Meanwhile, decades of free trade have spurred mass layoffs, unemployment, and offshoring of high-paying American jobs while surging trade deficits. Since China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO), the U.S. trade deficit with China has eliminated at least 3.5 million American jobs from the American economy. Millions of American workers in all 50 states have been displaced from their jobs, which have been lost due to U.S.-China trade relations.
ECONOMY
Despite Job Boom, More Men Are Giving Up On Work
Heard on Morning Edition
The long economic recovery has brought
unemployment to historic lows. But the number of men in the labor force during
their prime working age has dropped significantly over the past 50 years.
Jetta
Productions Inc./Getty Images
David Pierce was never someone who
sat around watching life go by. He worked as a chef and had a catering business
on the side. He sang in his church choir and did community theater, where he
met his wife.
Then, in his mid-50s, doctors
removed part of Pierce's foot, a complication of diabetes.
"My health just went, kind of
really downhill. It really took a turn for the worse," says Pierce,
sitting at his dining room table in his tidy home in Apalachin, N.Y. "I
couldn't maintain even a part-time schedule."
A year ago, he went on disability, joining the large army of men
who have left the workforce for
good.
While the job market has rebounded nicely since
the Great Recession, one segment of the population hasn't shared in the
recovery. Men between the ages of 25 and 54 are still less likely to be working than
they once were, says Melissa Kearney, an economics professor at the University
of Maryland.
In 1968, about 95% of men in their
prime working years held jobs. The number has fallen to just 86%, even though
today's job market is ultra-tight.
David Pierce of
Apalachin, N.Y., went on disability a year ago, joining the large army of men
who have left the workforce for good.
Jim
Zarroli/NPR
Kearney says the recovery and
employment growth in the past five years are very encouraging. But, she says, "I
still see a lot of data that suggests we have structural challenges, and we
need to be doing more to try and draw more prime-age workers back into the
workforce."
Simply put, there's much less demand
for the labor of less-educated men, Kearney says.
"They're competing now with
low-wage workers around the globe, and that's depressed domestic demand for
their skills in the workforce," she says.
Jonathan DeMarco lost his job at a
metal fabricating plant in upstate New York in 2006. He does odd jobs when he
finds them, but he hasn't had full-time work ever since.
DeMarco still looks for work, but
with his dyslexia, he doesn't read or write well and has trouble persuading
employers to hire him, he says.
"It's just hard out there for
people like myself to get a job," he says.
He refuses to accept any government
assistance, and, like many men in his situation, survives largely because his
wife works, at a local factory. But her health isn't good, he says.
"She was out of work ... for
four or five months. That put us way behind in the bills," he says.
In rural Schoharie
County, where DeMarco lives, the unemployment rate is a very low 3.8%. But a
lot of men don't show up in the government's numbers because they aren't
looking for work anymore, says Gail Breen, executive director of the local
workforce development board.
"There are a lot of hidden
people in those numbers that don't have jobs," she says. They are
"people who have pretty much just given up."
Some suffer from health problems or
drug abuse, or just lack the skills needed for today's workforce, she says.
In rural areas, where public
transportation is rare, simply finding a way to get to work can be a challenge.
ECONOMY
An Economic Mystery: Why Are Men Leaving The
Workforce?
Frank Altieri, who lives in the
upstate New York town of Owego, served time in prison on an assault charge and
hasn't worked full time since getting out four years ago. At 40, he has come
close to finding work sometimes, but without a car his options are limited, he
says.
Altieri points out that if he works
full time, he and his wife risk losing their disability check and food stamps,
so if he takes a job that doesn't pay well, he won't come out ahead.
"I am looking for work, but
with my SSI they can actually cut me off, under a certain amount," he
says.
At one time, men like Altieri could
find work by moving to cities, where they'd make more money. But these days, a
high school graduate in New York City or Boston doesn't make much more than
someone in a rural area, and costs in the city are a lot higher, says Kearney,
the economics professor.
"The wage premium for cities
that everyone used to get, even that's disappeared for the
non-college-educated," she says.
