And where is Congress? Should there not be sane statutory provisions regarding who gets pink-slipped at a time of massive layoffs? And should those provisions not be protecting American employees instead of permitting them to be sacrificed in favor of so-called "temporary" foreign workers?
Desperation swells among millions of unemployed in the US as layoffs mount and aid dries up
Over six months after pandemic-induced lockdowns went into effect in the US—before being quickly abandoned by Democratic and Republican governors at the insistence of President Donald Trump and the financial oligarchy—the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression shows no signs of abating.
Over six months after pandemic-induced lockdowns went into effect in the US—before being quickly abandoned by Democratic and Republican governors at the insistence of President Donald Trump and the financial oligarchy—the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression shows no signs of abating.
While the March-April crescendo of job losses of over 11 million has not been repeated, talk of a “V-shaped” recovery in the jobs market has been put to rest as ongoing layoffs in transportation, entertainment and hospitality sectors are adding tens of thousands more to the unemployment rolls every day. The Department of Labor (DOL) reports that 28.4 million workers are currently receiving unemployment benefits or are waiting for approval.
At the same time, small business owners who took advantage of loans offered through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) as part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, are teetering on the brink of collapse as Small Business Administration data revealed this week that less than one percent of the over 5.2 million loans granted through the program have been turned into grants. Since the beginning of the pandemic, an estimated 100,000 small businesses have permanently closed, with many still on the hook for outstanding PPP loans.
The combined economic squeeze on workers and small businesses has led to growing food insecurity and a rise in evictions. Despite the growing indicators of widespread social displacement, hunger, and mental anguish, including 40 states reporting an increase in opioid-related mortality, the US Congress, overwhelmingly comprised of millionaires, many of whom withheld information on the danger of the pandemic to increase their stock portfolios, continues to feign interest in a fifth coronavirus relief bill while accomplishing nothing.
The latest DOL report states that the US unemployment rate stands at 8.4 percent. However, economists estimate the number to be above 11 percent due to the fact that millions of workers have given up on securing employment as demand for work outstrips available jobs, with 2.5 workers per every one job, according to the DOL, for July, the last month data is available.
Despite the coordinated abandonment of any health and safety guidelines as part of the ruling class’s homicidal “back to school” and “back to work” campaign, which has led to a resurgence of the coronavirus cases across the country, millions of people continue to stay at home and spend what little money they have on essentials.
The reduction of travel, and with it, consumer spending, like all aspects of the pandemic, will be another burden the working class will be forced to shoulder. On Thursday, domestic airline carriers American, United and Delta are set to lay off up to 40,000 workers unless more government bailout funds are secured. As part of the CARES Act, the major airlines received $25 billion in government funding on the condition that they would not lay off workers prior to October 1.
The reduction in travel is hitting entertainment sectors particularly hard. The unemployment rate in central Florida, already 15 percent in Osceola County and nearly 12 percent in Orange County, is expected to balloon once the data is released for the month of September following multiple large-scale layoff announcements from several major resorts.
On Tuesday, Disneyworld and Disneyland resorts announced 28,000 layoffs, affecting workers at the California, Florida, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong locations. Disney Parks Chairman Josh D’Amaro said in a statement that the “difficult decision” to eliminate thousands of jobs “will enable us to emerge a more effective and efficient operation when we return to normal.” D’Amaro estimated that “67 percent” of those laid off are part-time, meaning they will not be eligible for full unemployment benefits, which in Florida is capped at an insulting $275 a week for 12 weeks.
The Swan and Dolphin hotels, which are located at Disney World in Orlando, but not owned by the company, also announced 1,100 layoffs at the beginning of September. Shortly thereafter, SeaWorld confirmed that it would be terminating 1,900 workers at its Orlando location, while Universal Orlando Resort also announced in September that it was extending furloughs for nearly 5,400 workers through “at least” the end of the year.
Audits conducted within the last month in California, Wisconsin, Florida and Nevada reveal dysfunctional call centers in which millions of calls from claimants went unanswered, with backlogs growing day after day. Laid-off workers report calling unemployment offices hundreds of times a day for weeks on end, only to be hung up on or, if they do get through, their issue is not resolved.
In Florida, where last month Republican governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump acolyte, admitted that the unemployment system was designed to pay out the “least number of claims ,” claimants still report not receiving funds even after sending in the requisite documentation.
As of September 18, more than 152,000 Floridians were waiting to be paid, according to the state’s own dashboard, while an estimated two thirds of the state’s unemployment funds have already been depleted, leaving many new applicants without access to funds without new legislation or until next year. DOL data for Florida shows that for the month of April only 36.44 percent of approved first unemployment payments were made within 14 to 21 days after the claim was approved. In May this decreased to 31.7 percent.
For those workers who have managed to get through annoying phone trees and have had their claims successfully processed, the expiration of state unemployment benefits, which is capped at 26 weeks a year in many states, combined with the ending of the Lost Wages Assistance Program (LWA), administered through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, portends more hardship.
