Heritage Senior Research Fellow Rachel Greszler recently testified in front of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, addressing small businesses struggling with inflation due to the left’s reckless economic policies.
Greszler is passionate about labor policy because “work is fundamental to human flourishing.” She says, “It is a primary source of freedom, opportunity, and personal dignity and self-worth.”
In her opening statement, she noted how government’s attempts to improve the workplace were often counterproductive:
“Politicians and bureaucrats can’t know businesses’ needs better than employers themselves, so they should stop diverting people into programs that waste their time and taxpayers’ money when private sector employers can and are providing more effective education and training.
“While the temptation for policymakers is always to do something, the best solution to fighting inflation and improving the workforce is to interfere less. Instead of building an expensive new highway, policymakers should just remove the roadblocks that are preventing people from getting where they need to go in the shortest time and at the lowest cost.”
Greszler advocated for small businesses by shedding light on their most recent challenges resulting from government-caused inflation: “Finding the quality workers they need has been small businesses’ top concern for years, but inflation recently surpassed that as business owners’ primary problem.”
She went on to say, “The federal government is the primary cause of inflation and labor and skills shortages, and the administration’s proposed ‘solutions’ to spend more, produce less, and further subsidize ineffective education while cancelling more effective alternatives are all backwards.”
You can watch her full opening statement here. Her testimony can be found at the 26:11 mark.
Greszler has been tracking what is happening in the labor market since the COVID-19 pandemic began, including how the federal government’s unemployment insurance bonuses made it harder for businesses to get workers. She has been looking into the statistics on how the unprecedented labor shortage is affecting small businesses across nearly every industry in the U.S.
Incorporating both data—including obtaining unpublished data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (through a connection with a former Heritage director who is now a director at the BLS)—and also personal experiences learned through conversations with small business owners, she started an ongoing series of reports on the labor market and has also recently partnered with Heritage’s education policy team to publish a report examining ways that federal policies are preventing lower-cost and more effective education and training alternatives from growing and thriving.
As a senior research fellow in the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, Greszler focuses on retirement and labor policies such as Social Security, disability insurance, pensions, and worker compensation. Her work focuses on policies that promote economic growth, individual freedom, and personal well-being.
Her writing and research include analyses of reforms to Social Security and its disability insurance program with the goals of returning them to their original focus of poverty-prevention and reducing the government’s control over personal retirement savings.
She also focuses on both public- and private-sector pensions, seeking reforms to prevent governments, employers, and unions from making underfunded promises, and offering solutions to minimize pension losses and prevent taxpayer bailouts where underfunded promises have already been made.
Greszler also provides research and commentary on workplace issues like federal employee compensation, women’s issues, and labor policies such as the minimum wage and paid family leave.
To see more of Rachel Greszler’s work, click here. And if you wish to receive more Heritage news and content, you can subscribe on the bottom of this page.