Since quitting his job, money has
been tight for Pierce. His wife, Lonna, a retired school librarian, went back
to work temporarily this year.
The Pierces are selling a rental
property because they need the money and because Pierce no longer has the
energy for upkeep. He and his wife don't travel or go out as much as they once
did.
"He's changed a lot,"
Lonna Pierce says. "We can't do what we did together. That's the thing
that makes it harder. And of course it's wearing on a marriage when you're not
doing things together. And that's sad. Obviously, that's why you get married.
You want to have a partner."
Being without work
has taken another toll on Pierce: He has trouble sleeping.
"My career was my identity, who
I am," he says. "And to lose that really affected me and created an
added layer of depression. I no longer could identify as the guy that was a wonder
with food.
"I could whip up all sorts of
meals and stuff, and today, if I do one I'm lucky. Just making lunch or
breakfast can zap me for the day. That was a real hardship for me."
Report:
Immigration Encourages Job Discrimination Against Americans
Mass migration encourages mass discrimination
against Americans, especially black employees, according to federal data
unearthed by the Center for Immigration Studies.
Report:
Immigration Encourages Job Discrimination Against Americans
Dave Einsel/Getty
29 Oct 2019118
9:50
Mass migration encourages mass discrimination
against Americans, especially black employees, according to federal data
unearthed by the Center for Immigration Studies.
“You really have to be out of
touch with reality to argue that there are no negative effects of immigration
on native workers,” said Jason Richwine, a statistician who studied the issue
for the Center for Immigration Studies.
“Forty
percent of the decline in labor participation rates among black workers over
three decades was attributable to competition from illegal immigration,” labor
lawyer Peter Kirsanow said at a CIS press
event at the press club. That “comes to nearly 1 million fewer jobs for
black Americans as a result of the competition from illegal immigrants … and it
is the wage levels also,” Kirsanow told the audience on October 25.
The huge impact of this
discrimination is mostly ignored by wealthy “woke” professionals, who prefer to
use discrimination claims as a political club against conservatives. The
documented discrimination is just “the tip of the iceberg,” but left-wing
critics have gone silent since Donald Trump was elected, said CIS director
Mark Krikorian,
Yet white-collar workers are
also losing salaries and jobs because of discrimination, said Kevin Lynn,
founder of Progressives for Immigration Reform:
The gains made by women and
minorities in STEM fields over the past three decades have really been
reversed. For example, today on average 12 percent of women earn degrees in
computer science. In 1984 it was 37 percent. So you have to ask yourself what’s
going on. Well, when the opportunities become scant and the workplaces become
hostile to women, they typically choose other career alternatives.
….
There is a preference for
hiring Indians over Americans in these [Indian-run] consulting firms because,
one, they will work longer hours. It’s a quiescent workforce, largely because
they’re here on H-1B visas. And a lot of what goes into this is they are given
the hope that their company will sponsor them for an – a green card, and then
they’ll eventually get citizenship here in the U.S. Unfortunately for the
American worker, that means that they’re competing with someone who is willing
to work for less, work for increasingly lower benefits and other benefits that
go along with their salaries, and it just ultimately makes things a lot more
difficult.
The press club event was
scheduled to spotlight Richwine’s study of discrimination lawsuits by the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission. He summarized several of the EEOC
cases, often quoting directly from the commission’s reports:
When a warehouse in Memphis
began using a new employment agency to fill its daily work crew, the agency,
quote from EEOC, “essentially replaced the African Americans with Hispanics.”
End quote. Potential workers would line up outside the warehouse each day, but
the agency would select Hispanics over blacks even when black workers were
farther ahead in line. Sometimes managers would send potential black workers
home by announcing in English that there were no more positions. After the
African Americans left, the Hispanics were allowed to come into the warehouse
and work. Again, systematic – neither subconscious nor subtle.
