Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) took aim at the US Chamber of Commerce on Friday for demanding an end to weekly unemployment benefits that have been a lifeline to Americans who lost their jobs because of the coronvirus pandemic.
Millions of Americans have been out of work because of the virus, which Republicans could have prevented if they had taken the pandemic seriously from the start. In fact, they still aren’t taking it seriously, and now they want to force Americans to take low-paying jobs by stripping unemployment benefits away from them.
Frankly, $300 a week is still not enough, but it’s better than a lot of jobs that are out there when many employers expect people to work for slave wages rather than simply pay them a fair living wage.
Instead of urging businesses to entice applicants by offering higher wages and better benefits, the US Chamber of Commerce is siding with corporations in calling for an end to the unemployment benefits in order to force people to take low-paying jobs no one really wants.
That’s why Ocasio-Cortez slammed the organization as nothing more than a lobbying arm for corporations that cares more about profit than about the welfare of employees, even pointing out that Walmart apparently paid handsomely for the US Chamber of Commerce’s services.
Fun fact: the US Chamber of Commerce is a secretive business lobby that supported a $3M effort to primary me out of office last year bc I stand up to Wall Street. (They lost 🤗) Wal-mart was outed as a secret client.
If UI > wages, the solution is to actually pay a living wage. https://t.co/04C2pCEZsY
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 7, 2021
If you’re interested in learning more about their secretive/bizarre lobbying operation, check out this archived piece from @MotherJones
“the Chamber had been routinely inflating its membership numbers by 900 percent”https://t.co/wk3c1cQrKG
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 7, 2021
Moral of the story is that the US Chamber of Commerce is a corporate lobbyist group with 0 credibility in helping everyday people.
Huge, big-box corporations hire them to lobby Congress into prioritizing profits over people and planet.
Ignore them 🙂
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 7, 2021
It should be pointed out that Walmart is a multibillion-dollar megacorporation whose employees receive government aid because their employers don’t pay them enough. Yet the company wasted $3 million on lobbying that could have been used to raise the pay of thousands of their underpaid employees. Walmart is certainly not the only corporation that is doing this either.
If corporations, or any business for that matter, really want people to work for them they should offer a living wage. Nobody really wants to live on unemployment benefits, but taking a shitty job for shitty pay is an even worse option. The US Chamber of Commerce should be ashamed of themselves for perpetuating a system of poverty wages that has enriched corporate executives at the expense of the employees who do all of the work. People are waking up to this scam and have decided they aren’t going to take it anymore. And it’s about damn time.
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