JOE BIDEN HAS SPENT HIS ENTIRE POLITICAL LIFE FIGHTING THE AMERICAN WORKERS AND THEN STAGING HIMSELF AS A 'POPULIST'.
Biden Labor Department Under Investigation After Mass Exploitation of Child Migrants Revealed
The independent watchdog of the Department of Labor is investigating the agency's role in a wave of child labor violations of migrants across the country.
The department's Office of Inspector General said in an Aug. 21 memo that it plans to audit the department's "efforts to curtail child labor law violations, as well as the cause for rising child labor law violations."
It's the latest development in a scandal involving the Labor Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the White House.
The New York Times first broke the story in April, when it showed documents proving the administration was quickly releasing unaccompanied migrant children into the country by the thousands. Many of those children ended up working grueling jobs, often for long hours and in dangerous conditions where they worked with chemicals and industrial equipment.
The probe comes amid rising cases of illegal child labor, Bloomberg reported:
Agency officials said in July that over the past 10 months alone, the DOL’s wage division has concluded 765 cases involving 4,474 children employed in violation of federal child labor laws. Overall, the department reported that it’s seen a 69% increase child labor violations from 2018 and 2022.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) slammed the Biden administration in June for its failure to address the widespread crisis.
"This administration has let tens of thousands of children be sold into slavery," Hawley said. "They are doing nothing about it."
Five former HHS employees said they were pushed out of the agency after they raised concerns about children's safety.
The Times report also implicated former domestic policy adviser Susan Rice. Rice and her team reportedly failed to act, even as administration staffers called for stricter vetting of the sponsors migrant children were placed with to prevent human trafficking. A week after the Times report, the White House announced that Rice would step down.
Further reports found that children were sent to the homes of unscreened adults, some of whom could have been registered sex offenders or had a history of child neglect.
The Times reported that though the two departments did flag the problem for the White House, the notices were not marked as urgent and did not properly explain the scope of the crisis.
Local Democratic Party leaders and corporate media demand Washington D.C. transit workers pay for massive budget shortfall
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) is facing a budget deficit of $750 million as of July 2024, the beginning of the next fiscal year.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, the Washington D.C. transit system has been sustained on a raft of congressional bailouts totaling $2.4 billion. That funding will come to an end by the next fiscal year, leaving WMATA with a nearly $1 billion deficit on its hands. Due to anti-public funding statutes enacted at the federal level, the system, popularly known as “Metro,” cannot run a deficit in spending.
According to Railway Age, “Balancing the budget with service cuts, WMATA says, would require eliminating two-thirds of the agency’s existing service, with no service after 9:30 p.m.” In addition, “All but 37 of 135 bus lines would no longer operate, customers would wait 20-30 minutes for trains on all lines, and MetroAccess would serve a much smaller area with less hours.”
Such cuts would “devastate the region,” WMATA general manager Randy Clarke declared in a June statement when the shortfall was noted. It is the second-largest transit system in the United States, serving a pre-pandemic weekly ridership of almost 900,000.
Metro serves the Washington D.C. region, including the neighboring jurisdictions of Virginia and Maryland as well as the capital itself. While other localities provide dedicated sources of funding to their transit systems, WMATA must rely on the combined payments of all three localities, making it critically vulnerable to shifts in funding from the various constituent governments it relies on.
Regional leaders and executives would have the general public believe that funds are non-existent to support vital transportation infrastructure in an exceedingly prosperous area of the country. This is contradicted by the numerous pro-business infrastructure projects the region carries out yearly.
In 2018, the Maryland government offered the logistics giant Amazon $8.5 billion to locate its second headquarters in Montgomery County. The state of Virginia clinched the deal, however, with a promise of $4.6 billion from state and local taxpayer funds.
Like other transit systems since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, WMATA has seen its ridership drop. “Rail ridership is still down 50% since the beginning of the pandemic, as many of the region’s white collar workers aren’t commuting nearly as often as they used to,” NPR noted in June.
The region’s leaders, the corporate press and WMATA’s management are all seemingly alarmed by the shortfall and the crisis which it poses. “It’s just too important to the region, and too many people worked so hard to build this incredible regional asset,” stated Clarke to the Washington Post in June. However, the various commentators are all of one mind regarding who must bear the cost of fixing the deficit: workers.
Leading this charge, as usual, is the Democratic Party-controlled corporate press. While billions are made readily available for corporate bank bailouts and wars, the capitalist class and its press organs can find little by way of support for the “incredible regional asset” of public transit without deep attacks on the working class.
The Washington Post declared in a June 20 editorial statement, a day after the shortfall was announced, that while Congress is likely in no mood “for further increases in Metro funding,” exceptions might be made in exchange for “further trims and reforms, for example of labor contracts.” NPR is more specific, noting, “Metro’s biggest labor contract includes raises tied to inflation, costing the transit agency 20% more in payroll just over the past two years.”
