So if the economy shows real signs of softening, the president might get more rate cuts before the election (though I think the more likely outcome is that those cuts won’t be needed). It is even possible wage growth could pick up before the election, if we are finally, really at full employment. Wage growth could accelerate even if overall economic growth does not. That’s what should already be happening at this point in the cycle.
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.
“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.
For example, the federal
government rewards companies that discriminate in favor of Indian “OPT”
work-permit workers by rejecting American graduates, Lynn said.
American companies which hire
Indian graduates are not required to pay Social Security taxes, he said,
adding:
That’s about a 15 percent
premium that is added to hiring someone on the OPT program and, again, these
people compete directly with our new [American] graduates in the workplace …
[where] a [U.S.] student today might exit university with anywhere from $35
[thousand] to $85,000 in debt. That’s a lot of money, and … they’re having
their legs broken as they leave the gate into the workplace.
Instead,
American victims of Indians’ discrimination are suing the Indians firms in
court. For example, in a 2016 lawsuit against a giant Indian software firm,
Infosys, American witnesses alleged:
Hiring Manager Instructions:
an Infosys hiring manager admitted “There does exist an element of
discrimination. We are advised to hire Indians … because they will work off the
clock without murmur and they can always be transferred across the nation
without hesitation unlike [a] local workforce.”
Talent Acquisition Unit
Observations: Recruiters in Talent Acquisition observed that Indians were
highly favored, and it was extremely difficult to move non-South Asians ahead
in the hiring process. Non-Indians were regularly rejected as being “not a good
fit,” – an Infosys euphemism for “non-Indian.” This discrimination is on-going.
In 2016 for example, an Infosys manager in their Talent Acquisition Unit
observed that of Infosys’ 2,900 hires in the United States, 2,200 (76%) were
Indian. She observed a similar hiring disparity in prior years.
Applicant Data Manipulation:
Infosys manipulates applicant tracking data in such a way that consideration of
non-South Asians and non-Indians is minimized, and the hiring of South Asians
is maximized. For example, recruiters have observed that non-South Asian
applicants were repeatedly deleted from Infosys’ applicant tracking system,
forcing one recruiter to keep a separate spreadsheet of applicants on his
computer. Recruiters have also observed South Asian applicants, located by
Infosys’ “sourcers” in India, manually entered into the applicant tracking
system despite those individuals not having formally applied, thus streamlining
the hiring process. Individuals sourced in this way were moved “to the front of
the line” ahead of applicants in the U.S. A recruiter also observed that
applications for United States positions were regularly not reviewed, and in
2016, approximately 11,000 to 12,000 were rejected en masse.
Immigration Numbers:
Each year, roughly four
million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high
school or a university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who
graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or
science, software, or statistics.
But
the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants. It also
adds replacement workers to a resident population of more than 1.5 million
white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers
and about 500,000 blue-collar H-2B, H-2A, and J-1 visa workers. The
government also prints more than one
million work
permits for
new foreigners, and it rarely punishes companies for employing illegal
migrants.
This
policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth and
stock values for investors. The stimulus happens
because the extra labor ensures that employers do not have to compete for
American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
The
federal policy of flooding the market with cheap,
foreign white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts wealth
from young employees toward older
investors. It also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech
investment, increases state and local tax
burdens, reduces marriage rates, and hurts
children’s schools and college educations.
The
cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from
high-tech careers, and it sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including
many who are now struggling with drug addictions.
The
labor policy also moves business investment and
wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, undermines suburbia, shrivels real estate values in
the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
But President Donald Trump’s
“Hire American” policy is boosting wages by capping immigration within a
growing economy.
The
Census Bureau said September 10 that men
who work full-time and year-round got an average earnings boost of 3.4 percent
in 2018, pushing their median salaries up to $55,291. Women gained 3.3 percent
in wages, bringing their median salaries to $45,097 for full-time, year-round
work.
Despite Job Boom, More Men Are Giving Up On Work
December 5, 2019
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."
The decline in male
workers is concentrated almost entirely among men with high school diplomas or
less, or even a bit of college, she says. At one time, men of all educational
levels were equally likely to be working; today, a huge gap has opened up, with
many more college graduates holding jobs.
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.
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."
Meet
the 'American Students Last' Lobby
Who is
funding the militant illegal immigrant youth army of thousands of entitled
"Dreamers" that marched to Washington, D.C., for the Supreme Court
hearing this week on President Barack Obama's unconstitutional amnesty program?
Follow
the money; find the truth. I've got the "Open Borders Inc." breakdown
for you of so-called DACA financiers and enablers on both sides of the
political spectrum. Call them what they are: the "American Students
Last" lobby.
Let's
start with Charles Koch. The libertarian billionaire has thrown his weight and
fortune behind an amnesty brigade called the LIBRE Initiative. While the establishment
right purports to oppose identity politics, LIBRE wraps itself in the mantle of
"empowering Hispanics" to "advance liberty" and
"prosperity." Koch has poured more than $10 million into the
ethnocentric group since 2011 under the slogan "Limited Government.
Unlimited Opportunity."
Translation:
driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, in-state tuition discounts for
illegal immigrant students and securing a Congressional deal to codify the
Obama administration's blanket deportation shields and work permits for 800,000
illegal immigrant students if the Supreme Court strikes the deal down.
Koch
operatives send out weekly press releases urging Congress to "Protect
Dreamers Now," "Achieve a permanent solution for Dreamers"
(hint: It's not deportation), and "act promptly on relief for
Dreamers." Along with the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, LIBRE
sponsored a "pop-up art exhibit" propagandizing the benefits of
illegal immigrant Dreamers to coincide with their march on Washington on
Tuesday.
