Big Business Complains of Labor Shortage, High Wages While 22M Americans Out of Work
7:20
Big business and Big Agriculture is complaining of labor shortages and high wages while the Chinese coronavirus crisis has spurred mass unemployment with at least 22 million Americans out of work.
While unemployment among Americans climbs to record levels, with now at least 22 million out of work in the last four weeks, employers who hire H-2A and H-2B foreign visa workers continue to complain that the United States is facing a labor shortage and that wages are too high.
Executives with the American Farm Bureau Federation, one of the leading cheap labor lobbying organizations, are backing a reported plan to federally lower wage rates for imported H-2A foreign visa workers that are brought into the U.S. to work on farms:
Paul Schlegel, vice president of public affairs at the American Farm Bureau Federation, said it’s important to address the [Adverse Effect Wage Rate] at a time when labor-intensive produce farms have lost much of their markets due to COVID-19. [Emphasis added]“The closing of restaurants, hotels and tourism is forcing farmers to plow under their fields to cut their losses,” Schlegel said. “Asking farmers to pay artificially high wages at a time when their own income has largely evaporated due to the COVID-19 pandemic is not right.” [Emphasis added]
The plan under consideration by the Agriculture Department would allow farmers to pay H-2A foreign visa workers wages below existing rates. The wage reduction policy would be coupled with the State Department’s fast-tracking of H-2A foreign visa workers into the U.S.
American Farm Bureau Federation executives praised the Agriculture Department for issuing visa waivers to more readily fast-track H-2A foreign visa workers, calling it “critically important.”
As federal data shows, H-2A foreign visa workers make up only about ten percent of the total U.S. crop farm workforce and the program is already used by farmers to pay imported foreign workers less than their American counterparts.
The H-2A visa program has no numerical limit. Last year, U.S. farmers hired roughly 250,000 H-2A foreign visa workers.
Gaston Marquevich, the CEO of Generation Farms — one of the largest crop growers of carrots and sweet onions on the East Coast — told TheStreet.com that his corporation has successfully imported foreign workers in the middle of the crisis:
Yeah, I think there is an issue, of course. There are many issues. One of the issues is a labor shortage. So, we started to work a conversation a month ago. So, but yeah, right in time when this COVID-19 came to us. So we normally use, in between Florida and Georgia, we normally use 1,200 employees as labor. So, we applied to the aid program. So normally, the program takes three months, and the last two or three year was taking like six months because all of this and then changes on the immigration policies, rules. [Emphasis added]So we’ve been very, very stressed about getting all the employees in place to allow us to pick up the crop from the ground. So we connect, a month ago, we contact the USDA team, the team that works with the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, and they basically have been very flexible, very cooperative with us, and they count on the USCIS in California. So in California, they contact the U.S. embassy in Monterey and finally we get 500 employees in Florida and 450 in Georgia. So we don’t have the 1,200 that normally we use, but we are okay with it the 950 right now. [Emphasis added]
On April 6, USA Today published the grievances of a local California agriculture reporter who argued that farmers are struggling “to find workers” despite mass unemployment:
A crippling labor shortage has affected nearly every corner of California agriculture. Increased competition for workers continues as wine grape growers lose labor to commercial cannabis growers — who can offer higher wages, stable employment and better working conditions because of how lucrative the crop is. [Emphasis added]
These complaints have also been echoed by the employers of H-2B foreign visa workers, whereby more than 66,000 foreign nationals are imported every year to take seasonal, nonagricultural jobs. The State Department, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, is allowing employers to fast-track these foreign workers by waiving certain visa requirements.