“Our workforce [at Metro] is incredibly important and incredibly valued, and I don’t think anybody should be trying to blame the workers for part of [the escalating costs],” said Democratic D.C. council member Charles Allen to the Post. However, Allen, who chairs the city’s committee on transit did, “think, though, that we’ve got to look at our overall cost and our structure.”
A breakdown of the debt further reveals the class basis on which the local capitalist politicians and managers are choosing to balance its debt.
According to the Eno Center for Transportation, $288 million is due to depressed ridership during the pandemic. Over $196 million is due to forfeited jurisdictional subsidies paid to the transit authority by the various states and districts it serves.
States the center: “Apparently, at the start of the pandemic, when municipal governments were dreading a tax base collapse (which wound up not happening), WMATA offered to help out by reducing the amount of operating subsidies to which they were entitled.” Finally, $266 million is owed to “Inflation and collective bargaining agreements,” the Eno Center states.
In other words, the majority of the deficit (forfeited regional subsidies and pandemic stimulus) has been caused by forces outside of the workers’ and general public’s control.
Beginning July 1, Metro initiated a new fare structure. The base fare is dropping from $2.25 to $2.00, but they are also changing peak and non-peak rates on weekdays before 9:30 p.m. “For example,” notes a local publication, “an off-peak trip into D.C. from Montgomery County that used to cost $3.85 will now be $6. The maximum fare is also increasing from $6 to $6.50.”
Likewise, numerous reports have noted that remote work among workers has led to a drop in ridership. Nearly 40 percent of the transit system’s riders are federal workers that have not yet fully returned because the “government and other major employers continue to countenance remote work.”
The spiraling crisis in the transit system has caused local leaders to cut corners on public safety beyond COVID-19. In the autumn of 2021, Metro’s 7000-series railcars were removed from service on account of an axle defect that was determined to have caused three derailments in one day. They remained out of service for months, leading to an increase in passenger wait times. This caused Metro to hurriedly return the cars to service without ever determining the cause of the defect.
In the face of this mounting public onslaught against the working class, Raymond Jackson, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689, which represents nearly 15,000 workers and retirees, offered little more than bluster. “For [Metro] to say now that we need to look at our health insurance plans and things of that nature and look to cut our benefits when we need them the most—when I have members right now that are still suffering from long-haul covid—I wish they would bring that fight to 689,” he said to the Post last month.
No faith can be placed in the ATU or any of the other trade union bureaucracies which operate in the region. The ATU tied itself into knots in order to avoid acting upon a strike authorization in 2018, during the last contract negotiations between the local and Metro. The notion that it will now find the heart to fight the attacks when the entire political establishment is demanding workers make sacrifices is laughable.
The crisis in the transit system is leading to an all-out confrontation with the region’s working class.
To resist this attack requires a new form of political struggle. Workers must organize independently of the ATU and federal unions, which will only serve to isolate and stifle their opposition and tie them to the Democratic Party, the same forces demanding that they submit to budget cuts.
The critical condition for victory is that workers form independent rank-and-file committees that strive to unify their struggles in order to bring the pro-corporate forces aligned against them to their knees and win demands for livable wages, healthcare as well as safe working conditions.
Biden’s Labor Market: 44M Americans Out of Workforce While Foreign Workers Hold More U.S. Jobs than Ever
President Joe Biden’s use of mass immigration to inflate the nation’s labor market comes as more than 44 million working age Americans are out of the workforce altogether, not including those counted as unemployed, data reveals.
The labor data, published on August 21 by Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler at the Center for Immigration Studies, shows that while Biden adds millions of legal immigrants and illegal aliens to the United States population who now hold jobs, working age Americans — especially those among the working class — are falling out of the workforce at an alarming pace.
As of April, the number of American-born men and women from 16 to 64 years old who are not in the workforce at all stands at 44.3 million — almost ten million more than the year 2000, when 34.4 million were not in the workforce.
That figure, though, does not include the millions of United States-born men and women who are considered unemployed.
Chart via the Center for Immigration Studies
For six decades, the labor force participation rate among American men has been dramatically declining.
In 1960, for example, the share of United States-born men from 16 to 64 years old in the workforce was 88.7 percent. In 2000, it had dropped to 83.7 percent and by April 2023 it stood at 77.5 percent. If the same share of these men were in the labor force today as were in 1960, there would be another 9.5 million American-born men for hire.
Among working-class men, the drop is even steeper.
From 1960 to 2023, the labor participation rate among men without a bachelor’s degree declined by nearly 17 percentage points.
Camarota and Zeigler write:
This is relevant to the immigration debate because one of the arguments for allowing in so many legal immigrants, or even tolerating illegal immigration, is that the low unemployment rate, along with the aging of the U.S. population, means there are not enough workers. But this ignores the enormous increase in the number of working-age people not in the labor force who do not show up as unemployed because they are not actively looking for work.
