With executive pay, rich pull away from rest of America
By Peter Whoriskey,
It was the 1970s, and the chief executive of a leading U.S. dairy company, Kenneth J. Douglas, lived the good life. He earned the equivalent of about $1 million today. He and his family moved from a three-bedroom home to a four-bedroom home, about a half-mile away, in River Forest, Ill., an upscale Chicago suburb. He joined a country club. The company gave him a Cadillac. The money was good enough, in fact, that he sometimes turned down raises. He said making too much was bad for morale.Forty years later, the trappings at the top of Dean Foods, as at most U.S. big companies, are more lavish. The current chief executive, Gregg L. Engles, averages 10 times as much in compensation as Douglas did, or about $10 million in a typical year. He owns a $6 million home in an elite suburb of Dallas and 64 acres near Vail, Colo., an area he frequently visits. He belongs to as many as four golf clubs at a time — two in Texas and two in Colorado. While Douglas’s office sat on the second floor of a milk distribution center, Engles’s stylish new headquarters occupies the top nine floors of a 41-story Dallas office tower. When Engles leaves town, he takes the company’s $10 million Challenger 604 jet, which is largely dedicated to his needs, both business and personal.
The evolution of executive grandeur — from very comfortable to jet-setting — reflects one of the primary reasons that the gap between those with the highest incomes and everyone else is widening.
For years, statistics have depicted growing income disparity in the United States, and it has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. In 2008, the last year for which data are available, for example, the top 0.1 percent of earners took in more than 10 percent of the personal income in the United States, including capital gains, and the top 1 percent took in more than 20 percent. But economists had little idea who these people were. How many were Wall street financiers? Sports stars? Entrepreneurs? Economists could only speculate, and debates over what is fair stalled.
Now a mounting body of economic research indicates that the rise in pay for company executives is a critical feature in the widening income gap.
The largest single chunk of the highest-income earners, it turns out, are executives and other managers in firms, according to a landmark analysis of tax returns by economists Jon Bakija, Adam Cole and Bradley T. Heim. These are not just executives from Wall Street, either, but from companies in even relatively mundane fields such as the milk business.
The top 0.1 percent of earners make about $1.7 million or more, including capital gains. Of those, 41 percent were executives, managers and supervisors at non-financial companies, according to the analysis, with nearly half of them deriving most of their income from their ownership in privately-held firms. An additional 18 percent were managers at financial firms or financial professionals at any sort of firm. In all, nearly 60 percent fell into one of those two categories.
Other recent research, moreover, indicates that executive compensation at the nation’s largest firms has roughly quadrupled in real terms since the 1970s, even as pay for 90 percent of America has stalled.
This trend held at Dean Foods. Over the period from the ’70s until today, while pay for Dean Foods chief executives was rising 10 times over, wages for the unionized workers actually declined slightly. The hourly wage rate for the people who process, pasteurize and package the milk at the company’s dairies declined by 9 percent in real terms, according to union contract records. It is now about $23 an hour.
“Do people bitch because Engles makes so much? Yeah. But there’s nothing you can do about it,” said Bob Goad, 61, a burly former high school wrestler who is a pasteurizer at a Dean Foods plant in Harvard, Ill., and runs an auction business on the side to supplement his income. “These companies have the idea that the only people that matter to the company are those at the top.”
Through a spokesman, Engles declined to be interviewed. Company officials threatened to call the police as a reporter was interviewing workers outside one of its dairies.
Defenders of executive pay have argued that today’s chief executives are worth more because, among other things, companies are larger and more complex.
But critics question why so much of the growth in income should go to the wealthiest. Douglas, the Dean Foods chief from the ’70s, died in 2007. But his son, Andrew Douglas, said his father viewed wages in part as a moral issue.
If his father had seen how much executives were making today, Andrew Douglas said, he’d be “spinning in his grave. My dad just believed that after a while, what else would you need the money for?”
Inherent inequality
Inequality, economists have noted, is an essential part of capitalism. At least in theory, “the invisible hand,” or market system, sets compensation levels to lead workers into pursuits that are the most productive to society. This produces inequality but leads to a more efficient economy.
