You are correct that the law "says" that you must be actively looking for work. But, people have been routinely cheating on that law and the Government has been letting them get away with it ever since the law was created.

Finding servers and bartenders who can earn tips is not nearly as big a problem as finding workers who only earn an hourly wage. Cooks and dishwashers slave in hot kitchens and typically work much harder than servers and don’t get tips. These are the people actually making your food, and at the end of their shift they have to watch the servers and bartenders sit down and count their piles of tip money, while wearing their grease and sweat filled kitchen clothes.

Yep. It's insidious and institutional. Personal pride and initiative are being bred out of our youth in favor of government control. The Eloi. It's amazing how prescient HG Wells was...I swear his Time Machine was not a novel, but an experiential account of his own time travel.

Our children (and I doubt they are exceptions !) worked their way through under grad and grad school working minimum wage jobs just as I did. While there are people who do not tip, over-all it really is much better than usually discussed. I was a "curbie" for a root-beer drive-in, and worked same for a Steak & Shake. Certainly saw it was not the way to great wealth, but, definitely much better than most would guess it to be. One thing my adult children and I all agree on having all worked a variety of these jobs; a significant problems among minimum wage workers is a lack of knowledge and/or skills in managing money. It's a sad and never ending problem in our society that those who need the greatest expertise in money management, are often those who left school before they took advantage of the 12 years of free education our country offers every individual. Please understand this is NOT ALL who work in these industries, but so many who most need the ability to compare prices, value, and convert net weights at the grocery store, lack such skills. They are the ones most like to NOT read the fine print on an auto lease or bill of sale, etc. etc. Also adding to the problem is that a high percentage of those who do complete their education may have been present in classes but paid little attention to learning.

This was verified when I was involved in research into this very topic. Those who completed secondary school with high attendance records and a history of completing assignments (regardless of g.p.a. !), but were not college bound, tended to NOT enter minimum wage jobs and entered skilled trade schools and apprenticeships and entered the military (where they received advanced education and skills training), and they attended community college evening outreach programs at a much higher rate than those who did complete secondary school but with sporadic and limited engagement in the classroom learning process.

We are a free county, free to reject education, however, mandatory basic education, provided free through taxes, could go a long way to solving many, not all of course, problems of our society. IF minimum wage jobs provided a launching platform, a support, for reaching for additional education or to gain skills to prepare for a better paying job, we could greatly reduce the number of welfare programs we must offer to keep our country from deteriorating to the level of many I have seen in travels abroad. There is much we "could" do. When my parents were young, education was mandatory in their state. IF anyone dared to "skip" school, Mr. "Jake", the "truant officer" as he was called, was a branch of the local police force, something like officers assigned to schools today to discourage drug use. Students and parents KNEW they had a responsibility to attend classes for 12 years; it was something you owed yourself and you duty to your country to be literate. While some could view this as anti-democratic (forced education) and obviously that is what has happened over the years since my parent's youth, it could just be worth a try rather than continue down this path ?

People do not seem to be concerned with the fact that many of our country's secondary schools have now dropped below the 50% graduation rate. This can have a devastating effect on GNP, wages, welfare burdens; it touches every aspect of our society.

MOST minimum wage workers don't get tips. In fact, in the state of Florida, tip-earning employees only have to be paid $5.63/hour by their employers, because it's expected that they'll make up the difference with tips. Usually they do. Sometimes they don't.

But those workers who were earning below the normal state minimum, plus tips, I totally don't blame them for wanting to bow out of the rat race for a few more months before they run out of benefits.

Especially now that there's been another surge in COVID cases and many of these workers have kids who *cannot* be vaccinated since they're under age. The last thing they need is to bring home a virus that will require them to stay home with their kids for a 2-week quarantine, with no income at all, not even unemployment benefits.

Painting the canvas with a pretty broad stroke there. In my graduating class in 1978, 1/8 of the senior girls didn't graduate because they were pregnant. In the same year's graduation class in a more rural part of our state, around 1/6th of the males didn't graduate, because they were expected to work on their family farm and you can't do that and be in a classroom at the same time, and the world wide web hadn't been invented yet.