Chart via the Center for Immigration Studies
As Breitbart News reported in May, the Biden administration has brought in so many legal immigrants and illegal aliens that foreign workers now account for the largest share of United States job holders since the numbers have been tracked.
In 2022, foreign workers saw their share of the labor market hit the highest level in almost 30 years at more than 18 percent, with close to 30 million now holding U.S. jobs.
“Policy-makers should consider encouraging work among the millions on the economic sidelines rather than ignoring the problem and continuing to allow in large numbers of immigrants,” Camarota and Zeigler write.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Feds: Washington Farm Used H-2A Visa Program to Import Cheaper Foreign Workers
Executives at a farm in Sunnyside, Washington, allegedly used the H-2A visa program to import cheaper foreign workers and then subsequently paid them below-market wages, federal officials say.
Months ago, the Washington Attorney General’s Office reached a $3.4 million settlement with Ostrom Mushroom Farms for allegedly firing its mostly female farmworkers and replacing them with mostly male foreign workers who arrived on H-2A visas — the federal program that allows United States farms to import a limitless number of foreign workers.
According to the Los Angeles Times, “prosecutors and workers say the company was trying to replace local employees with foreign workers who could be paid less and were willing to work longer hours.”
The Times continued:
It wasn’t long before new workers, mostly men, were bused into the farm in vans, taking the place of the fired women. Some of the new pickers looked like they were no more than 15 years old, several current and former workers at the farm told The Times.
“Little by little, they’re getting rid of the local workers,” said Cabrera, who worried the job she had for more than two years was at risk. “They fired people without saying anything, just gone.”
In one particular case, a foreign H-2A visa worker imported by the farm told the Times that he was 17 years old when he started working at the farm and would work up to 15 hours a day. If foreign visa workers spoke out against their employment conditions, they would be retaliated against, prosecutors claimed.
Last week, the Department of Labor announced that it had secured nearly $60,000 in unpaid wages for foreign visa workers whom Ostrom Mushroom Farms allegedly took from as well as nearly $75,000 in civil penalties for violating the terms of the H-2A visa program.
That Labor Department settlement comes just a week after a New Jersey-based farm was made to pay more than half a million in back wages that the agency claims it stole from foreign H-2A visa workers.
As Breitbart News has chronicled for years, the program is often used to replace Americans and preserve the low cost of agricultural labor.
In 1997, a little more than 16,000 foreign H-2A visa workers were imported to take American agriculture jobs. The latest data shows that in the first half of fiscal year 2023, which runs from October 2022 through March 2023, U.S. farms imported nearly 200,000 foreign H-2A visa workers.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
MasterLock–Outsourcing Milwaukee Jobs–Sets Backdrop for GOP Debate
For months, Americans employed at the MasterLock factory in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have been protesting against the corporation’s plans to outsource their jobs — reportedly to Mexico — with little-to-no attention from lawmakers.
On Wednesday, eight Republican presidential hopefuls will debate policy issues in Milwaukee in the primary’s first debate, hosted by Fox News.
It remains unclear whether hosts will ask about the plight of the city’s MasterLock employees or if any candidates will mention the issue of corporations continuing to gut working and middle class American communities with outsourcing schemes, often with no repercussions from the federal government.
As Breitbart News reported in May, MasterLock executives announced their plans to lay off more than 400 employees at the Milwaukee factory and close it after 102 years of operation. The jobs, according to the United Auto Workers (UAW), will be sent to other existing plants in North America — mainly, Mexico, where labor laws go unenforced and wages remain low.
The outsourcing scheme was finalized this month and the factory will close in early 2024. The first round of layoffs will start in November.
Former President Donald Trump made outsourcing a staple of his populist platform in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Most recently, he suggested that he wants across-the-board 10 percent tariffs on all foreign imports to the United States in an effort to restore American manufacturing jobs and those jobs in supporting industries.
“When companies come in and they dump their products in the United States, they should pay, automatically, let’s say a 10 percent tax … I do like the 10 percent for everybody,” Trump told Fox Business Channel last week.
Trump, though, will not be attending the debate in Milwaukee and will instead appear in a pre-recorded interview hosted by Tucker Carlson. Beyond tariffs, Trump has not said how he would punish companies for outsourcing.
Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and former Vice President Mike Pence — both of whom are attending the debate — have previously backed tariffs but, like Trump, have yet to say if and how they would punish corporations that outsource American jobs.
DeSantis, last month, said he supports a plan to revoke China’s free trade status with the U.S., which would slap immediate tariffs on imports from the communist country. The move would force outsourcers to rework supply chains, potentially moving them back to the U.S., so as not to get hit with big tariff costs.
In October 2020, Pence touted the rounds of tariffs that the Trump administration imposed on foreign imports and warned that President Joe Biden would eliminate them. Since then, though, Pence has been largely quiet on the trade issue.
Other candidates, like businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, have been unclear about how they would go about returning manufacturing jobs to the U.S. and keeping them — focusing largely on criticizing the nation’s dependence on China.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