As a result, economists have noted, there is an inherent tension in market-oriented democracies because while society aims to endow each person with equal political rights, it allows very unequal economic outcomes.
“American society proclaims the worth of every human being,” economist Arthur M. Okun, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in his 1975 book on the subject, “Equality and Efficiency.’’ But the economy awards “prizes that allow the big winners to feed their pets better than the losers can feed their children.”
Americans have been uneasy about the income gap at least since the ’80s, according to polls.
Repeated surveys by the National Opinion Research Center since 1987 have found that 60 percent or more of Americans agree or strongly agree with the statement that “differences in income in America are too large.”
The uneasiness arises out of the fear that extremes of wealth can unfairly reduce the economic opportunities and political rights of everyone else, according to sociologists. The wealthy, for example, can afford better private schools for their children or acquire political might by purchasing campaign advertising or making campaign donations. Moreover, as millions struggle to find jobs in the wake of the recession, the notion that the very wealthiest are gaining ground strikes some as unfair.
“Americans think income inequality is excessive and have done so consistently for years,” said Leslie McCall, a sociology professor at Northwestern University who is writing a book on the subject. “Their concerns arise when it seems that extreme incomes for some are restricting opportunities for everyone else.”
Whatever people think of it, the gap between the very highest earners and everyone else has been widening significantly.
Income inequality has been on the rise for decades in several nations, including the United Kingdom, China and India, but it has been most pronounced in the United States, economists say.
In 1975, for example, the top 0.1 percent of earners garnered about 2.5 percent of the nation’s income, including capital gains, according to data collected by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez. By 2008, that share had quadrupled and stood at 10.4 percent.
The phenomenon is even more pronounced at even higher levels of income. The share of the income commanded by the top 0.01 percent rose from 0.85 percent to 5.03 percent over that period. For the 15,000 families in that group, average income now stands at $27 million.
In world rankings of income inequality, the United States now falls among some of the world’s less-developed economies.
According to the CIA’s World Factbook, which uses the so-called “Gini coefficient,” a common economic indicator of inequality, the United States ranks as far more unequal than the European Union and the United Kingdom. The United States is in the company of developing countries — just behind Cameroon and Ivory Coast and just ahead of Uganda and Jamaica.
Democratic leaders, whose constituents have expressed more alarm over the divide, have used the phenomenon to justify their policies, such as universal health care.
“A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” President Obama said in his inaugural address.
Breakdown of earners
But exactly what the government ought to do about the income gap hasn’t been clear, because economists have been divided over what is causing it to grow.
They weren’t even sure, for example, who was making all that money. Sure, people like Bill Gates and LeBron James made lots. But it wasn’t at all clear who the other roughly 140,000 earners were in the top 0.1 percent — that is, people earning about $1.7 million a year, including capital gains.
Then, late last year, economists Bakija, Cole and Heim completed their massive analysis of income tax returns.
Little noticed outside academic circles, their research focused on the top 0.1 percent of earners. From those tax returns, they could glean a taxpayer’s occupation, which is self-reported. Using the employer’s tax identification number, the researchers found the industry they were employed in.
After executives, managers and financial professionals, the next largest groups in the top 0.1 percent of earners was lawyers with 6.2 percent and real estate professionals at 4.7 percent. Media and sports figures, who are often assumed to represent a large portion of very high-income earners, collectively made up only 3 percent.
“Basically, executives represent a much bigger share of the top incomes than a lot of people had thought,” said Bakija, a professor at Williams College, who with his co-authors is continuing the research. “Before, we just didn’t know who these people were.”
Acceptable greed
Defenders of executive pay argue, among other things, that the rising compensation is deserved because firms are larger today. Moreover, this group says, more packages today are based on stock and options, which pay more when the chief executive is successful.
Critics, on other hand, argue that executive salaries have jumped because corporate boards were simply too generous, or more broadly, because greed became more socially acceptable.
Again, in settling these arguments, economists were hampered by a lack of data, particularly any that might give some historical perspective.
It wasn’t until economists Carola Frydman from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Raven E. Molloy of the Federal Reserve collected and analyzed data going back to 1936 — an exhaustive task because of the lack of computerized records going that far — that the longer-term trends became clear.
