Tuesday, April 21, 2020

BIG AG GETS BIG BAILOUTS AND STILL DEMANDS AMERICA BE FLOODED WITH 'CHEAP' LABOR ONE-THIRD OF WHOM WILL END UP ON WELFARE - 'US farm relief program hands billions to agribusiness while millions lack food'

DHS Allows Agricultural Guestworkers to Stay Indefinitely

By Preston Huennekens

ImmigrationReform.com

https://www.immigrationreform.com/2020/04/16/guestworker-agriculture-dhs-h2a-immigrationreform-com/

Big Business Complains of Labor Shortage, High Wages While 22M Americans Out of Work


SAN RAFAEL, CA - MAY 23: Illegal immigrants Misael Amrocio (L) and Jose Augustine, both of Guatemala, layout a flagstone patio while working on a landscaping job May 23, 2007 in San Rafael, California. Both Misael and Jose came to the United States from Guatemala and are currently living and …
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
7:20

Big business and Big Agriculture is complaining of labor shortages and high wages while the Chinese coronavirus crisis has spurred mass unemployment with at least 22 million Americans out of work.
While unemployment among Americans climbs to record levels, with now at least 22 million out of work in the last four weeks, employers who hire H-2A and H-2B foreign visa workers continue to complain that the United States is facing a labor shortage and that wages are too high.
Executives with the American Farm Bureau Federation, one of the leading cheap labor lobbying organizations, are backing a reported plan to federally lower wage rates for imported H-2A foreign visa workers that are brought into the U.S. to work on farms:
Paul Schlegel, vice president of public affairs at the American Farm Bureau Federation, said it’s important to address the [Adverse Effect Wage Rate] at a time when labor-intensive produce farms have lost much of their markets due to COVID-19. [Emphasis added]
“The closing of restaurants, hotels and tourism is forcing farmers to plow under their fields to cut their losses,” Schlegel said. “Asking farmers to pay artificially high wages at a time when their own income has largely evaporated due to the COVID-19 pandemic is not right.” [Emphasis added]
The plan under consideration by the Agriculture Department would allow farmers to pay H-2A foreign visa workers wages below existing rates. The wage reduction policy would be coupled with the State Department’s fast-tracking of H-2A foreign visa workers into the U.S.
American Farm Bureau Federation executives praised the Agriculture Department for issuing visa waivers to more readily fast-track H-2A foreign visa workers, calling it “critically important.”
As federal data shows, H-2A foreign visa workers make up only about ten percent of the total U.S. crop farm workforce and the program is already used by farmers to pay imported foreign workers less than their American counterparts.
The H-2A visa program has no numerical limit. Last year, U.S. farmers hired roughly 250,000 H-2A foreign visa workers.
Gaston Marquevich, the CEO of Generation Farms — one of the largest crop growers of carrots and sweet onions on the East Coast — told TheStreet.com that his corporation has successfully imported foreign workers in the middle of the crisis:
Yeah, I think there is an issue, of course. There are many issues. One of the issues is a labor shortage. So, we started to work a conversation a month ago. So, but yeah, right in time when this COVID-19 came to us. So we normally use, in between Florida and Georgia, we normally use 1,200 employees as labor. So, we applied to the aid program. So normally, the program takes three months, and the last two or three year was taking like six months because all of this and then changes on the immigration policies, rules. [Emphasis added]
So we’ve been very, very stressed about getting all the employees in place to allow us to pick up the crop from the ground. So we connect, a month ago, we contact the USDA team, the team that works with the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, and they basically have been very flexible, very cooperative with us, and they count on the USCIS in California. So in California, they contact the U.S. embassy in Monterey and finally we get 500 employees in Florida and 450 in Georgia. So we don’t have the 1,200 that normally we use, but we are okay with it the 950 right now. [Emphasis added]
On April 6, USA Today published the grievances of a local California agriculture reporter who argued that farmers are struggling “to find workers” despite mass unemployment:
A crippling labor shortage has affected nearly every corner of California agriculture. Increased competition for workers continues as wine grape growers lose labor to commercial cannabis growers — who can offer higher wages, stable employment and better working conditions because of how lucrative the crop is. [Emphasis added]
These complaints have also been echoed by the employers of H-2B foreign visa workers, whereby more than 66,000 foreign nationals are imported every year to take seasonal, nonagricultural jobs. The State Department, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, is allowing employers to fast-track these foreign workers by waiving certain visa requirements.
Still, big business has claimed they are struggling to hire folks to take jobs. In a Bloomberg News report, an attorney for H-2B visa employers said that while millions are out of work, his clients still need imported foreign labor:
The holding pattern “shows the lack of understanding the government has of how the H-2B program is essential to the economy,” said Jeff Joseph, an attorney with Joseph & Hall in Aurora, Colo., who represents companies that employ H-2B workers. Some industries are operating as usual “regardless of the pandemic,” he said, and need workers going into the summer and fall. [Emphasis added]
“Without clear, transparent information from the government on how long this shutdown is going to last, those people still need the workers,” he said, adding that his clients that employ H-2B workers—including resorts, landscaping companies, and outdoor-adventure operators—haven’t been laying off workers. [Emphasis addd]
Less than a month ago, Maryland seafood processors complained that they needed more H-2B foreign visa workers even after Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf promised businesses an additional 35,000 foreign workers to hire:
Jack Brooks, co-owner of J.M. Clayton Seafood Co. in Cambridge,  and president of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association, said he expects a worker shortfall, despite the government’s action. [Emphasis added]
Initially, the Department of Homeland Security doled out 33,000 work visas, which are in effect for six months beginning April 1. With the added 35,000 visas, the total still falls well short of the 100,000 slots that U.S. employers nationally had sought to fill. [Emphasis added]
While big business and Big Agriculture ask for more foreign workers, a number of leading conservative voices have asked President Trump’s administration to pause immigration to the U.S. — a plan supported by nearly 80 percent of Americans, according to the latest Ipsos poll.
Former Sen. Jeff Sessions and Laura Ingraham have said the nation’s unemployment totals should be eased by stopping increased labor market competition against unemployed Americans via legal immigration.
Such a pause to immigration would come after four decades of the U.S. admitting 525,000 to 1.8 million legal immigrants annually. The U.S., at current legal immigration levels, admits more legal immigrants than any other country in the world and has done so for more than two decades.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.