While nearly every single US state and territory was approved for the $300 weekly payment meant to last six weeks, at least 15 states will end the program this week, or have already ended it, including: Arizona, California, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.
Conversely, states such as Michigan that were approved weeks ago to begin distributing funds have yet to send funds to most of those who are eligible, while in Nevada, where the unemployment rate in Las Vegas is above 16 percent, Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) Administrator Elisa Cafferata still does not expect LWA payments to begin depositing into workers accounts for at least “another four to five weeks.”
DETR is currently in the process of phasing out a privately run call center, Alorica, which was awarded a $5 million contract in April to assist with handling the deluge of unemployment claims. However, after months of complaints and a backlog of more than 80,000 unpaid valid claims since March, the state terminated the contract. Cafferata admitted that the department is still “chipping away at the backlog” and claiming to have resolved an estimated 18,161 claims in the last two months, leaving more than 60,000 waiting.
In Wisconsin, a recent analysis from the Legislative Audit Bureau found that fewer than one percent of calls directed to the Department of Workforce Development unemployment call centers between March 15 and June 30 were answered. Approximately 93.3 percent or over 38 million calls placed during that time period were blocked or callers received a busy signal, while roughly 6 percent of callers hung up before reaching someone, leaving only .5 percent of calls answered.
Speaking to a local Fox affiliate, Kathleen Meachem of Appleton, Wisconsin explained the mind-numbing tedium of trying to get through the lines. “I would sit somedays and literally just hit repeat dial to unemployment,” Meachem said. “There were some days that I had 500 calls to them and was unable to get through.”
Last month, Sharon Hillard, Employment Development Director (EDD) for the state of California, told lawmakers that the state had a backlog of 1.6 million claims, which Hilliard estimated would not be resolved “until January 2021.” The state is currently not accepting any more applications to address the backlog and to prevent what it says are “fraudulent claims.”
As in Wisconsin and Nevada, long wait times and unanswered phone calls to EDD have left millions frustrated and without funds. In addition to long wait times, the state’s unemployment website itself was not optimized for mobile devices, forcing millions to access it on a desktop computer, something hard to come by for low-income workers, especially with the pandemic closing down public libraries.
Speaking to the Sacramento Bee, Pearl Jow, a 53-year-old resident of Palm Desert, spoke on the hardships she faces, now that the state will be ending LWA payments next week for her and some 3.2 million people who had been receiving payments. Jow lost her job at a logistics company at the start of the pandemic in March and has been receiving $110 a week in unemployment benefits.
“How am I supposed to cover basic bills on $110 a week?” Bow wondered. “Literally, I’ve been living on oatmeal and peanut butter sandwiches.” Speaking on congressional inaction, Jow remarked, “They act like they have all the time in the world. Twenty-four hours is a life-or-death situation, and no one cares, and no one is listening.”
Sheltering H-1B 'Temporary' Workers at the Expense of Americans During COVID
By Dan Cadman | October 1, 2020 | 4:02pm EDT
Consider these factoids in chronological succession:
- In mid-August, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ran a second H-1B visa lottery for the year despite, as my colleague David North noted, a lack of interest.
- On Sept. 25, Law360 (partially behind a paywall) reported that the Department of Labor (DOL) had freed up $150 million from H-1B user fees to support a program to train American workers due to "critical shortages of skilled workers" allegedly brought on by the Trump administration's "ban" on the importation of H-1B workers (which still amounts to a total of 85,000 visas, and therefore jobs, that DHS has shown itself determined to give away, despite the administration's emphasis on "hiring American").
- On Sept. 30, Disney Corporation announced that it is laying off 28,000 workers from its theme parks due to the disastrous COVID pandemic we are still living through.
The import of DHS's unnecessary August lottery is that a whole host of H-1B visas will be granted to foreigners to come and work in the United States, even though the economy is still suffering and unemployment rates are still disturbingly high.
Conversely, DOL can at least be said to be trying to do something to ease the plight of disenfranchised American workers by apportioning funds toward training programs — although there is reason enough to question whether there actually is a "critical shortage," given the lack of interest in the initial H-1B lottery and the massive layoffs at employers such as Disney. There's also plenty of reason to doubt exactly how "skilled" many H-1B recipients are: Once again, thanks to North, we know that significant numbers of these individuals come from distinctly lackluster institutions of learning, not just from the American university system, but also within the hierarchy of their own countries.
Finally, there is the matter of the massive layoffs at Disney (and Carnival Cruise Lines and Sea World and other theme parks before it). Two-thirds of those laid off are part-time workers, presumably less-skilled; but since the layoffs are hitting workers "at all levels," one wonders how many of those laid off will be H-1B workers — who tend to work for lower wages than comparable American workers — and how many will be Americans who forfeit their jobs while the H-1Bs go unscathed.
Past history suggests that Disney will go straight for the jugular and dump the Americans and keep the foreign workers. In this, they're not alone; it is a pattern often repeated in the corporate world. It would have been nice for Disney (or any of the others) to make an affirmative statement about doing all it can to protect American jobs despite the need for layoffs. That it didn't is pretty suggestive that history will repeat itself.