What the research showed is that while executive pay at the largest U.S. companies was relatively flat in the ’50s and ’60s, it began a rapid ascent sometime in the ’70s.
As it happens, this was about the same time that income inequality began to widen in the United States, according to the Saez figures.
More importantly, however, the finding that executive pay was flat in the ’50s and ’60s, when firms were growing, appears to contradict the idea that executive pay should naturally rise when companies grow.
This is a “challenge for the market story,” Frydman said.
So what happened since the ’70s that has sent executive pay upward?
While no company over this period of time — from the 1970s to today — can be considered completely typical, Dean Foods offers a better comparison than most because fundamentally it hasn’t changed.
The dairy business is still the root of the company; it was on the Fortune 500 by the late ’70s and remains there today. It grew then and more recently through acquisition.
Moreover, both chief executives — Douglas and Engles — could boast records of growing the company and profits.
From 1970 to 1979, while Douglas was the chief executive, sales at Dean Foods tripled and profits increased tenfold, to $9.8 million, according to company records. Similarly, from 2000 to 2009, sales at what would be Dean Foods had roughly doubled, and so had profits, to $228 million. (Engles became chief executive after the company he led bought Dean Foods in 2001 and adopted its name.)
Yet there are vast differences in the way the two men were paid, even when you adjust for the effects of inflation.
In the late 70s — 1977, 1978 and 1979 — Douglas made about $1 million annually in today’s dollars. The largest part of that was a salary; some came from a long-term incentive based on the stock price that would not mature until he retired.
By contrast, in the late 2000s — 2007, 2008 and 2009 — Engles averaged $10.5 million annually, most of it in stock and options awards and other incentive pay, according to proxy statements. After ’09, which was a particularly bad year, Engles’s compensation dropped to $4 million in 2010. If profits return, so will his higher earnings.
The case of Dean Foods appears to bolster the argument that executive compensation moves with company size: The profits for Dean Foods in 2009 were roughly 10 times what they were in 1979, adjusted for constant dollars. Engles’s compensation has averaged 10 times that of Douglas.
“It’s a different company today,” company spokesman Jamaison Schuler said. He declined to comment further.
But some economists have offered an alternative, difficult-to-quantify explanation: that the social norms that once reined in executive pay have disappeared.
This new attitude, according to this view, was reflected in epigrammatic form by the 1987 movie “Wall Street,” which made famous the phrase “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” Americans were growing more comfortable with some extremes in pay. Payoffs for the stars on Wall Street, in the movies and in pro sports were rising.
But back in the ’70s, something was holding executive salaries back.
Harold Geneen, the president of ITT, then one of the nation’s largest companies, told Forbes in 1975 that while he might be worth six times as much to the company as he was making, he hadn’t sought a raise.
“No one moved up there, and I didn’t dare do it alone,” he explained.
Over at Dean Foods, Kenneth Douglas was likewise resistant to making more. Most years, board members at Dean Foods wanted to give Douglas a raise. But more than once, Douglas, a former FBI agent who literally married the girl next door, refused.
“He would object to the pay we gave him sometimes — not because he thought it was too little; he thought it was too much,” said Alexander J. Vogl, a members of the Dean Foods board at the time and the chair of its compensation committee. “He was afraid it would be bad for morale, him getting a big bump like that.”
“He believed the reward went to the shareholders, not to any one man,” said John P. Frazee, another former board member. “Today we get cults of personality around the CEO, but then there was not a cult of personality.”
Outside one of the Dean Foods dairies recently, the workers at the plant for the most part only rolled their eyes when asked about Engles’s salary. But they spoke admiringly of Douglas.
“People back then thought enough was enough,” said Ron Smith, 63, who maintains the machines at the plant.
Some were reluctant to criticize Engles to a reporter. Others defended him.
“You’re king of the hill, and you get paid for that,” said Ray Kavanaugh, 61, who operates a filler at the dairy. “He’s worth it if he keep the company making money.”
The employees said they only occasionally dwell on Engles’s riches, anyway. Their primary focus is on making ends meet, they said.
