americans Are Flush With Cash and Jobs.” Scheiber buried his most frightening concession in the seventh paragraph, but made it sound uncertain as to whether Inflation has already overcome wage gains, even though it conclusively has. “While businesses have raised wages, those increases can be easily eroded by inflation, if they haven’t been already,” Scheiber said. There’s already been a plethora of reports — including from Scheiber’s own newspaper — showing that inflation ate up the wage gains claimed by Americans last year.  [Emphasis added.]

Scheiber only mentioned the word “inflation” once in his whole article! One mention in an article that cites “labor shortages” and workers’ “economic security” completely downplays the historic surge in inflation that has also cramped economic growth. [Emphasis added.]

But Scheiber quickly found different culprits for low wages and unstable working hours: “a practice known as ‘fissuring.’” He also pointed to businesses “that continued to employ workers directly and began hiring them to part-time positions, rather than full-time roles.” This increase in part-time roles, he attributed to “the mass entry of women into the workforce.”

The Times’ primary target though was — as usual — greedy businesses.

Scheiber interviewed Daniel Schneider from Harvard, an expert in public policy. He tried to put blame on American companies, Scheiber said. The Times: “‘Companies are doing all they can not to bake in any gains that are difficult to claw back. … Workers’ labor market power is so far not yielding durable dividends.’”

What, then, is Scheiber’s answer to low wages? “With workers nationwide quitting at high rates and companies complaining that they can’t fill jobs, employers might be expected to rethink their dependence on part-time scheduling,” he said. It would be so easy to find the right solution. 

It’s as if Scheiber and Schneider argued that the working masses could finally break free and enter the promised land of higher wages and collective bargaining privileges if only the greedy capitalist business owners could ever so slightly alter their practices.

This wasn’t the first time The New York TimesThey ignored inflation in order to support their bizarre narrative. New York Times Senior economics correspondent Neil Irwin wrote an article headlined “Americans Are Flush With Cash and Jobs. They Also Think the Economy is Awful.” Irwin made the amazingly arrogant claim that Americans fell under the control of “the psychology of inflation.” Irwin continued, “Americans are, by many measures, in a better financial position than they have been in many years.” That kind of nonsense might fly at The New York TimesAmericans can see past the economic spin. 

Conservatives under attack Workers are struggling under President Biden’s flailing economy. The New York Times can be reached at 1-800-698-4637 for a full report about the deteriorating economy and increasing inflation under President Biden.