Hawley: ‘Democrats Have Made American Workers Compete with Slave Labor’
Friday, during an appearance on FNC’s “Fox News Primetime,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) discussed why Republicans lost Georgia and other elections throughout the country. As a remedy, he urged the GOP to embrace working people.
The Missouri Republican argued a proper contrast would be for Republicans to compare approaches to trade, in which Democrats have supported policies that force the United States to compete with nations that engage in unfair labor practices.
“Well, how about bringing jobs back to our urban core from overseas?” he said. “Why don’t we start there? Why don’t we start with the disastrous trade policies and economic policies that the liberals in step with a big corporation have pursued for 30, 40 years and who’s been hurt most, working folks, African Americans working folks, Latino working folks, white working folks, Asian working folks, you name it. They’re the ones whose communities have suffered as these jobs have been shipped off to China. As these jobs have been shipped overseas to the lowest bidder to the lowest wages.”
“The Democrats have made American workers compete with slave labor, and they’ve done it in order to get rich, so the big corporations could get rich. It’s time to bring those jobs back and create opportunities in our urban core, in our rural areas, everywhere. For American workers, that’s where I’d start,” Hawley added.
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Biden, Democrats agree to cut weekly jobless benefit by $100
In a further cave-in to the right wing, Senate Democrats agreed Friday to reduce the weekly supplemental unemployment benefit in the Biden administration’s coronavirus relief bill by $100 a week, from $400 to $300. This would leave unchanged the wholly inadequate level enacted under Trump, itself a 50 percent cut from the $600 benefit included in last March’s CARES Act.
Only days before, Democratic leaders had presented passage of a $400 weekly benefit as a certainty. The latest concession to the Republicans and the most right-wing congressional Democrats came on the heels of Biden’s decision to drop the income cut-off for receiving a one-time $1,400 stipend from $100,000 and $80,000, depriving millions of working class and middle-class families of desperately needed assistance. That, in turn, was preceded by the dropping of a $15 minimum wage from the bill.
The decision to cut the jobless benefit took place as the Labor Department released its February employment report. While showing a higher-than-expected increase in non-farm payrolls of 379,000 for February, the report documented a continuation of extremely high long-term unemployment and job losses among educators, miners and construction workers. The vast bulk of new jobs came in the leisure and hospitality sector, where wages are at poverty levels and exploitation is rampant. The spike in jobs in that sector reflects an accelerating process of recklessly reopening business in the midst of the still-deadly pandemic.
The move to slash the weekly supplemental benefit, which could cost unemployed workers close to $2,000, was presented as necessary to placate conservative Democrats, in particular, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Late Friday afternoon, Manchin, essentially dictating terms to Senate Democrats, announced he would not accept a deal to trade the $100 weekly benefit cut for an extension of benefits to early October, rather than the current August 29 end date. In an outright provocation, Manchin indicated he might side with Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio to impose an earlier, July 18 cutoff of benefits. He also said he might not accept a Democratic proposal to sugarcoat the benefit cut by making the first $10,200 of unemployment benefits in 2020 tax-free. Manchin cynically cited the “good” jobs report to justify his opposition.
The unemployment report in fact reflected the continuing restructuring of the economy during the pandemic at the expense of workers. There were 355,000 new jobs in leisure and hospitality, while temporary help services added 53,000 jobs, health care and social assistance added 46,000 jobs, and retail trade added 41,000 jobs. Manufacturing added an anemic 21,000 jobs. On the other side, there was a sharp drop in construction, 61,000 jobs, and a drop of 69,000 in state and local government education.
The number of long-term unemployed, those out of work for 27 weeks or more, stood virtually unchanged in February at 4.1 million. Another key measure, the labor force participation rate, also remained steady at 61.4 percent, still well below the figure prior to the pandemic.
An economist cited by the New York Times, Drew Matus, chief market strategist at MetLife Investment Management, pointed to the fact that hours worked declined by about 18 minutes a week in February—a huge number of total hours when multiplied over the entire working population.
“The scale of the decline is quite big,” Matus said. “This report tells me things are looking up if vaccine administration continues, but we’re still not out of the woods yet.”
February figures also showed a significant jump in the jobless rate for African Americans. Unemployment among black women over age 20 rose to 8.9 percent, up from 8.5 percent in January. The rate for black men older than age 20 increased to 10.2 percent, up from 9.4 percent.
The official unemployment rate has been kept artificially low by the fact that more than four million workers have dropped out of the labor force since the start of the pandemic. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in February that the real unemployment rate is likely closer to 10 percent.
In the face of the reality of unrelenting economic hardship for millions, the debate on the coronavirus relief bill has demonstrated that the Democrats have effectively ceded control over the party to a handful of right-wing nonentities such as Manchin, catering to their every whim at the expense of millions of workers. For their part, more liberal forces like Vermont Senator Bernie Sander and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren have meekly accepted being sidelined, despite having won broad popular support in last year’s Democratic presidential primaries.
