Long known as Delaware’s “senator from DuPont,” Biden served on committees that were most sensitive to the interests of the ruling class, including the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. He supported the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, a milestone in the deregulation of the banks, and other right-wing measures. After nearly four decades in the Senate, Biden became Obama’s vice president, helping to oversee the massive bailout of Wall Street following the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent restructuring of class relations to benefit the rich. That included the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, based on a 50 percent cut in the pay of all newly hired autoworkers.
The very fact that Biden has intervened so forcefully exposes the claims that what is involved in the unionization campaign at Amazon has anything to do with the interests of Amazon workers. Biden’s entire career in the Senate, from 1973 to 2009, coincides with the abandonment by the Democratic Party of any program of social reform and its accommodation to “Reaganomics.”
Big Tech, Koch Network Cheer Biden’s Amnesty to Flood U.S. Labor Market
Big tech’s lobbying arm and the Koch brothers’ network of donor class organizations are cheering on President Joe Biden’s amnesty plan that would pack the United States labor market with more foreign visa workers for business to hire over American graduates and professionals.
This week, Biden’s amnesty plan was introduced in Congress by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) as Democrats look to increase foreign competition in the U.S. workforce while more than 17 million Americans are jobless.
Among other things, the plan would:
· Put nearly all illegal aliens in the U.S. on an eight-year path to citizenship
· Provide $4 billion in foreign aid to Central America
· Expand the U.S. labor market with more foreign visa workers
· Expedite green cards for foreign relatives, otherwise known as “chain migration”
· Potentially add 52 million foreign-born residents to the U.S. population
· Eliminate per-country caps, ensuring India monopolizes employment green cards
· Increase the Diversity Visa Lottery program where visas are given out randomly
· Provide green cards to foreign students who graduate in advanced STEM fields
· Bring already deported illegal aliens back to the U.S. to provide them amnesty
For Amazon, millions of newly legalized illegal aliens, foreign visa workers, and chain migrants who would be added to the U.S. labor market as a result of the plan are a boon to multinational corporations’ profits.
“Today’s immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient,” Amazon officials wrote in a statement. “We look forward working [with] the administration and Congress to advance these proposed solutions.”
Today's immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient. We look forward working w/ the administration & Congress to advance these proposed solutions.
— Amazon Public Policy (@amazon_policy) February 18, 2021
Specifically, aside from providing Amazon with more foreign visa workers to hire, the plan includes a green card giveaway that would create a green card system where only H-1B foreign visa workers are able to obtain employment-based visas by creating a backlog of seven to eight years for all foreign nationals.
The process would reward outsourcing firms and tech corporations for the decades of outsourcing American jobs to H-1B foreign visa workers.
Executives with the Libre Initiative, a Koch-funded organization, also praised the Biden amnesty plan as “an important first step” to securing the green card giveaway for corporations that they have also long lobbied for.
“There is broad support for proposals like a permanent solution for Dreamers, workforce visa reform, removing per-country caps, efficient border security measures and much more,” Daniel Garza with the Libre Initiative wrote in a statement:
Lawmakers should seize the opportunity and demonstrate that partisan gridlock will not keep the American public waiting another 30 years for congress to enact sensible, permanent solutions. We look forward to working with lawmakers to ensure that we can get nonpartisan, sensible solutions past both chambers and enacted into law.
Todd Schulte with FWD.us, a group that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created to lobby on behalf of tech corporations, called the amnesty plan a “critical moment for immigration policy” and a “substantial step forward.”
“Congress has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform a long-failed and too easily weaponized immigration system,” Schulte wrote in a statement. “The time is now and we will seize this moment.”
Despite the business lobby’s insistence that there
is a labor shortage, millions of Americans are
out of work today and hundreds of thousands of
U.S. graduates enter the labor market every
year looking for white-collar professional jobs
with competitive pay and good benefits.
Already, the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants every year. Another 1.4 million foreign visa workers are brought in annually to take American jobs, many in white-collar professions. The latest data reveals that nearly 6-in-10 workers in Silicon Valley, California — the tech industry’s hub — are foreign-born.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
On Sunday night, President Joe Biden issued a video statement fully backing the efforts of the Retail, Wholesale, Department Store Union (RWDSU) to unionize workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse. Nearly 6,000 workers at the facility, which is located just outside of Birmingham, are currently voting on whether to join the RWDSU.
Biden clearly called on workers in Alabama to vote “yes” on the union drive, for which balloting concludes on March 29. “The National Labor Relations Act didn’t just say unions are allowed to exist,” he said. “It said we should encourage unions.”
He continued, “Today and over the next few days and weeks workers in Alabama and all across America are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace. This is vitally important—a vitally important choice—as America grapples with the deadly pandemic, the economic crisis, and the reckoning of race—what it reveals about the deep disparities that still exist in our country.”
Biden’s intervention is historically unprecedented. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act into law in 1935, the leaders of the newly organized industrial unions declared that “The president wants you to join a union.” But FDR never actually said that.