Joe Bopp, 55, said he has a second job taking care of a cemetery during the summer months, mowing the grass and digging graves.
“Twenty-three dollars an hour sounds like a lot of money,” he said. “But when you pay $4 a gallon for gas and $3.29 for a gallon of milk, it goes away real fast.”
This is the first in an occasional series.
*
YOU
DON’T GET A JOB IN THE OBAMA ADMIN UNLESS YOU’RE CONNECTED TO ONE OF OBAMA’S
MAJOR CRIMINAL BANKSTERS, OR OUR A LA RAZA SUPREMACIST!
JOBS…?
IT ISN’T BY ACCIDENT THAT OUR BORDERS ARE WIDE OPEN FOR THE CONVENIENCE OF
MEXICO’S LOOTING! IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED. WHEN OBAMA HAS A WORD
ABOUT JOBS, IT’S FIRST TO GIVE THE JOB TO AN ILLEGAL, AND THEN TO ASSURE HIS
BANKSTERS AND WALL ST CRONIES THAT THEIRS ARE SACRED AND WILL REMAIN UNTOUCHED!
“I’m
not here to punish banks!” Floor of the Senate – STATE of the UNION MESSAGE
after the rape of the nation by the banks.
OBAMA’S
SEC. LABOR IS THE LA RAZA SUPREMACIST
HILDA SOLIS. SHE AND OBAMA FIGHT E-VERIFY, AND PUSH THE LA RAZA AGENDA OF OPEN
BORDERS, AMNESTY, OR AT LEAST CONTINUED NON-ENFORCEMENT.
OBAMA’S
CHIEF-OF-STAFF, BILL DALEY WAS SELECTED BECAUSE HE’S AN ADVOCATE FOR OPEN
BORDERS LIKE OBAMA, AND WAS WITH TWO OF OBAMA’S CRIMINAL BANKSTERS J.P. MORGAN
and CHASE.
OBAMA’S FORMER JOBS CZAR:
“Rattner, an investment
banker whose net worth was estimated to be up to $600 million when Obama
selected him to head the Auto Task Force, said his “friends on Wall Street”
were concerned by GM’s earnings and communication with investors.”
We didn’t ask any active
worker to cut his or her pay. We didn’t ask them to sacrifice any of their
pension and we maybe could have asked them to do a little bit more.”
THE REALITY OF OBAMA AND JOBS:
With the full assistance of
the UAW, the White House slashed tens of thousands of jobs, wiped out “Jobs
Bank” income protections for laid-off workers and cost-of-living adjustments
for current workers. It cut retiree health care benefits and expanded the
two-tier wage system, which pays newly hired workers $15 an hour or roughly
half of what longer-term workers earn.
Nevertheless, Rattner
expresses the frustration of Wall Street that the percentage of workers making
poverty level wages will be limited to a quarter of the workforce by 2015.
Obama’s “Car Czar” says workers
should have taken deeper cuts
By Jerry White
21 December 2011
21 December 2011
President
Obama’s former “Car Czar” says the government should have slashed the wages of
auto workers and imposed even deeper concessions on United Auto Workers (UAW)
members during the 2009 restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler.
After
a speech at the Detroit Economic Club last week, Steven Rattner told reporters,
“If we had more time, we might have asked all the stakeholders to sacrifice a
little bit more. We didn’t ask any
active worker to cut his or her pay. We didn’t ask them to sacrifice any of their
pension and we maybe could have asked them to do a little bit more.”
Rattner, an investment banker
whose net worth was estimated to be up to $600 million when Obama selected him
to head the Auto Task Force, said his “friends on Wall Street” were concerned
by GM’s earnings and communication with investors. Even though the Detroit
automaker’s profits have sharply risen, the market has punished GM stocks,
which have fallen 50 percent since its IPO last year.
After
Rattner’s remarks were made public, he denied he was suggesting auto workers
should have or should now be forced to take pay cuts. Writing on his blog, he
said, “So let me be clear, I have no desire to see auto workers (or anyone
else) take a pay cut. The members of President Obama’s Auto Task Force did not
work as hard as we did in order for workers to see their pay slashed.”
