No
Labor Shortage: 11M Americans Out of Work, but All Want Full-Time Jobs
Scott
Olson/Getty Images
10 Jan 20201,070
2:53
There remain more than 11 million
Americans who are out of work but want full-time jobs, despite claims by
corporate interests and the big business lobby of a so-called “labor shortage.”
The latest unemployment data from
the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals there is still slack in the labor market
for disenfranchised Americans to enter the workforce rather than business
bringing foreign workers to the U.S. to take jobs.
Overall, about 5.8 million Americans
are unemployed — 12.6 percent of whom are teenagers who generally seek
entry-level jobs and 5.9 percent of whom are black Americans. These nearly six
million unemployed also include about 1.2 million Americans who are considered
“long-term unemployed” because they have been out of work for more than six
months.
Another 4.1 million Americans are
working part-time jobs but want full-time employment. Additionally, 1.2 million
Americans are out of the labor force entirely after looking for a job sometime
within the last year. These marginally attached Americans are available for
work and want full-time jobs.
Roughly 277,000 of the 1.2 million
Americans out of the labor force completely are considered “discouraged
workers” because they do not believe there are jobs in the labor market for
them.
In total, about 11.1 million
Americans are either unemployed, out of the labor force, or underemployed;
however, all have said they want good-paying, full-time jobs.
The
constant cry from corporate lobbyist @USChamber and "newsplainer" @voxdotcom is that America is "running out of workers." If that were true
there wouldn't be people to come off the sidelines and take jobs.
While Americans have enjoyed
significant wage growth in Trump’s
economy for blue-collar and working-class Americans, corporate interests have
increasingly suggested that the U.S. must continue importing millions of foreign
workers every year to fill jobs.
In April 2019, former Chamber of
Commerce President Tom Donohue said the U.S. needed more
legal immigration because the country is “out of people.”
Extensive research by economists
like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota has found that the country’s
current legal immigration system — wherein 1.2 million mostly low-skilled
workers are admitted annually — burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working
and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth
every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants.
Camarota, director of research for
the Center for Immigration Studies, has found that every one percent increase
in the immigrant composition of American workers’ occupations reduces their
weekly wages by about 0.5 percent. This means the average native-born American
worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.5 percent because of
current legal immigration levels.
John Binder is a reporter for
Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
CBO:
Immigration Has ‘Negative Effect on Wages’
NEIL
MUNRO
9 Jan 2020230
7:01
Immigration makes all of America richer, but it can make some
Americans poorer, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says in a report
issued January 9.
“Immigration, whether legal or illegal, expands the labor force
and changes its composition, leading to increases in total economic output,”
said the non-partisan report, titled “The Foreign-Born
Population and Its Effects on the U.S. Economy and the Federal Budget—An
Overview.”
But this national expansion does “not necessarily [deliver] to
increases in output per capita,” or income per person, the report said:
For example, business leaders say the nation’s enormous
population of immigrants has expanded the nation’s workforce, increased
consumption, and driven up housing prices. But that inflow has also shrunk the
wages of less-educated Americans, the report said:
Among people with less education, a large percentage are foreign
born. Consequently, immigration has exerted downward pressure on the wages of
relatively low-skilled workers who are already in the country, regardless of
their birthplace.
The CBO report contradicts business claims that a bigger economy
ensures bigger wages for everyone.
More ominously, the report also suggests that the American
middle-class — including millions of young college graduates — may suffer a
similar economic disaster if immigration policy is shifted to raise the inflow
of foreign college graduates. The report says:
The effects of immigration on wages depend on the
characteristics of the immigrants. To the extent that newly arrived workers
have abilities similar to those of workers already in the country, immigration
would have a negative effect on wages.
Many business advocates in Washington are calling for a dramatic
increase in “high-skilled immigration” — meaning foreign college graduates who
would compete for the same jobs as American college graduates. For
example, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is trying to pass his S.386 bill that offers the
prize of renewable work-permits — and eventual citizenship — to an unlimited
number of foreign graduates.
Each year, up to 120,000 foreign graduates — and their spouses
and children — can get green cards via their employer’s sponsorship, even as
perhaps 800,000 Americans graduate from college with skilled degrees.
But Lee’s bill creates a new legal status called “Early
Adjustment.” This status would allow an uncapped number of college graduate
migrants to apply for renewable work permits long before they can get a green
card to become a legal immigrant and citizen.