In this case, Biden gave no indication of impartiality, all but calling on workers to vote the union in and accusing Amazon of intimidation. Biden is putting the entire prestige of the White House behind the vote. He would not have done this unless he felt that the direct support of his administration was both necessary to ensure a “yes” vote in Bessemer and strategically important.
The very fact that Biden has intervened so forcefully exposes the claims that what is involved in the unionization campaign at Amazon has anything to do with the interests of Amazon workers. Biden’s entire career in the Senate, from 1973 to 2009, coincides with the abandonment by the Democratic Party of any program of social reform and its accommodation to “Reaganomics.”
Long known as Delaware’s “senator from DuPont,” Biden served on committees that were most sensitive to the interests of the ruling class, including the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. He supported the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, a milestone in the deregulation of the banks, and other right-wing measures. After nearly four decades in the Senate, Biden became Obama’s vice president, helping to oversee the massive bailout of Wall Street following the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent restructuring of class relations to benefit the rich. That included the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, based on a 50 percent cut in the pay of all newly hired autoworkers.
In the 2020 elections, Biden won the Democratic Party nomination for president through the intervention of the party leadership on the basis of an explicit repudiation of any program of social reform. Biden was promoted as the right-wing alternative to Bernie Sanders.
Biden’s aggressive intervention on behalf of the unionization campaign at Amazon can only be interpreted as a strategic, and not merely tactical decision by a significant faction of the ruling class. What are the considerations motivating this policy?
First, the ruling class confronts an unprecedented crisis, which has been enormously intensified by the pandemic. As a result of the refusal of the ruling class to take the necessary measures to save lives, nearly 530,000 people have died from COVID-19 over the past year. The impact of mass death, combined with the disastrous social and economic situation, is having a profoundly radicalizing impact on the consciousness of workers and youth.
Trump has responded to this situation with the promotion of fascistic organizations that will be used as a spearhead against working class unrest. The Democrats are attempting to smother social opposition by utilizing the unions. This is combined with their relentless efforts to divide workers against each other through the promotion of the politics of racial and gender identity. Significantly, Biden framed his intervention at Amazon in racial terms, presenting unions as instruments for defending “especially Black and Brown workers.”
Second, the international situation is no less concerning to the ruling class, which is determined to maintain its global hegemonic position through the use of military force. The Biden administration is carrying out an increasingly confrontational policy toward Russia and, in particular, China. The logic of this policy leads to war. In the event of a major “great power conflict,” the pro-capitalist unions will be critical in promoting national chauvinism and suppressing the class struggle. War abroad requires a disciplined “labor movement” at home.
Biden’s intervention at Amazon is part of a broader strategy of promoting the unions and integrating them ever more directly into the state apparatus and corporate management. Prior to his inauguration in January, Biden pledged that he would be the most “pro-union” president ever.
In mid-November, shortly after the 2020 elections, Biden held a meeting with the leaders of all the major unions, including AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, along with corporate executives from General Motors, Microsoft, Target and other companies. Biden reportedly told the meeting that he is “a union guy,” but insisted “that’s not anti-business.” He added that “we’re in a pretty dark hole right now,” but “we [that is, the union executives, the corporate CEOs and the incoming Biden administration] all agree on common goals.”
The strategy Biden is pursuing is known as corporatism—that is, the integration of the government with the corporations and the unions on the basis of a defense of the capitalist system.
It has been decades since the AFL-CIO was associated in any way with the defense of workers’ interests against the corporations and the ruling class. Since the isolation and defeat of the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in 1981, the trade union movement has been completely integrated into the structures of corporate management. During the 1980s, the unions played a critical role in isolating and suppressing opposition to the ruling class counter-offensive spearheaded by the Reagan administration.
With the assistance of the unions, strike activity was almost entirely suppressed in the 1990s and the first decades of the 21st century, facilitating an increase in social inequality to levels not seen since the 1920s.
In 2018, during oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of Janus vs. AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), a lawyer for AFSCME summed up the role of the unions by saying that the “agency fee”—the requirement that public service employees in some states pay the equivalent of dues even if they opt out of joining a union—“is the tradeoff for no strikes.” Without maintaining the financial security of the unions, he warned, “you can raise an untold specter of labor unrest throughout the country.”
The corporatist organizations like the AFL-CIO are still called “unions,” but their actual practice and role bear no relationship to the function traditionally associated with the term “union.” They are not workers’ organizations, but instruments of management and the state.
The ruling class, however, is extremely concerned with and sensitive to the growth of opposition in the working class, which has been concretized in the movement for rank-and-file committees, including among Amazon workers. The ruling class is, moreover, aware of the ability of workers in the US and internationally to utilize social media and other forms of communication to share information and organize outside of the control of the corporatist unions.
There is particular concern over the political radicalization of Amazon workers, who have become even more critical to the overall process of capitalist exploitation since the onset of the pandemic. The world’s fifth largest employer added 427,000 jobs in 2020, bringing its total to 1.3 million employees worldwide, including half a million in the US.
The promotion of the unions is aimed at countering the expanding movement of rank-and-file workers. It is aimed at subordinating workers to the array of laws that come into effect when the unions are established as the “sole legitimate” representative of the workers. In return, the union executives will be given access to the union dues that come from the institutionalization of these organizations in broader sections of industry.