Sanders and company have participated in the parliamentary charade orchestrated by the Democratic Party leadership. On Friday, Sanders staged an impotent and cynical effort to revive the $15 an hour minimum wage, but was voted down by a coalition of all 50 Senate Republicans and eight Democrats.
In a similar manner, Sanders and other “left” figures acquiesced to the sharp reduction in eligibility for the $1,400 stimulus checks, after initially making pro forma protests. For her part, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, complained that by imposing the annual $80,000 income limit, the Democrats were “allowing Trump to give more people relief checks than a Democratic administration.”
President Biden called the abandonment of key elements of the relief bill “some small compromises.”
Josh Hawley: Biden ‘More Focused’ on Amnesty than Working Class Job Losses
Sen. Josh Hawley says President Joe Biden is “more focused” on providing amnesty to millions of illegal aliens than grappling with potential economic doom for America’s working class.
Last week, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) introduced Biden’s amnesty legislation into the Senate. The plan seeks to legalize, and eventually provide American citizenship to, about 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the United States today.
Also, the plan is likely to double legal immigration levels — where already more than 1.2 million green cards are awarded to legal immigrants annually — even as more than 17 million Americans are jobless but wanting full-time employment.
Specifically, a McKinsey Global Institute analysis detailed by the Washington Post reveals that the overwhelming longterm economic burden, as a result of the Chinese coronavirus crisis, will be put on working and lower-middle class Americans.
The Post reports:
In a report coming out later this week that was previewed to The Washington Post, the McKinsey Global Institute says that 20 percent of business travel won’t come back and about 20 percent of workers could end up working from home indefinitely. These shifts mean fewer jobs at hotels, restaurants and downtown shops, in addition to ongoing automation of office support roles and some factory jobs. [Emphasis added]
…
“We think that there is a very real scenario in which a lot of the large employment, low-wage jobs in retail and in food service just go away in the coming years,” said Susan Lund, head of the McKinsey Global Institute. “It means that we’re going to need a lot more short-term training and credentialing programs.” [Emphasis added]
…
Indeed, the number of workers in need of retraining could be in the millions, according to McKinsey and David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-wrote a report warning that automation is accelerating in the pandemic. He predicts far fewer jobs in retail, rest, car dealerships and meatpacking facilities. [Emphasis added]
Hawley, in a statement online, called Biden out for pursuing an amnesty and increased foreign competition against Americans while millions remain jobless and millions more are underemployed and potentially looking at future unemployment.
“Can’t figure out why Joe Biden is more focused on supporting illegal immigration than working Americans,” Hawley wrote on Twitter.
Can’t figure out why Joe Biden is more focused on supporting illegal immigration than working Americans
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) February 22, 2021
In Hawley’s home state of Missouri, unemployment is especially hitting the working and middle class. For example, Americans in construction, extraction, building and grounds cleaning, food service, production, and transportation have the highest rates of unemployment as of last month.
In contrast, those in fields like engineering, architecture, and criminal justice — all of which are vastly less likely to have to compete for jobs against foreign workers — have some of the lowest unemployment rates.
Biden’s amnesty plan is being cheered by big business, tech conglomerates, and corporate special interests who boost their profit-margins by cutting labor costs, which often begins with hiring cheaper foreign workers over Americans.
“We look forward working w/ the administration & Congress to advance these proposed solutions,” Amazon executives wrote in a statement about the amnesty.
A flooded U.S. labor market has been well documented for its wage-crushing side effects, so much so that economist George Borjas has called mass immigration to the country the “largest anti-poverty program” at the expense of America’s working and lower-middle class.
Recent peer-reviewed research by economist Christoph Albert acknowledges that “as immigrants accept lower wages, they are preferably chosen by firms and therefore have higher job finding rates than natives, consistent with evidence found in US data.”
Albert’s research also finds that immigration “raises competition” for native-born Americans in the labor market. Similarly, research from June 2020 on U.S. wages and the labor market shows that a continuous flow of mass immigration exerts “stronger labor market competition” on newly arrived immigrants than even native-born Americans, thus contributing to the wage gap.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), likewise, has repeatedly noted that mass immigration cuts Americans’ wages. In 2013, CBO analysis stated that the “Gang of Eight” amnesty plan would “slightly” push down wages for the American workers. A 2020 CBO analysis stated that “immigration has exerted downward pressure on the wages of relatively low-skilled workers who are already in the country, regardless of their birthplace.”
Every year, about 1.2 million legal immigrants are given green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. In addition, 1.4 million foreign nationals are annually awarded temporary visas to full U.S. jobs that would otherwise go to Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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