Tuesday, December 21, 2010

FIRST... Jobs Go to Illegals!

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com

FIRST… jobs go to illegals!
There are only eight (8) states with a population greater than Los Angeles County, where half those with a job are illegals using stolen social security numbers! This same county puts out $600 million per year in welfare to illegals!

WE ARE MEXICO’S WELFARE, FREE BIRTHING CENTER, FREE EMERGENCY ROOM HEALTHCARE, JOBS & JAILS PROGRAM!

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US corporations move to create a part-time, contingent workforce

US corporations move to create a part-time, contingent workforce
By Jerry White
21 December 2010
World Socialist Web Site
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/temp-d21.shtml

Big employers in the US are increasingly using part-time and temporary workers to hold down labor costs, according to the latest figures from the Labor Department. In a trend that has been accelerated over the last two years, corporations are moving to phase out full time positions and create a workforce earning far lower wages and fewer, if any, benefits that can be hired and fired at will.

In November there were a total of 9.2 million “involuntarily part-time” workers in the US. After adding an average of 28,000 new jobs over the previous few months, temporary help services created 39,500 jobs in November, more than any other sector of the economy. Temporary agency jobs accounted for 80 percent of the 50,000 jobs added by private employers last month.

Since the beginning of the year, employers have added a net 307,000 temporary workers, more than a quarter (26.2 percent) of the 1.17 million private sector jobs added in total, according to a December 19 article in the New York Times. In the comparable period after the recession of the early 1990s, only 10.9 percent of the private sector jobs added were temporary, and after the downturn earlier this decade, just 7.1 percent were temporary.

“It hints at a structural change,” Allen L. Sinai, chief global economist at the consulting firm Decision Economics told the Times. Temporary workers “are becoming an ever more important part of what is going on.”

In a recent interview with the job search web site monster.com, Melanie Holmes, vice president of staffing agency Manpower, said, “The nature of work is changing. Because of technology, we’re able to work anywhere, at any time, and not just from home or from Starbucks, but from India. That’s changed the way some employers look for employees. They recognize they’re always going to want to have a contingent workforce and to staff up or down to meet their needs.”

Temporary agencies have seen an increase across every sector of the economy, with some reporting a 17 to 20 percent increase in new customers in education, nonprofits, healthcare, manufacturing and financial services. A survey by Staffing Industry Analysts, a Mountain View, California research firm, reported that 68 percent of all temporary workers would rather have permanent employment.

The shift to low-paid and part-time workers is part of a fundamental change in class relations in the US. America’s corporate and financial elite has used the economic crisis—created by their own making—to strip workers of long-standing income and job protections and drastically increase productivity and exploitation. As a result, US corporations are making record profits and are sitting on huge financial reserves. Rather than hiring they are using the cash hoards to pay out bigger executive bonuses, boost share values through stock buybacks and to prepare a new wave of mergers and acquisitions.

Corporate America has received the full support of the Obama administration, which, while handing over trillions in bailouts and tax cuts for the rich, has refused to provide any relief to victims of the economic crisis. The president has repeatedly insisted that only the private sector, not the government, is responsible for creating jobs, even as corporations carry out a hiring boycott and 27 million people remain jobless or underemployed.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, the ratio of job seekers for every available full-time job is 7.1-to-1. With November’s official jobless rate hitting 9.8 percent, unemployment has not dipped below 9 percent for 19 straight months, tying the recession of the early 1980s for the longest stretch on record. Economists expect the jobless rate to remain above 9 percent through all of 2011, if not beyond.

Exploiting the desperate conditions facing workers, US corporations are limiting themselves to hiring part-timers to cut labor costs and introduce “flexibility.” The Times writes, “Corporate executives, stung by the depth of the recent downturn, are looking to make it easier to hire and fire workers. And with the cost of health and retirement benefits running high, many companies are looking to reduce that burden. In some cases, companies wrongly classify regular employees as temporary or contract workers in order to save on benefit costs and taxes.”

Increasingly, manufacturing companies, including auto and auto parts makers are relying on temporary workers they can rapidly dispense with if sales decline. With the assistance of the United Auto Workers, the auto industry has increased the use of temporary workers, along with lower-paid new hires earning half the wages of traditional workers.

This is part of an international trend, as corporations and government institute labor “reforms” to strip workers of job protections. According to the International Labor Organization, temporary employment levels grew in absolute terms in all of the industrialized countries over the last decade, led by Japan, which saw the addition of 990,000 temporary workers. There were also large increases in the United Kingdom (+603,000), the United States (+520,000), Germany (+434,000) and France (+279,000).

As the global economic crisis hit, the biggest temporary job losses were recorded in the manufacturing sector of developed countries, most noticeably in the car industry. In Germany, for example, auto companies eliminated the positions of between 100,000 and 150,000 temporary agency workers in the four to six months after October 2008.