The combination of aggressive backing by the government and anger and opposition among Amazon workers could produce a victory for the union drive in Bessemer. Whatever the outcome of the vote, the fight to establish and build rank-and-file committees must be developed and expanded. Workers cannot allow themselves to be disciplined by the pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist trade union apparatus.
This must be combined with a new political strategy to mobilize the working class in the US and internationally in the fight for socialist policies, including the expropriation of pandemic profiteers like Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and the transformation of Amazon and other logistics companies into public utilities, democratically controlled and collectively owned by the working class.
At its most fundamental level, the promotion of the unions by the ruling class is aimed at quarantining workers from socialism. The overriding fear of the ruling class is that the objective radicalization of the working class, intensified by the pandemic, will acquire a socialist leadership and political program. It is this fear that is behind Biden’s extraordinary intervention at Amazon.
The Democratic Party has made it abundantly clear that they are the party of immigration lawlessness, mass legal and illegal immigration, and do not care about the impacts on working Americans. With that being their platform, you would think that every Republican would look very suspiciously upon any immigration proposal that was put forward by the Democrat Party.
10 House Republicans Declare Support for Amnesty, Visa Worker Bill
Ten GOP representatives joined the Democrat farmworker amnesty bill, even though the bill would push many of their own voters out of jobs and their own districts, critics assert.
Republican Washington state farmer Rep. Dan Newhouse leads the ten GOP cosponsors on H.R.1603.
They include Reps. Elisa Stefanik (NY), Mark Amodei (NV), Mario Diaz-Balart (FL), Doug LaMalfa (CA), Cathy McMorris Rogers (WA), Mike Simpson (ID), Fred Upton (MI), David Valadao (CA), and Jefferson Van Drew (NJ).
Additional legislators may be trying to dodge criticism from voters by hiding their support for H.R. 1603, titled “To amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to provide for terms and conditions for nonimmigrant workers performing agricultural labor or services, and for other purposes.” The bill is expected to come to the floor for a vote next week.
“Congress should not debate nor vote on any further significant legislation while American citizens are cut off from their representatives and staffers by armed troops and a pandemic,” William Gheen, the founder of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC grassroots group, stated in a press release.
“President Biden and lawmakers who promote or try to advance Amnesty legislation for illegals during this pandemic are causing a dangerous surge on our borders when we already have 17 million Americans out of work and illegals with COVID-19 being released by the Biden administration,” Gheen asserted.
The bill “will attract more illegal immigration into America while making future border or immigration law enforcement impossible by giving the Democratic Party millions of new voters to mobilize in exchange for government jobs, welfare, benefits, and incentives,” ALIPAC stated.
The H.R. 1603 legislation is a March 8 version of the H.R. 1537 amnesty bill, which was introduced on March 3 and had only one GOP supporter: Dan Newhouse.
The amnesty bill would devastate rural towns by giving employers an unlimited supply of cheap H-2A visa workers, Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA, said. She told Breitbart News:
Once you give them amnesty, the [current illegal] farmworkers are going to leave agriculture. So the growers are going to have to replace that labor force. If the borders are open, they’ll just do it with more illegals. But if they have to use E-Verify [to ensure legal hiring], they’ll hire H-2As and pay them less.
So all wages across the industry will go down, or at least be stagnant, and the farm communities will basically empty out more than what has already happened. Towns will dry up because local wages for Americans will decline — and the visa workers will send most of their wages back to their home countries.
It will basically be the exacerbation of the rural-to-urban population shift that we’ve already been seeing [nationwide]. Businesses in those [rural] communities will shut down because there won’t be enough consumers. It means that [private-sector] services will diminish because there won’t be enough consumers. Tax receipts will tank, which is why [government-provided] services will decline. Drug use will increase.
In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News, Rob Law, Center for Immigration Studies legislative and regulatory director and former policy chief of President Donald Trump’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, said agriculture amnesty “is a special interest handout … it’s government-sanctioned serfdom.”
“This immigration bill is far more harmful [to rural communities] than any other provision Congress would ever give our rural communities,” he said, adding:
It completely forecloses on job opportunities for rural Americans. Are they supposed to learn how to code or build solar panels? Their livelihood is in the rural community, and the importation of a permanent foreign workforce will shut them out entirely. The [rural] towns will eventually collapse. The tax base of citizens will be depleted, while the schools, hospitals, and other public facilities will get overrun by the needs of the foreign-born workforce. Americans will leave, further straining the very limited resources in those communities.
…
The Democratic Party has made it abundantly clear that they are the party of immigration lawlessness, mass legal and illegal immigration, and do not care about the impacts on working Americans. With that being their platform, you would think that every Republican would look very suspiciously upon any immigration proposal that was put forward by the Democrat Party.
The Democrats' amnesty for illegal ag. workers buys off corporate opposition by offering endless, cheap, indentured H-2A visa workers.
But no jobs for Americans.
Many more rural towns would die as the Americans depart with their kids, spending & taxes. https://t.co/cLYy3abHzx— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) March 9, 2021
No comments:
Post a Comment