Still, big business has claimed they are struggling to hire folks to take jobs. In a Bloomberg News report, an attorney for H-2B visa employers said that while millions are out of work, his clients still need imported foreign labor:
The holding pattern “shows the lack of understanding the government has of how the H-2B program is essential to the economy,” said Jeff Joseph, an attorney with Joseph & Hall in Aurora, Colo., who represents companies that employ H-2B workers. Some industries are operating as usual “regardless of the pandemic,” he said, and need workers going into the summer and fall. [Emphasis added]“Without clear, transparent information from the government on how long this shutdown is going to last, those people still need the workers,” he said, adding that his clients that employ H-2B workers—including resorts, landscaping companies, and outdoor-adventure operators—haven’t been laying off workers. [Emphasis addd]
Less than a month ago, Maryland seafood processors complained that they needed more H-2B foreign visa workers even after Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf promised businesses an additional 35,000 foreign workers to hire:
Jack Brooks, co-owner of J.M. Clayton Seafood Co. in Cambridge, and president of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association, said he expects a worker shortfall, despite the government’s action. [Emphasis added]Initially, the Department of Homeland Security doled out 33,000 work visas, which are in effect for six months beginning April 1. With the added 35,000 visas, the total still falls well short of the 100,000 slots that U.S. employers nationally had sought to fill. [Emphasis added]
While big business and Big Agriculture ask for more foreign workers, a number of leading conservative voices have asked President Trump’s administration to pause immigration to the U.S. — a plan supported by nearly 80 percent of Americans, according to the latest Ipsos poll.
Former Sen. Jeff Sessions and Laura Ingraham have said the nation’s unemployment totals should be eased by stopping increased labor market competition against unemployed Americans via legal immigration.
Such a pause to immigration would come after four decades of the U.S. admitting 525,000 to 1.8 million legal immigrants annually. The U.S., at current legal immigration levels, admits more legal immigrants than any other country in the world and has done so for more than two decades.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
DHS Allows Agricultural Guestworkers to Stay Indefinitely
By Preston Huennekens
ImmigrationReform.com
https://www.immigrationreform.com/2020/04/16/guestworker-agriculture-dhs-h2a-immigrationreform-com/
Meat shortages: The wages of 'cheap' illegal labor
In 2004's preachy, much panned leftist mockumentary, A Day without a Mexican, the supposedly hypothetical scenario, about how California would fall apart if all its Mexicans, including illegals, somehow disappeared, was acted out. The film had a grand old time portraying white people as a bunch of soft, privileged fools, unable to clean even their own toilets.
This is annoying because it lumps most Americans into a stereotype of a typically feckless, over-monied limousine liberal, such as you might really find in Hollywood circles.
But it did raise the question of U.S. dependence on illegal foreign labor.
Seems we might just be experiencing that now with the big meat plant shutdowns, based on problems with much of the labor force being out with the coronavirus. The plants also are described in news reports as having an "immigrant" workforce. Based on the number of ICE chicken plant raids seen in recent news, it's very likely that these plants, too, may be dependent on illegal alien labor. With those workers now either out with COVID-19 or else in, and spreading it to others, the plants are going down. Worse still, industry consolidation means that these plants are now few in number, so nothing can pick up the slack. The shutdowns are expected to mean meat shortages at the groceries, curiously similar to Venezuela's.
According to the Associated Press:
Some massive meat processing plants have closed at least temporarily because their workers were sickened by the new coronavirus, raising concerns that there could soon be shortages of beef, pork and poultry in supermarkets.The meat supply chain is especially vulnerable since processing is increasingly done at massive plants that butcher tens of thousands of animals daily, so the closure of even a few big ones can quickly be felt by customers. For instance, a Smithfield Foods plant that was forced to close in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, after nearly 300 of the plant's 3,700 workers tested positive for the virus produces roughly 5% of the U.S. pork supply each day.In addition, conditions at plants can be ripe for exploitation by the virus: Workers stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the line and crowd into locker rooms to change their clothes before and after shifts.