In
fact, that was central purpose of the task force. Using the threat of
liquidation, the Obama administration set out to shut unprofitable plants and
drastically reduce labor costs so Wall Street could be ensured high returns
even if car sales fell to historic lows.
With the full assistance of
the UAW, the White House slashed tens of thousands of jobs, wiped out “Jobs
Bank” income protections for laid-off workers and cost-of-living adjustments
for current workers. It cut retiree health care benefits and expanded the
two-tier wage system, which pays newly hired workers $15 an hour or roughly
half of what longer-term workers earn.
This was a signal for the
launching of a wage-cutting campaign, which has stretched to every section of
the working class, from teachers and public employees to industrial and other
private sector workers.
In
the recent round of labor agreements the UAW handed over more concessions,
agreeing to contracts that raise labor costs by their lowest margin in four
decades. Nevertheless, Rattner expresses
the frustration of Wall Street that the percentage of workers making poverty
level wages will be limited to a quarter of the workforce by 2015. They feel
conditions are ripe—with mass unemployment, rising poverty and the full
complicity of the UAW—to reopen the auto contracts in the not too distant
future in order to cut the wages of the remaining 75 percent of workers.
The
current lockout of rubber workers at Cooper Tire in Findlay, Ohio is indicative
of the “new normal” being demanded by corporate America, which is intent on
closing the wage gap between American workers and their brutally exploited
counterparts in China, Latin America and other impoverished regions.
In
his blog, Rattner continued, “[A]s I have watched events unfold in the past 2½
years, I have become increasingly concerned about the competitiveness of
American manufacturing, including autos. We are competing more and more against
countries whose workers are paid a small fraction of what American workers are
paid but whose productivity is getting closer and closer to U.S. levels (in
some cases, even exceeding it).
“All
I was trying to say was that if we had achieved more shared sacrifice at the
time of the restructurings, we would be in a better position to retain more
American jobs in the face of this competition. I wish sacrifice was not
necessary.”
Notwithstanding
his lament over “necessary sacrifice,” Rattner is speaking for the financial
aristocracy, which has no intention of investing in manufacturing unless the
gains of a century of working class struggle are overturned. Having worked
intimately with the UAW during the auto bailout, Rattner is well aware that the
UAW is fully on board as long as it can retain its position of a purveyor of
cheap labor.
Rattner
is typical of the financial parasites that have risen to the top of the US
economy over the last three decades of deindustrialization and assault on the
working class. According to Fortune magazine, he lives in a “sprawling”
Manhattan apartment, which “overlooks Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum
of Art (where he is on the board).” The magazine continues: “He has a horse
farm in North Salem, New York, in northern Westchester County, near his friend,
New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, and is building a 15,575-square foot house
on the water in Martha’s Vineyard.”
Rattner was forced to leave
the Auto Task Force after the New York state attorney filed two civil suits
charging that he committed fraud when, as head of the Quadrangle Group private
equity fund, he used bribes and kickbacks to obtain management over $150
million in assets of the New York State Common Retirement Fund. Rattner—who is
also a major figure in the Democratic Party establishment—settled the case with
no admission of guilt by paying $10 million.
*
Guess LA RAZA his happy with
OBAMA’S endless hispandering! THEY SHOULD BE!
There are only eight states with a larger
population than LOS ANGELES COUNTY, where 47% of those with a job are ILLEGALS
USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS! This same mex gang infested county puts
out $600 million in welfare to illegals!
*
“The inspections have
determined that hundreds of companies throughout the U.S. have significant numbers of illegal immigrants
on their payroll yet none have been punished, according to a Houston newspaper
that obtained internal ICE records through the Freedom of Information Act. At
least 430 audit cases listed as “closed” by the agency had high percentages of
workers with “questionable” documents yet they faced no consequences.”
THE ENTIRE REASON THE BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS
TO CUT WAGES!
“We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs
taken by illegal workers,” said Representative Lamar Smith of
Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. “President Obama is on
the wrong side of the American people on immigration. The president should
support policies that help citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they
need and deserve rather than fail to enforce immigration laws.”