Existing law allows an uncapped number of foreigners to legally
get short-term work permits and jobs after enrolling in U.S. colleges. The
migrants can get jobs by first paying tuition to a university, and then getting
short-term work permits via the uncapped “Curricular Practical Training” and
the “Optional Practical Training” programs. These workers must leave the United
States after a few years until they enroll themselves in work permit programs.
But Lee’s bill would remove any caps on this foreign worker
population by allowing an unlimited number of foreign workers to get “Early
Adjustment” status from their employers.
DHS
posts videos of Indian migrants buying fake documents from ICE's Farmington U.
sting operation.
The #OPT Optional Practical Training program is an estb.-run
labor-trafficking scheme to sideline American graduates.
It will expand if #S386 becomes law http://bit.ly/39H2Zqh
Many migrants already use the CPT and OPT work permits to get
jobs and to also compete for entry into the H-1B visa worker program. Once in
the H-1B program — which accepts 85,000 new workers each year — many of the
migrants also ask their employers to sponsor them for green cards.
The sponsorship allows them to stay working in the United States
until they eventually get their valuable green card, long after their temporary
visas have expired. Congress has not set an annual limit on the number of visa
workers who can be sponsored for green cards, so the resident population of
permanent “temporary workers” is growing fast — and is helping to suppress
wages for American graduates.
Roughly 1.5 million foreign visa workers hold white-collar jobs
throughout the U.S. economy. This number includes at least 750,000 Indians who
are allowed to work via the supposedly temporary CPT, OPT, L-1, and H-1B visa
programs. Roughly 300,000 of these Indians — plus 300,000 family members — are
being allowed to stay in the United States because they asked their employers
to sponsor them for green cards.
The CBO report shows that immigrants comprise roughly 40 percent
of the population of people who did not graduate from high school — and
that immigrants already comprise roughly 20 percent of all people with a
“graduate degree.”
Congressional Budget Office
The 20 percent share likely would quickly rise if the Senate
approves Lee’s S.386 plan — and that rise could sharply reduce salaries for
American college graduates.
“Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10
percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills
probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent” as the extra
workers compete for jobs, says George Borjas, a labor economist at Harvard.
That extra labor does expand the economy — but that expansion is dwarfed by the
transfer of the wage reductions to investors, he wrote in 2016:
I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in
the total wealth of the native population—to be about $50 billion annually. But
behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to
another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native
winners [mostly employers] is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year.
“In low-skilled occupations, a one percent increase in the
immigrant composition of an individual’s occupation reduces wages by [0].8
percent,” said a 1998 report by the Center for
Immigration Studies.
A 2013 CBO report predicted that the 2013
“Gang of Eight” amnesty and immigration bill would reduce the share of income
that goes to wage earners and increase the share that goes to
investors. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the
labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after
enactment,” the CBO report said.
But all that cheap labor would boost corporate profits and spike
the stock market, the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be
higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout
the next two decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
Business leaders sometimes admit that an extra supply of workers
forces down wages. “If you have ten people for every job, you’re not going to
have a drive [up] in wages,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue told
Breitbart News on January 9. But “if you have five people for every ten jobs,
wages are going to go up.”
Are rising wages good
for national politics?
“You’re damn right they are,” US Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue said,
adding: "They are good for national politics if you’re a politician, for
sure."http://bit.ly/2FwwCg7
Claims
of a Labor Shortage Are Just Not True
America's
September unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, the lowest level since 1969,
according to the most recent Department of Labor report.
The tight
labor market is forcing companies to hire disadvantaged Americans. For
example, New
Seasons Market, a
West Coast grocery chain, is actively recruiting people with disabilities and
prior criminal records. Similarly, Custom
Equipment, a
Wisconsin manufacturing firm, recently hired several prison inmates through a
work-release program and intends to employ them full-time upon their release.
For the
first time in decades, these disadvantaged Americans are finally winning
significant pay increases. Over the past year, the lowest-paid 25 percent of
workers enjoyed faster wage growth than their higher-paid peers.
Unfortunately,
this positive trend could be short-lived. Corporate special interests are
whining about a labor shortage -- and are spending millions to lobby for higher
levels of immigration, which would supply companies with cheap, pliable workers.
Hardworking
Americans need their leaders in Washington to see through this influence
campaign and stand up for their interests. Scaling back immigration would
further tighten the labor market, boosting wages and helping the most
disadvantaged Americans find jobs.