Collectively, the juxtaposition of these three things is enough to make one's head spin and wonder if anyone at all is in charge of strategic thinking in our federal government's bureaucracies, where foreign workers vs. American jobs are concerned, or whether we are floating along rudderless.
And where is Congress? Should there not be sane statutory provisions regarding who gets pink-slipped at a time of massive layoffs? And should those provisions not be protecting American employees instead of permitting them to be sacrificed in favor of so-called "temporary" foreign workers?
Dan Cadman is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and is a retired INS / ICE official with thirty years of government experience. Mr. Cadman served as a senior supervisor and manager at headquarters, as well as at field offices both domestically and abroad.
Agriculture Department Drops Wage Floor in H-2A Farmworker Program
Agriculture department officials have announced they will not conduct a routine annual survey on wages in the farm sector, likely helping agriculture employers to suppress wages for the expected supply of 230,000 H-2A workers in 2021.
The decision by former Gov. Sonny Perdue’s Department of Agriculture was slammed by the left and the right as bad for Americans and for the H-2A migrant workers.
“This seems like an ill-advised move during such difficult economic times, and far too many U.S. workers have had to endure pay cuts and job losses,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. She continued:
Sadly, it’s not a surprise, as Trump’s agriculture officials are practically lobbyists for the farm employers, always looking to implement policies that lower the cost of farm labor, especially by keeping the pipeline of farm visa workers as large as possible. It’s not going to serve the President very well in this hotly contested election.
“This action will have the consequence of lowering [American] farmworker wages,” said Giev Kashkooli, the political & legislative director at the United Farm Workers union. He continued:
The current law allows [agriculture employers] to bring in an unlimited number of people on the H-2A [visa] program. The protection for U.S. … workers is that the employer is required to pay [the foreign] workers in the H-2A program the average wage that farmworkers in the United States are receiving by region. So that term, “Adverse Effect Wage Rate” really should just be called the average wage. But it’s called “adverse effect” because its purpose is to not have an adverse effect on U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.
So that’s what the compromise was under President [Ronald] Reagan and has existed till now: ‘You can bring in as many [H-2A] people as you want, as long as you’re paying people the [AEWR] average wage.’
In 2019, agriculture employers imported up to 230,000 H-2A workers and paid them at the various AEWR rates, which rose by an average of six percent and reached up to $15 per hour. That wage-level protected Americans from long jobs or wages to H-2A workers, and also pressured employers to invest in labor-saving, wage-boosting machinery.
But Perdue is blocking the AEWR survey for 2021 so that employers can pay the H-2A workers at rates set by the employers’ flawed surveys, Kashkooli argued. The wage rates will be skewed downward by the arrival of more H-2A workers, creating a cycle of shrinking wages and underpaid H-2A workers, he argued.
“The Trump administration is proposing that you can bring in as many people you want, but you can do it at minimum wage,” Kashkooli said.
The Agricultural Labor Survey is used to set the AEWR wage rates. It is conducted by the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). A department statement said the “USDA has determined that the public can access other data sources for the data collected in the Agricultural Labor Survey.”
The department declined Breitbart’s request for information about how the AEWR wages can be set.
Agricultural employers say they are under intense economic pressure from each other and from increasingly sophisticated foreign suppliers. The foreign farms are using very cheap labor, plus improving technology, skilled managers, low-cost transportation, and free-trade deals to win larger shares of U.S. food sales.
The American Farm Bureau Federation is touting the department’s decision to drop the survey, according to Agri-pulse.com:
The Labor Department uses the NASS wage survey to set the annual state wage minimums, known as the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, or AEWR, for H-2A workers. This year, the rates went up 6% nationally, with farmers in some states seeing increases of up to 10%.
…
Veronica Nigh, an economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation, called the USDA move “a step in the right direction to ensure the wage setting mechanism for H-2A workers does not encompass flawed data that disproportionately penalizes farmers who rely on guest workers.”
She said, “Nothing in this announcement states an intent to lower wages for domestic and foreign workers.”
The left-wing and the right-wing activists jointly criticized the agriculture department — but they differ over the impact of imported labor.
“What is surprising is that the farmworker advocates have abandoned their historic support for tighter controls on farmworker visas,” said Vaughan:
If they put their energies into fighting against the mass importation of foreign farmworkers and against illegal immigration, they would help instigate movement toward a more modern farm industry that relies more heavily on mechanization and technology and creates better, higher-paying farm jobs.
Instead, they’ve chosen to embrace a never-ending labor surplus fueled by foreign labor that ensures that keeps their wages low and gives the employers the upper hand.
Congress has repeatedly approved — but not passed — bills that would dramatically raise the inflow of cheap labor into farmworker jobs.
Under Trump, the reduced inflow of legal refugees and illegal migrants have nudged up food-industry wages. In turn, the rising labor price prompted farm companies to invest in lab0r-saving, wealth-creating machinery for a wide range of delicate and skilled tasks, including meat processing, cow-milking, and fruit picking:
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