*
“The principal beneficiaries of our current
immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard
wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American
workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant
flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.” Christian Science Monitor
*
The California Budget Project, a liberal study
group in Sacramento, brought the income squeeze down to the state level in its
Labor Day analysis.
Using state tax data, the project said that the
average adjusted gross income of all California taxpayers - whether filing
individually or jointly - fell from $82,268 in 2000 to $68,434 in 2008, after
adjusting for inflation. TOM ABATE SFGATE.com
*
Labor
secretary: Obama doing good job on economy
Monday, September 6, 2010
(09-06) 04:36 PDT
WASHINGTON (AP) --
Labor Secretary Hilda
Solis is defending President Barack Obama's efforts to combat the recession and
unemployment, saying his focus has been on helping the jobless and
underemployed.
In a Labor Day
appearance on ABC News'"Good Morning America," Solis said Obama is
doing a good job.
Solis says the Obama
administration knows people are hurting from the weak economy. She pointed to
last year's $814 billion economic recovery act and administration proposals for
job training and hiring incentives for businesses.
On CBS'"Early
Show," she said that over the last eight months, the U.S. economy has
added some 90,000 private sector jobs each month.
Critics have cited
persistent unemployment rates of nearly 10 percent and only faint signs that
businesses are rehiring workers.
*
Labor Secretary
Hilda Solis, a former California congresswoman with close ties to the
influential La Raza movement, announced the “We Can Help” project with
great fanfare a few days ago.”
FROM JUDICIAL WATCH. org –
get on their emails!
Labor Dept. Helps Illegal
Alien Workers
Last
Updated: Tue, 04/06/2010 - 11:04am
The
Department of Labor has launched a special program to assist and protect
illegal immigrant workers in the U.S., referred to as “vulnerable” and “underpaid”
by the presidential cabinet member who heads the agency.
Hundreds
of new field investigators have been deployed to reach out to Latino laborers
in areas with large numbers of illegal alien employees. Their message, in
Spanish, is “we can help” bring workplace protections to the nation’s most
vulnerable and underpaid workers, including those who have no legal right to
live in the Untied States.
(THE
OBAMA PLAN TO PUT ILLEGALS INTO OUR JOBS AND VOTING BOOTHS!)
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis,
a former California congresswoman with close ties to the influential La Raza
movement, announced the “We Can Help” project with
great fanfare a few days ago. A total of 1,000 investigators from her agency will focus
on enforcing labor and wage laws in industries that typically hire lots of
illegal aliens without reporting anyone to federal immigration authorities.
(WHO
WORKS FOR THE RIGHTFUL JOBS OF AMERICAN CITIZENS? WHO ENFORCES THE LAWS THAT
PROHIBIT THE EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGALS, EVEN IF THEY HAVE A STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY
NUMBER? NOT THE LA RAZA DEMS, OR HISPANDERING BARACK OBAMA!)
Solis
told Latino workers that “your president, your secretary of labor and this
department will not allow anyone to be denied his or her rightful pay,
especially when so many in our nation are working long, hard and often
dangerous hours.” She assured illegal immigrants that “if you work in this
country, you are protected by our laws.”
The
same day Solis publicly announced the Obama Administration’s new project, a
Labor Department investigator visited a day laborer center in northern
California to promote it. The federal employee actually chatted warmly with the
illegal immigrants about how to find jobs
without being exploited,
according to a local newspaper report. “We’re the feds but the good ones,” he
told the day laborers in Spanish. “We’re here to help workers.”
The
agency has also launched a Spanish television advertising campaign to spread
the word and created a web site. Workers in industries from construction to
food service are urged to contact the Labor Department of wage and hour
violations. An investigator may be deployed to the work site or the employer
may be taken to court.
*
MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
OBAMA HAS FILLED HIS ADMINSTRATION WITH
PRIMARILY LA RAZA PARTY MEMBERS.