In rural areas all over the country, kids are expected to NOT finish school, and stay on the family farm. In some of the poorer parts of this country, kids are expected to NOT finish school, and get minimum wage jobs to help their families financially at home. When it's time for them to fall in love and get married, they have NOTHING. No savings, because daddy drank it all. Or mama shot it all into her veins. Or big brother spent it at the track.

Not all kids CAN graduate school, because not all families are in a position to provide a home life to support their kids graduating school. Some people are truly and sincerely stuck at the bottom. They don't even know what it would be like to dream of getting out of the bottom, because all the people who are out - want to keep their own position, and do everything they can to ensure that the ones on the bottom stay there.

This isn't true for all poor people. It's not true for all rural people. And it's not true for all suburbanites. But it is a significant demographic that is never represented in these conversations, because they're the the ones you can't conveniently dump the blame on.

That happened a lot back in the early part of the 1900s. I grew up on a small farm in southwest Iowa and graduated from high school in 1965 and I don't remember a single farm kid dropping out of school. Education and graduating from high school was stressed pretty hard at that time. There were a few that were junior thugs that dropped out but they were town kids and were in jail within 5 years. In the mid west for the last few decades the family farm doesn't really exist, it is mostly large farmers that have bought neighboring farms or rent the land, and corporate farms. I believe you will find the majority of school drop outs are inner city kids in large cities.

Nevada has the highest dropout rate in the country. Vermont has the lowest.

There's apparently a thing called "dropout factory" schools, that's the term used to describe schools that have a persistent problem with a high dropout rate. 32% of minority students are districted to attend dropout schools. Only 8% of white students are districted to attend dropout schools.

Seems to me that schools containing primarily minority students are not being educated the same as schools containing primarily white students. It's not the fact that minorities are minorities - because the ones who are districted to attend non-dropout schools do as well in them as the white kids do. And white kids in the dropout factory schools trend as badly as the minorities attending those schools do.

Thanks for this. Those of you who think workers are not returning to work because of all the unemployment benefits should try living on the amount of those benefits before complaining! And then, go help out the social services agencies that hear the concerns of the workers, as I have. There are MANY reasons why workers can not go back to work, don’t criticize until you know what is really going on! And, you should realize restaurant staff who get tips are paid BELOW minimum wage, as allowed by law, they DEPEND on tips just to get to minimum wage. What I’m seeing is that people want to get back to work but when they have to take care of someone in the family that is still affected by the after-effects of COVID-19, that can impact their ability to work. Or if they can’t get the vaccine because they don’t have access to the internet to get one of those precious appointments and need it because of underlying health factors, that can impact their ability to go back to work too. So, please learn more about the people you are criticizing for not going back to work, walk in their shoes, as the saying goes.

Question

How dangerous are these dropout schools for teachers and students?

Possible that teachers do not want to teach there as they are in fear?

People are only counted as unemployed if they're 1) Out of work and 2) Looking for work. The labor participation rate is what actually matters the most and as a country we're still down around 60%, at least that's what the number was a while back, haven't heard it mentioned in months. So 40% of working age citizens are not working, that of course includes anyone retiring before regular retirement age (~ 65) but also shows a lot of the country living off the efforts of others..

$275 x 12 = $3300

I'm pretty sure everyone who lost sufficient income is getting the $275 week unemployment bonus. If someone was already not working prior to the pandemic, I'm not sure why they would qualify for extra 'pandemic' relief other than the $1200, $600 and $1400 checks the government already paid out to them.

The market can and should adjust wages. If a restaurant can't find workers they can voluntarily raise their wages (Unless they are a corporate store). In North Dakota (I heard) during the employment boom pre-covid, they had to pay upwards of $25/hour for fast food workers. Federal minimum wage is a joke and simply a political ploy for votes.

Why anyone would want to be satisfied working at a minimum wage job is beyond me.

Did it as a teenager and knew it was temporary. Many businesses are looking for people and not all at min wage salary.

Get training and keep looking for something better while working at min wage.