Next up:
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Big Business lobbyists for cheap labor have
prioritized illegal immigrant amnesty legislation since 2014, when the Chamber
dumped $50 million to protect border-jumpers from deportation and win them
employment authorization documents. "Stripping DACA recipients of their
ability to legally live and work in the country will harm them," the D.C.
fat cats lamented this week.
Then
there's Facebook. All week long, young users of the Silicon Valley giant's
Instagram app have been fed heart-tugging ads highlighting Dreamer families and
their activist sisters and brothers, including the George Soros-funded street
demonstrators of United We Dream, Make the Road New York and CASA de Maryland.
Facebook's lobbying arm, FWD.us, disseminated a letter from 10 of its illegal
immigrant Dreamer employees "in solidarity with" all immigrants
living and working here in violation of our laws. FWD.us has shelled out
$430,000 on immigration lobbying this year alone.
Open
borders Catholic Church elites have had a busy "illegal immigrants
first" month so far. The Vatican and bishops' conference spend hundreds of
millions of donations on illegal immigrant shelters, legal teams for dubious
asylum claimants, and community organizing activities promoting sanctuary
policies and profiting off the backs of border-trespassers, who in turn enrich
smuggling rings and drug cartels. The NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice
marched from New York City to D.C. with DACA recipients, according to the
group's press secretary Lee Morrow (who makes sure to let Catholic colleagues
and journalists know that his pronouns are "he/him"). Leaders of the
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops convened masses at the border to condemn
patriots who use the accurate term "invasion" to describe the violent
siege in the Southwest. Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles pledged that
"we will never abandon you" and enlisted American churchgoers to pray
for illegal immigrant families.
Such
virtue-signaling gestures have never been extended to American families
permanently separated from their children and grandchildren because of
criminal-coddling sanctuary policies and porous fences, of course.
Microsoft
and Princeton University jointly filed the Supreme Court briefs on behalf of
Dreamers suing for the right to stay here illegally. Princeton also lobbied on
Capitol Hill to extend the endless "temporary protected status" and
work permits of 300,000 low-wage workers from Central America. Microsoft has
punched American students twice in the gut, leading the charge not only for a
massive pipeline of illegal immigrant youths but also for millions of H-1B and
F-1 foreign student visa holders.
Even The
New York Times now acknowledges the obvious reason Democrats are throwing
American youth under the bus: mass uncontrolled immigration both legal and
illegal is turning America radically blue. But what about Beltway Republicans
and establishment Swamp conservative think tanks and college groups? Where is
the defense of American students fighting to make a decent living while
competing with unrelenting floods of foreign workers at both ends of the wage
scale?
Turning
Point USA's Charlie Kirk blithely advocates stapling green cards to foreign
student diplomas and his speakers have shouted down America First students as
racists and losers for challenging the donor class on demographic realities.
(Who needs SPLC smear merchants with "friends" like these?)
Shamefully, no right-leaning groups bothered to muster up their own army of
American students to counter the Koch-Soros-Silicon Valley-Vatican-backed
hordes on the Mexifornicated steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. The job of
combating the American Students Last lobby has been left to anti-establishment
outsiders -- Proud Boys, Groypers, displaced U.S. tech workers and other
dissidents unmasking Open Borders Inc.'s controlled opposition. On Tuesday, I
was called a "Nazi" by a young GOP operative for supporting American
students first.
Keep
shooting the messengers, civilizational suicide squad clowns. If the goal is to
make America disappear, you're winning.
Michelle Malkin 's email address is
MichelleMalkinInvestigates@protonmail.com.
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.
The wage and housing problems are made worse —
especially for families — by the loss of
employment benefits as companies and investors spike stock prices by cutting
costs. The report says:
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%.
.
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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.
John
Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
WEST HOLLYWOOD WELCOME MAT FOR ILLEGALS...
Not a single employer of illegals ever prosecuted in this LA
RAZA SANCTUARY CITY where they print voting ballots in Spanish so illegals can
vote for more!
November: Foreign Workers See Nearly 5X Job Growth of Americans
Foreign workers saw nearly five times as much
job growth as native-born American workers did last month, Bureau of Labor
Statistics data reveals.
In November 2018, foreign-born worker employment increased 5.1
percent compared to the same time last year. Meanwhile, native-born Americans
saw an employment increase of only about 1.2 percent year-to-year, almost five
times less job growth as their foreign worker competitors.
The foreign-born workforce — those who are employed and looking
for work — also had significantly higher gains than native-born Americans. Last
month, the number of foreign-born workers in the labor force increased almost
five percent. At the same time, native-born Americans in the labor force
increased only 0.66 percent.
The labor force participation rate among foreign-born workers
increased 1.2 percent, while the labor force participation rate for native-born
Americans increased only 0.2 percent from year-to-year.
Though foreign-born workers have had
significant gains in the last three months of President Trump’s economy, native-born Americans’
unemployment dropped by an impressive 12.5 percent while their foreign
competitors’ unemployment decreased by 5.9 percent.
The fast-growing employment of foreign-born workers over
American citizens is exacerbated by the country’s wage-crushing national
immigration policy whereby about 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants are
added to the U.S. population every year.
While legal immigrants continued being admitted to the U.S. to
take blue-collar working-class jobs and many white-collar, high-paying jobs,
there remain about six million Americans who are unemployed, 12 percent of whom
are teenagers and nearly six percent of whom are black Americans.
There remain about 1.3 million workers who have been jobless for
more than two years, 4.8 million workers who are working part time but who want
full time jobs, and 1.7 million workers who want a job, including more than
450,000 workers who are discouraged by their job prospects.
John
Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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