Richwine described cases
where Hispanic managers discriminated against American blacks:
Perhaps the most egregious
example of this comes from Prestige Transportation Services. It would discard
or refuse to accept employment applications from non-Hispanic blacks. Quote
from EEOC: “On multiple occasions when a black person applied for employment,
Prestige managers Mr. Ramirez and Ms. Rodriguez would stand behind the
applicant and rub their hand on their skin to display their disdain for black
people.” End quote. Staff meetings were conducted in Spanish only.
The record shows that some
Indian immigrants also discriminates against blacks, he said.
At a Hampton Inn in Colorado,
three non-Hispanic white housekeepers were fired by the new general manager and
replaced by Hispanics. The owners, Falgun Patel and Mukund Patel, told the
general manager that they prefer that maids be Hispanic because in their
opinion Hispanics worked harder while American employees are lazy. The general
manager allegedly told a Hispanic employee to recruit friends for the incoming
vacancies because the owner preferred a Hispanic workforce. After three months,
all of the Hampton Inn’s non-Hispanic housekeepers were gone.
The pattern of lawsuits by
Hispanics is very different, said Richwine. Instead of losing job opportunities
because of discrimination, Latinos lose workplace protections that were once
normal for Americans, he said:
When Hispanics file suits,
they are not complaining that they are being replaced by some other group in
the workforce; instead, they’re complaining about working conditions, they
complain about low pay, they complain about dangerous situations on the job
site, and they complain about harassment. Harassment oftentimes is ethnically
based, ethnic slurs and so on directed at them. The saddest part is that when
we’re talking about Hispanic women, sexual harassment is a very pervasive
problem if you believe these EEOC lawsuits,
The examples are merely the
most egregious ad straightforward cases, he said, ensuring that they are likely
many other cases of discrimination that do not end up in court.
Deputies for President Donald
Trump have partly reversed some discrimination against blacks, for forcing
wages up to record levels.
But his deputies done little
to curb the white-collar discrimination, partly because there is so much more
money at stake for high-tech firms, hospitals, and investors.
Claims
of a Labor Shortage Are Just Not True
|
Posted: Oct 19, 2019 12:01 AM
America's
September unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, the lowest level since 1969, according
to the most recent Department of Labor report.
The tight
labor market is forcing companies to hire disadvantaged Americans. For
example, New
Seasons Market, a
West Coast grocery chain, is actively recruiting people with disabilities and
prior criminal records. Similarly, Custom
Equipment, a
Wisconsin manufacturing firm, recently hired several prison inmates through a
work-release program and intends to employ them full-time upon their release.
For the
first time in decades, these disadvantaged Americans are finally winning
significant pay increases. Over the past year, the lowest-paid 25 percent of
workers enjoyed faster wage growth than their higher-paid peers.
Unfortunately,
this positive trend could be short-lived. Corporate special interests are
whining about a labor shortage -- and are spending millions to lobby for higher
levels of immigration, which would supply companies with cheap, pliable
workers.
Hardworking
Americans need their leaders in Washington to see through this influence
campaign and stand up for their interests. Scaling back immigration would
further tighten the labor market, boosting wages and helping the most
disadvantaged Americans find jobs.
The U.S.
economy is the strongest it has been in years. Employers added 136,000 new jobs
in September, marking 108 months of consecutive
job growth.
But
there's still more progress to be made. Approximately 6
million Americans
are currently looking for jobs but remain unemployed. Another 4
million desire
full-time positions but are underemployed as part-time workers. Millions
more, feeling
discouraged about their bleak prospects, have abandoned the job search altogether.
Indeed, among 18 through 65-year-olds, 55
million people
aren't working.
Many of
these folks have limited or outdated skills. Others have criminal records or
disabilities. So they might require a bit more training than traditional job
applicants.
Rather
than put in this extra effort, some big businesses want to eliminate their
recruiting challenges by importing cheap foreign workers. These firms have
instructed their lobbyists to push for more immigration, which would introduce
more slack into the labor market.
The CEO
of the Chamber of Commerce recently claimed that America needs a massive
increase in immigration because we're "out of people." Chamber
officials said their lobbying efforts would center on sizeable increases to
rates of legal immigration.