The U.S.
economy is the strongest it has been in years. Employers added 136,000 new jobs
in September, marking 108 months of consecutive
job growth.
But
there's still more progress to be made. Approximately 6
million Americans
are currently looking for jobs but remain unemployed. Another 4
million desire
full-time positions but are underemployed as part-time workers. Millions
more, feeling
discouraged about their bleak prospects, have abandoned the job search
altogether. Indeed, among 18 through 65-year-olds, 55
million people
aren't working.
Many of
these folks have limited or outdated skills. Others have criminal records or
disabilities. So they might require a bit more training than traditional job
applicants.
Rather
than put in this extra effort, some big businesses want to eliminate their
recruiting challenges by importing cheap foreign workers. These firms have
instructed their lobbyists to push for more immigration, which would introduce
more slack into the labor market.
The CEO
of the Chamber of Commerce recently claimed that America needs a massive
increase in immigration because we're "out of people." Chamber
officials said their lobbying efforts would center on sizeable increases to
rates of legal immigration.
The
National Association of Manufacturers, meanwhile, recently released a proposal which would effectively double
the number of H-1B tech worker visas, import more seasonal low-skilled laborers
on H-2A and H-2B visas, and grant amnesty to illegal immigrants.
And the
agriculture industry is lobbying for a path to legalization for
illegal laborers and is seeking to expand "temporary" guest-worker
programs to include stable, year-round positions on dairy farms and meatpacking
plants -- jobs that Americans will happily fill for the right wage. The
Association of Builders and Contractors, Koch Industries, and dozens more
companies have called for similar measures.
There are
already 45
million immigrants
in the United States -- 28 million of which are employed -- and counting. More
than 650,000
people crossed
into the United States illegally in the past eight months alone, already
exceeding last fiscal year's totals. And the U.S. government grants an
additional 1 million lifetime work permits to immigrants every year.
Those
figures will skyrocket even higher if business groups get their way. Such an
expansion would hurt hardworking Americans.
The
majority of foreigners who cross the border illegally or arrive on guest worker
visas lack substantial education. Naturally, they seek out less-skilled jobs in
construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and service -- and directly compete
with the most economically vulnerable Americans. The labor surplus created by
immigration depresses the wages of native-born high school dropouts up to $1,500 each year.
Several
proposals under consideration in Washington could alleviate American workers'
woes.
A
recent bill from Senator Chuck Grassley
(R-IA) would mandate all businesses use a free, online system called E-Verify,
which determines an individual's work eligibility in mere seconds.
The
system would make it extremely difficult for employers to hire illegal
immigrants, roughly 40
percent of whom
have been paid subminimum wages at some point. Without a pool of easily abused
illegal laborers, businesses would raise pay for Americans.
Several
senators also recently introduced the Raise
Act, a bill that
would reduce future levels of legal immigration.
It's time
for our leaders in Washington to scale back both legal and illegal immigration.
By doing so, they can further tighten the labor market and force businesses to
bring less-advantaged Americans back into the workforce.
OPEN BORDERS: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES
DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the
financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful
blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working
class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic
hardship not seen since the 1930s."
"Inequality has reached unprecedented
levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net
worth of the poorest half of the US population."
PELOSI,
FEINSTEIN, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWOMS’S MEXIFORNIA
Report:
California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years
Justin
Sullivan/Getty Images
3 Sep 2019172
6:24
Middle-class wages in
progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a study
by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.
“Earnings for California’s
workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or
stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled “California’s Workers Are
Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.” The report continued:
In
2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1%
higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars)
(Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at
the 10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in
1979 to $11.12 in 2018.
The report admits that the
state’s progressive economy is delivering more to investors and less to
wage-earners. “Since 2001, the share of state private-sector [annual new
income] that has gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6 percentage
points — from 52.9% to 47.3%.”
In 2016, California’s Gross
Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop shifted $146
billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in 2016.
The report notes that wages
finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits the credit between the
Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald Trump’s go-go economy.
The 40 years of flat wages are
partly hidden by a wave of new products and services. They include almost-free
entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap imported coffee in
supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.
But the impact of California’s
flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing costs, the report says,
even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of the establishment’s
pro-immigration policies:
In just the last decade
alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far outpaced the rise in
the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting that working
families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends
meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the state is more
than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even if all adults
are working full-time.