Just as the coronavirus crisis drove home the foolhardiness of corporate America outsourcing all of its manufacturing, including that of medicine, to China, so the upcoming meat shortages highlight the problem of dependency on a vast army of illegal "immigrant" labor for the nation's food processing. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit noted the problem here:
CONDITIONS AT MEAT-PROCESSING PLANTS NEED TO BE BETTER. IF THEY COULDN’T HIRE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS, THEY’D HAVE TO BE BETTER TO ATTRACT WORKERS: Beef processors are closing U.S. plants, warn of beef shortages and hoarding.
The New York Times and others cite the crowded conditions of meat-packing plants as one reason why workers are getting sick in high enough numbers at plants to force their shutdown. While it may or may not be correctable, there's obviously a limited replacement workforce for this kind of hard and disagreeable work. The money isn't great, either — the average earning in the big South Dakota Smithfield plant is $17.70 an hour, not a lovely wage for the hard work of stripping out animal guts from cows and pigs or picking the feathers and skin off chickens. The hard working conditions might just be the work of choice for people with low bargaining power owing to their illegal status. But that's not good when it involves the nation's meat supply.
The company itself has made some questionable calls, too, if the media reporting is right. Vox reports that workers were promised $500 bonuses at the Smithfield plant if they didn't miss work for a month. Got a cough? Come to work so you won't miss your bonus.
Speaking of bonuses, illegals may be even more incentivized to come to work while sick based on the fact that they aren't getting $1,200 stimulus checks to tide them over. If staying home to get well means no money at all, the incentive is there to come to work in close quarters while sick, which is apparently what happened. This is not an argument that they should get the checks. It's an argument that the U.S. shouldn't be dependent on workers for food processing in a consolidated industry who might feel compelled to come to work sick instead of stay home if they show symptoms of COVID-19.
As Reynolds notes, it comes down to conditions. If a plant can have tough working conditions and still attract a workforce to do the work, it will do that. If it can't, it needs to raise its wages and improve its working conditions to attract a wider and more flexible workforce.
The industry consolidation is another issue that seems to be compounding the problem. According to the Times, meat industry is now centralized with huge consolidated plants, another byproduct of globalization, same as illegal immigrant labor dependency. Who owns the Smithfield plant in this consolidation rage? Here's the Times:
In the 1980s and ’90s, companies like Smithfield, which is now owned by a Chinese pork company, bought out competitors and designed massive plants that could slaughter more than a million animals a year. At the same time, meatpacking became more concentrated in a few states where animal feed is grown, like Iowa and South Dakota.
The net result of these two products of globalization - illegal immigrant labor and Chinese consolidated ownership -- is meat shortages.
Why did Venezuela get meat shortages? Yes, socialist mismanagement, price controls, and corruption for sure. But overdependency on oil as its sole source of revenue was very much part of it, too. The high dollars the Venezuelan government was raking in from globally traded oil during the boom of the aught years pretty well drove other Venezuelan industries out of business, given that they were in no position to export competitively with their currency bloated in value and they couldn't afford imported raw materials, either.
Seems the dependencies on illegal labor and consolidated industries don't work well to ensure production in a pandemic, either. The meat shortages are here, too.
Which once again demonstrates that cheap labor isn's so cheap after all, particularly when it's monopoly labor. And the efficiencies of consolidation and centralization have costs too when there's a need for competition to pick up the slack. When the competition is gone, whether of labor or companies, you get the approximate result of centralized Venezuelan or Bernie Sanders-style socialism where the government controls everything. Happens every time.
Socialism can't correct itself. Capitalism, though can. And one hopes the coronavirus crisis is a wakeup call on the problems of dependency on cheap illegal foreign labor and consolidated foreign ownership.
Photo illustration by Monica Showalter using public domain sources and image by Michael Vadon via Wikimedia Commons and Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
DHS Allows Agricultural Guestworkers to Stay Indefinitely
By Preston Huennekens
ImmigrationReform.com
https://www.immigrationreform.com/2020/04/16/guestworker-agriculture-dhs-h2a-immigrationreform-com/
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