The
National Association of Manufacturers, meanwhile, recently released a proposal which would effectively double
the number of H-1B tech worker visas, import more seasonal low-skilled laborers
on H-2A and H-2B visas, and grant amnesty to illegal immigrants.
And the
agriculture industry is lobbying for a path to legalization for
illegal laborers and is seeking to expand "temporary" guest-worker
programs to include stable, year-round positions on dairy farms and meatpacking
plants -- jobs that Americans will happily fill for the right wage. The
Association of Builders and Contractors, Koch Industries, and dozens more companies
have called for similar measures.
There are
already 45
million immigrants
in the United States -- 28 million of which are employed -- and counting. More
than 650,000
people crossed
into the United States illegally in the past eight months alone, already
exceeding last fiscal year's totals. And the U.S. government grants an
additional 1 million lifetime work permits to immigrants every year.
Those
figures will skyrocket even higher if business groups get their way. Such an
expansion would hurt hardworking Americans.
The majority
of foreigners who cross the border illegally or arrive on guest worker visas
lack substantial education. Naturally, they seek out less-skilled jobs in
construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and service -- and directly compete
with the most economically vulnerable Americans. The labor surplus created by
immigration depresses the wages of native-born high school dropouts up to $1,500 each year.
Several
proposals under consideration in Washington could alleviate American workers'
woes.
A
recent bill from Senator Chuck Grassley
(R-IA) would mandate all businesses use a free, online system called E-Verify,
which determines an individual's work eligibility in mere seconds.
The
system would make it extremely difficult for employers to hire illegal
immigrants, roughly 40
percent of whom
have been paid subminimum wages at some point. Without a pool of easily abused
illegal laborers, businesses would raise pay for Americans.
Several
senators also recently introduced the Raise
Act, a bill that
would reduce future levels of legal immigration.
It's time
for our leaders in Washington to scale back both legal and illegal immigration.
By doing so, they can further tighten the labor market and force businesses to
bring less-advantaged Americans back into the workforce.
OPEN BORDERS: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES
DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the
financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful
blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working
class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic
hardship not seen since the 1930s."
"Inequality has reached unprecedented
levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net
worth of the poorest half of the US population."
PELOSI,
FEINSTEIN, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWOMS’S MEXIFORNIA
Report:
California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years
Justin
Sullivan/Getty Images
3 Sep 2019172
6:24
Middle-class wages in
progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a
study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.
“Earnings for California’s
workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or
stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled “California’s Workers Are
Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.” The report continued:
In
2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1%
higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars)
(Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at
the 10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in
1979 to $11.12 in 2018.
The report admits that the
state’s progressive economy is delivering more to investors and less to
wage-earners. “Since 2001, the share of state private-sector [annual new
income] that has gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6 percentage
points — from 52.9% to 47.3%.”
In 2016, California’s Gross
Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop shifted $146
billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in 2016.
The report notes that wages
finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits the credit between the
Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald Trump’s go-go economy.
The 40 years of flat wages are
partly hidden by a wave of new products and services. They include almost-free
entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap imported coffee in
supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.
But the impact of California’s
flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing costs, the report says,
even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of the establishment’s
pro-immigration policies:
In just the last decade
alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far outpaced the rise in
the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting that working
families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends
meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the state is more
than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even if all adults
are working full-time.
…
Specifically, inflation-adjusted
median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017, while
inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least 35
hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget
Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
Many workers are being paid
little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker productivity has
risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans sponsored by their employers,
leaving individual workers on their own to stretch limited dollars and
resources to plan how they’ll spend their later years affording the high cost
of living and health care in California. And as union representation has
declined, most workers today cannot negotiate collectively for better working
conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as retirement and health care, like
their parents and grandparents did. On top of all this, workers who take on
contingent and independent work (often referred to as “gig work”), which in
many cases appears to be motivated by the need to supplement their primary job
or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely granted the same rights and legal
protections as traditional employees.