…
Specifically, inflation-adjusted
median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017, while
inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least 35
hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget
Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
The wage and housing problems are made worse —
especially for families — by the loss of
employment benefits as companies and investors spike stock prices by cutting
costs. The report says:
Many workers are being paid
little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker productivity has
risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans sponsored by their
employers, leaving individual workers on their own to stretch limited dollars and
resources to plan how they’ll spend their later years affording the high cost
of living and health care in California. And as union representation has
declined, most workers today cannot negotiate collectively for better working
conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as retirement and health care, like
their parents and grandparents did. On top of all this, workers who take on
contingent and independent work (often referred to as “gig work”), which in
many cases appears to be motivated by the need to supplement their primary job
or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely granted the same rights and legal
protections as traditional employees.
The center’s report tries to
blame the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the declining clout of unions. But
unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan elites’ policy of mass-migration
and imposed diversity.
In
2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for
Immigration Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the
economic impact of migration:
TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do
a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was
the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. For a helper, it was
about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45
an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically
got $25 an hour.
…
Now, the average wage in Los
Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower
than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour
at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood
that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor
can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099,
which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Diversity
also damaged the unions by shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007,
the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title
“Latino Gang Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing
Blacks.” In the same year, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times described another murder by Latino
gangs as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic
cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”
The center’s board members
include the executive director of the state’s SEIU union, a professor from the
Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and
the research director at the “Program for Environmental and Regional Equity” at
the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Outside
California, President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies are pressuring
employers to raise Americans’ wages in a hot economy. The Wall Street Journal reportedAugust 29:
Overall, median weekly earnings
rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same quarter in 2018, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between the ages of 25 and 34,
that increase was 7.6%.
Free
Trader Paul Krugman Admits Failure of Globalization for American Workers:
‘Major Mistake’
Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
13 Oct
2019780
3:21
Economist
Paul Krugman, the longtime defender of global free trade and a member of the
failed “Never Trump” movement, now admits that globalization has failed
American workers.
In a column for Bloomberg titled “What
Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization,” Krugman admits that
the economic consensus for free trade that has prevailed for decades has failed
to recognize how globalization has skyrocketed inequality for America’s working
and middle class workers.
Krugman writes:
In the past few years, however,
worries about globalization have shot back to the top of the agenda, partly due to new research and partly due to the political
shocks of Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trump. And as one of the
people who helped shape the 1990s consensus — that the contribution of rising
trade to rising inequality was real but modest — it seems appropriate for me to
ask now what we missed. [Emphasis added]
…
The pro-globalization consensus of
the 1990s, which concluded that trade contributed little
to rising inequality, relied on models that asked how the growth of
trade had affected the incomes of broad classes of workers, such as those who
didn’t go to college. It’s possible, and probably even correct, to think of
these models as accurate in the long run. Consensus economists didn’t
turn much to analytic methods that focus on workers in particular industries
and communities, which would have given a better picture of short-run
trends. This was, I now believe, a major mistake — one in which I
shared a hand. [Emphasis added]
Krugman, though, writes that he and
his fellow free trade economists “had no way to know” that globalization of the
American economy or a surge in trade deficits “were going to happen,” though
the anti-globalization movement had warned for years of the harmful impact free
trade would have on U.S. workers — including Donald Trump.
In an interview with SiriusXM
Patriot’s Breitbart News
Tonight, economist Alan Tonelson said that
Krugman’s acknowledging that he and the free trade economic consensus has been
wrong is “better later than never,” but “the damage has already been done.”
LISTEN:
“There’s been an even more
startling, in fact jaw-dropping, development on that front. Paul Krugman, the
famous Never Trumper, the famous pro-free trade economist, the Nobel Prize
winner just published an article … saying that for the past 20 years, he and
his other globalist, free trade economist friends have been substantially wrong
about the effect of globalization, particularly more trade with low income, low
wage countries like China,” Tonelson said.
“They’ve been substantially wrong
about its effects on the American economy and American workers in particular,”
Tonelson said.
Meanwhile, decades of free trade
have spurred mass layoffs, unemployment, and offshoring of high-paying American
jobs while surging trade deficits. Since China entered the World Trade
Organization (WTO), the U.S. trade deficit with China has eliminated at least 3.5
million American jobs from the American economy. Millions of American workers
in all 50 states have been displaced from their
jobs, which have been lost due to U.S.-China trade relations.
John
Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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