Here’s his Sec. Labor, HILDA SOLIS:
While in Congress, she opposed strengthening the
border fence, supported expansion of illegal alien benefits (including driver's
licenses and in-state tuition discounts), embraced sanctuary cities that
refused to cooperate with federal homeland security officials to enforce
immigration laws, and aggressively championed a mass amnesty. Solis was steeped
in the pro-illegal alien worker organizing movement in Southern California and
was buoyed by amnesty-supporting Big Labor groups led by the Service Employees
International Union. She has now caused a Capitol Hill firestorm over her new
taxpayer-funded advertising and outreach campaign to illegal aliens regarding
fair wages:
*
Michelle Malkin
The U.S. Department of
Illegal Alien Labor
President Obama's
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis is supposed to represent American workers. What you
need to know is that this longtime open-borders sympathizer has always had a
rather radical definition of "American." At a Latino voter
registration project conference in Los Angeles many years ago, Solis asserted
to thunderous applause, "We are all Americans, whether you are legalized
or not."
That's right. The
woman in charge of enforcing our employment laws doesn't give a hoot about our
immigration laws -- or about the fundamental distinction between those who
followed the rules in pursuit of the American dream and those who didn't.
While in Congress, she opposed strengthening
the border fence, supported expansion of illegal alien benefits (including
driver's licenses and in-state tuition discounts), embraced sanctuary cities
that refused to cooperate with federal homeland security officials to enforce
immigration laws, and aggressively championed a mass amnesty. Solis was steeped
in the pro-illegal alien worker organizing movement in Southern California and
was buoyed by amnesty-supporting Big Labor groups led by the Service Employees
International Union. She has now caused a Capitol Hill firestorm over her new
taxpayer-funded advertising and outreach campaign to illegal aliens regarding
fair wages:
"I'm here to
tell you that your president, your secretary of labor and this department will
not allow anyone to be denied his or her rightful pay -- especially when so
many in our nation are working long, hard and often dangerous hours,"
Solis says in the video pitch. "We can help, and we will help. If you work
in this country, you are protected by our laws. And you can count on the U.S.
Department of Labor to see to it that those protections work for you."
To be sure, no
one should be scammed out of "fair wages." Employers that hire and
exploit illegal immigrant workers deserve full sanctions and punishment. But
it's the timing, tone-deafness and underlying blanket amnesty agenda of Solis'
illegal alien outreach that has so many American workers and their
representatives on Capitol Hill rightly upset.
With double-digit
unemployment and a growing nationwide revolt over Washington's border security
failures, why has Solis chosen now to hire 250 new government field
investigators to bolster her illegal alien workers' rights campaign? (Hint:
Leftists unhappy with Obama's lack of progress on "comprehensive
immigration reform" need appeasing. This is a quick bone to distract
them.)
Unfortunately,
the federal government is not alone in lavishing attention and resources on
workers who shouldn't be here in the first place. As of 2008, California,
Florida, Nevada, New York, Texas and Utah all expressly included illegal aliens
in their state workers' compensation plans -- and more than a dozen other
states implicitly cover them.
Solis' public
service announcement comes on the heels of little-noticed but far more
troubling comments encouraging illegal alien workers in the Gulf Coast. Earlier
this month, in the aftermath of the BP oil spill, according to Spanish language
publication El Diario La Prensa, Solis signaled that her department was going
out of its way to shield illegal immigrant laborers involved in cleanup
efforts. "My purpose is to assist the workers with respect to safety and
protection," she said. "We're protecting all workers regardless of
migration status because that's the federal law." She told reporters that
her department was in talks with local Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) officials who had visited coastal worksites to try to verify that workers
were legal.
No word yet on
whether she gave ICE her "we are all Americans, whether you are legalized
or not" lecture. But it's a safe bet.
*
MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
From the above blog,
email articles to those concerned about Obama’s endless push for amnesty.
FAIRUS.org
JUDICIAL WATCH.org
ALIPAC.us
*
WE ARE MEXICO’S WELFARE and PRISON SYSTEMS!
“Mexico’s government has
provided its nationals with valuable tools to help them cross the border safely
but Dominguez is the first American resident, with a salary provided by U.S.
taxpayers, to openly promote such a gadget. A few years ago Mexican officials
published a 32-page booklet (Guia Del Migrante Mexicano) with safety
tips for border crossers and distributed hand-held satellite devices to ensure
the violators complete their journey safely.”
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