The center’s report tries to blame
the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the declining clout of unions. But
unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan elites’ policy of mass-migration
and imposed diversity.
In
2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for
Immigration Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the
economic impact of migration:
TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do
a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was
the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. For a helper, it was
about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45
an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically
got $25 an hour.
…
Now, the average wage in Los
Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower
than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour
at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood
that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor
can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099,
which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Diversity
also damaged the unions by shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007,
the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title
“Latino Gang Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing
Blacks.” In the same year, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times described another murder by Latino
gangs as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic
cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”
The center’s board members
include the executive director of the state’s SEIU union, a professor from the
Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and
the research director at the “Program for Environmental and Regional Equity” at
the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Outside
California, President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies are pressuring
employers to raise Americans’ wages in a hot economy. The Wall Street Journal reportedAugust 29:
Overall, median weekly earnings
rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same quarter in 2018, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between the ages of 25 and 34,
that increase was 7.6%.
The New York Times laments that reduced immigration does force wages
upwards and also does force companies to buy labor-saving, wage-boosting
machinery. Instead, NYT prioritizes "ideas about America’s identity and
culture.” http://bit.ly/2Zp2u2J
NYT Admits Fewer Immigrants Means Higher Wages, More Labor-Saving
Machines
.
Free
Trader Paul Krugman Admits Failure of Globalization for American Workers:
‘Major Mistake’
Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
13 Oct
2019780
3:21
Economist
Paul Krugman, the longtime defender of global free trade and a member of the
failed “Never Trump” movement, now admits that globalization has failed
American workers.
In a column for Bloomberg titled “What
Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization,” Krugman admits that
the economic consensus for free trade that has prevailed for decades has failed
to recognize how globalization has skyrocketed inequality for America’s working
and middle class workers.
Krugman writes:
In the past few years, however,
worries about globalization have shot back to the top of the agenda, partly due to new research and partly due to the political
shocks of Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trump. And as one of the
people who helped shape the 1990s consensus — that the contribution of rising
trade to rising inequality was real but modest — it seems appropriate for me to
ask now what we missed. [Emphasis added]
…
The pro-globalization consensus of
the 1990s, which concluded that trade contributed little
to rising inequality, relied on models that asked how the growth of
trade had affected the incomes of broad classes of workers, such as those who
didn’t go to college. It’s possible, and probably even correct, to think of
these models as accurate in the long run. Consensus economists didn’t
turn much to analytic methods that focus on workers in particular industries
and communities, which would have given a better picture of short-run
trends. This was, I now believe, a major mistake — one in which I
shared a hand. [Emphasis added]
Krugman, though, writes that he and
his fellow free trade economists “had no way to know” that globalization of the
American economy or a surge in trade deficits “were going to happen,” though
the anti-globalization movement had warned for years of the harmful impact free
trade would have on U.S. workers — including Donald Trump.
In an interview with SiriusXM
Patriot’s Breitbart News
Tonight, economist Alan Tonelson said that
Krugman’s acknowledging that he and the free trade economic consensus has been
wrong is “better later than never,” but “the damage has already been done.”
LISTEN:
“There’s been an even more
startling, in fact jaw-dropping, development on that front. Paul Krugman, the
famous Never Trumper, the famous pro-free trade economist, the Nobel Prize
winner just published an article … saying that for the past 20 years, he and
his other globalist, free trade economist friends have been substantially wrong
about the effect of globalization, particularly more trade with low income, low
wage countries like China,” Tonelson said.
“They’ve been substantially wrong
about its effects on the American economy and American workers in particular,”
Tonelson said.
Meanwhile, decades of free trade
have spurred mass layoffs, unemployment, and offshoring of high-paying American
jobs while surging trade deficits. Since China entered the World Trade
Organization (WTO), the U.S. trade deficit with China has eliminated at least 3.5
million American jobs from the American economy. Millions of American workers
in all 50 states have been displaced from their
jobs, which have been lost due to U.S.-China trade relations.
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