My point was the argument that the government design PPP as an effort to perpetuate an existing system that reduces employees bargaining power and prefers businesses can’t be supported when the government specifically strengthen employees bargaining power.
The powers that be know that loans obligations have been made that can only be satisfied if labor costs remain contained. Their primary objective is to make sure the mortgages keep getting paid, and paying employees double would endanger that.
An easy illustration is the fact that “essential” employees at much higher risk of getting the virus are getting paid with their old near minimum wage per hour jobs with signs that say “heroes work here”, and their management bosses are working safely at home with minimal risk of covid earning the same pay.
White collar employees continue to earn higher salaries from the safety of their home, and “hero” janitors and housekeepers are getting the same $10 to $15 they received as before, except they get to deal with higher chances of coronavirus.
I suspect what you would find is not some grand conspiracy but emergent properties from competitive forces.
And a lone businessman can’t just pay workers more and make the world right. If I decide to pay people more, and run the numbers and figure out I can afford to spend $5M on a piece of land to develop, and my competitor decides to project paying people much less, they can afford to spend $6M for the same piece of land. So guess which business ends up existing? The one that doesn’t pay higher wages. Same situation with people choosing to shop at stores that offer lower prices.
It would have to be a nationwide effort to transfer wealth, such as UBI or higher minimum wages. Otherwise we keep going as is with an ever widening wealth/income gap.
If you give people at the bottom a choice to not work, by giving them cash directly, then they would have better negotiating power versus employers.
The employers would then have to raise wages, and therefore prices. That means consumers who were proportionally consuming more than others have to consume less as more of the wealth goes towards paying higher wages. And we don’t want that as a society.
So we make the aid contingent upon an employer who might bless you with a furlough so you can collect the temporary generous unemployment, but also yank it away in case your menial work is necessary and they can go back to paying you near minimum living wages.