With the unemployment rate for college graduates at 5.1 percent—the highest since records began being kept in 1970—many young people have found no prospects other than temporary work. Since leaving school in 2009, Jeff, a college graduate in Chicago, has only had temporary assignments although he has put in over 100 applications for a full time position.

“Since I graduated I’ve worked four different temp jobs, including for the US Census. The first was for 20 hours a week for a utility company; it was a six-month assignment but it paid so low that I had to take another temporary job in the catering industry. Now I’m working for an online retailer, which said they planned to put me on full time.

“You’re nothing but a commodity, always on call. The temp agency will call you the night before or even a few hours before your assignment—but you never get guaranteed hours. At one job for a catering service, they expected you to invest hundreds of dollars for your own clothes, including a tuxedo, shoes and ties. You get no transportation even if the assignment is 40 miles away. A friend of mine had to travel back and forth for over an hour but they only gave her four hours. She got $10 an hour, but the temp agency was paid $19.50 an hour for her services.

“There are very limited opportunities to work in the field you studied in,” Jeff added. “The only way to get a full time job is to start temporary. I’ve worked in catering and warehouse work and I’ve never heard of a temporary job with benefits. A quarter of the new hires are temps. That is a fundamental change. The companies feel that in a depressed labor market they can get the skills they need from the pool of unemployed workers without paying competitive wages or benefits. It’s all part of the reduction in living standards for the working class.”
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NEW YORK TIMES

DECEMBER 13, 2010, 7:19 PM
King Outlines Immigration Plans for 2011
By JULIA PRESTON
The Republican who is expected to lead the main subcommittee on immigration in the House of Representatives in the new congress next year said on Monday that he will push for a bill that would cancel employers’ tax deductions for wages of workers who are illegal immigrants.
In an interview, Representative Steve King of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Judiciary subcommittee on immigration in the current congress, said his priority as chairman would be to pass a bill he introduced last year that would also require the Internal Revenue Service to share information with the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration about the immigration status of workers.
Mr. King said his measure would increase pressure on employers to fire unauthorized immigrant workers by increasing their cost. He estimated that if employers were not able to claim tax deductions for those workers’ wages and benefits, an unauthorized immigrant making $10 an hour would cost the employer the equivalent of $16 an hour.
Mr. King said his measure would be a “velvet glove” that would leave it up to employers to fire unauthorized workers. “That opens up lots of jobs for Americans,” he said.
The proposal would break down a major privacy firewall that protects tax information from scrutiny by Homeland Security authorities. Millions of authorized immigrants in the workforce have payroll taxes deducted and file tax returns using a taxpayer number issued by the I.R.S., which is not routinely shared with immigration agencies.
Mr. King’s strategy would be a sharp departure from the outgoing Democratic-controlled House, which last week passed a bill known as the Dream Act. Mr. King was a leading opponent of that bill, which would open a path to legal status for hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant students if they attend college or serve in the military.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, has said he plans to bring up the House version of the student bill for a vote before the end of the lame-duck session. Although it gained some momentum from the House action, its chances for Senate passage appear slim. Mr. King said that if the bills fails there, “it is dead.”
Mr. King, who cautioned that he has not been formally named chairman of the sub-committee, said he also hoped to conduct a review of the Obama administration’s spending on border enforcement, and perhaps seek new construction of physical fence barriers to stop illegal border-crossers. “Build it until they stop going around the end – that would be my standard,” Mr. King said.
On a call with reporters on Monday, several leading immigration scholars said the young immigrants who are eligible for legal status under the student bill, some of whom are already in college, would be forced into a shadow existence if it fails. The researchers were among 280 immigration scholars who signed a letter of support for the bill.
“It would be a complete waste of the taxpayer money we have spent to this point to educate them,” said Douglas Massey, a sociology professor at Princeton who studies Mexican migration. “Just when they are about to come on to the labor market to take up their jobs, we seem to be throwing that investment all away. And it means incredible hardship for them. The only place they can go is into the underground economy.”
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THE ENTIRE REASON THE BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS TO CUT WAGES!


“We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers,” said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. “President Obama is on the wrong side of the American people on immigration. The president should support policies that help citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than fail to enforce immigration laws.”
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Obama soft on illegals enforcement

Arrests of illegal immigrant workers have dropped precipitously under President Obama, according to figures released Wednesday. Criminal arrests, administrative arrests, indictments and convictions of illegal immigrants at work sites all fell by more than 50 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009.

The figures show that Mr. Obama has made good on his pledge to shift enforcement away from going after illegal immigrant workers themselves - but at the expense of Americans' jobs, said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the Republican who compiled the numbers from the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Mr. Smith, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said a period of economic turmoil is the wrong time to be cutting enforcement and letting illegal immigrants take jobs that Americans otherwise would hold.