Skip to content Skip to footer

Only 3 Percent of Jobs on Tennessee Government Website Pay Over $20,000

GOP Gov. Bill Lee has ended extra pandemic unemployment benefits in the state, touting jobs listed on the website.

Earlier this month, Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Lee announced that he, like many other Republican governors across the country, would be ending extra unemployment benefits for workers as provided by the federal government. The spurious justification given by Lee and other GOP governors was that people were making too much money off unemployment to want to return to work.

But new findings from Tennessee Senate Democrats shows that the real reason for people not being able to or wanting to return to work may be because the available jobs pay far too little.

Lee, the Democrats point out, often points to the 250,000 jobs that are listed on Tennessee’s job portal as reasoning for ending the extra unemployment benefits. “When we have 250,000 job openings in the state and we are paying people to stay home, that needs to change,” he said earlier in June.

Of those jobs, however, only about 8,500 list paying a salary of over $20,000 — which amounts to only about 3 percent of the available jobs that Lee so likes to tout.

It’s possible that many of these job listings simply don’t publicize the salary in the post. However, the Democrats also point out that a majority of the jobs are older than a month, meaning some of them may no longer be available. Meanwhile, the number of new job postings are far less than the number of people unemployed.

Meanwhile, as the Tennessee Democrats and many Democrats and progressives across the country have pointed out, ending unemployment benefits does more to hurt workers than it does to help the economy. The U.S. Congressional Joint Economic Committee found early in June that Republican governors ending extra unemployment benefits could cause their states to lose out on $12 billion in revenue.

Workers are not only hurt in the short term by this decision, but potentially also the long term. “Cutting benefits early in order to push people into jobs that don’t work for them (e.g. pay too little, endanger their health, are not geographically proximate, etc.) risks reducing demand in local economies, foregoing [sic] the potential for future better earnings, and ultimately constricting the economic recovery from the coronavirus recession,” the report found.

Indeed, as employers complain about a supposed worker shortage, reports and some businesses have found that the real issue is the unreasonable wages being offered by employers. A May report on the food industry found that the most common reason for restaurant employees to quit or leave the industry altogether is low wages.

Some business owners have even found that when they offer starting wages of $15 an hour or higher, they have more applicants than they can hire.

Still, Republicans have stuck with the now disproven talking point that unemployment benefits stop people from seeking work, much to the detriment of workers across the country.

Nationwide, food banks are reportedly bracing for a surge in demand as the GOP governors end extra unemployment benefits, the Guardian reports. The Census Bureau reported in May that 19.3 million Americans haven’t felt they’ve had enough to eat at some point in the past week, which is about 2.5 times the number of Americans who felt the same in 2019.

That number could increase when nearly 4 million people lose their unemployment benefits as states with Republican governors follow through on their threat to end the benefits early.

“We are still distributing about a million to a million and a half more meals each month than we did pre Covid,” Teresa Schryver, advocacy manager for a St. Louis food bank, told the Guardian. “We might see a spike again in July and August as we’re losing the unemployment benefits here in Missouri, so we might be doing 2m meals again for a couple of months.” Schryver added that it took food insecurity rates 10 years to bounce back from the 2008 recession and that the fallout from the pandemic will likely follow the same path.

We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.

As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.

Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.

As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.

At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.

Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.

You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.