US farm relief program hands billions to agribusiness while millions lack food

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced plans on Friday, April 17, for a farm relief program. Funded largely through the CARES Act, the $19 billion package will be used to funnel funds to corporate farms while providing little assistance for the vast majority of small or working farmers.
Like other government programs to help farmers, most of this money will end up in the hands of agribusiness. The majority of farmland is owned by farms grossing over $500,000 in sales, a figure that demonstrates the demise of the American family farm. In total, $16 billion will be handed directly to farmers, of which $9.6 billion goes to the livestock industry. This funding will be given largely as reimbursements for “losses” and will not be contingent upon providing food to those in need.
The remaining $3 billion will be used to purchase $100 million each of produce, meat and dairy that will be distributed to food banks, nonprofits and community and faith organizations every month. This is a paltry sum, amounting to just 27 cents a day for every food insecure person, a figure that will only decline as America’s now 22 million unemployed seek assistance.
It will also provide funds to distribute 1,000,000 meals a week to children in “a limited number of rural schools.” How this would actually be done given the wide dispersion of such students, many of whom rode buses for an hour or more to reach their schools, is unclear.
This bailout is intended to offset financial losses from the collapse of distribution systems during the pandemic. While grocery stores are having difficulty keeping their shelves stocked, much of the food in the pipeline is packaged in bulk quantities for institutional buyers such as restaurants and schools.
The closure of restaurants, schools and other institutional buyers has resulted in farmers destroying millions of pounds of food as their distribution chains are disrupted. This is not because there is no demand, but because transitioning to retail packaging is too costly. It is cheaper to destroy food than to repackage it and send it elsewhere.
This mass destruction of crops and dairy products comes at a time when millions of Americans have lost their jobs and are now turning to food banks to feed their families. Some food banks are reporting an increase in demand as high as 300 percent. Lines of cars in the thousands have been reported queuing up at food banks across the country.
But even if all the available food was sent to food banks, they lack the necessary resources and equipment to handle such an expansion in supply. A study of food banks in San Diego County, California, found that in 2015 less than half of food banks had enough refrigerator space and only 54 percent had enough freezer space to service people in need. If food banks around the country did not have enough storage space before the pandemic, there is no reason to believe that they are prepared to handle a huge rise in demand or supply.
Feeding America, one of the largest organizations representing food banks, estimates that an additional $1.4 billion is needed to cover the increasing operating costs of food banks, an insignificant amount compared to the $2 trillion granted to bail out the banks and corporations.
Whether or not food banks and charities can handle a massive influx is not issue for the capitalist class and the state that protects it. They do not care whether people receive enough food, as long as the agricultural industry remains profitable and the pretense of aid is maintained.
There is not even mention in the legislation of providing agricultural and food processing workers with aid. Without proper protective equipment, these workers are at great risk, and migrant workers in particular are threatened with destitution without income support.
Farm laborers earn between $15,000 and $24,499 a year, according to official figures, with a quarter living below the poverty line. Already working and living in horrid conditions, these workers face privation during a global health crisis. Suffering similarly horrendous conditions, meat packing workers are kept on the job while the virus is allowed to tear through their plants. It has already taken several lives and infect ed hundreds of workers. These workers need aid far more than the capitalists who exploit them.
The ruling class has made it clear with this relief program that it only cares about protecting profits at the expense of workers. Kenneth Sullivan, CEO of the meatpacker Smithfield Foods, said, “We have to operate these processing plants even when we have COVID. If we don’t, we sadly won’t have food.”
This is a falsehood. Tens of millions of pounds of food are being destroyed while the USDA estimates that 2.4 billion pounds of meat sits in cold storage—enough to cease all meat packaging for several weeks until protective measures are put in place.
An estimated 3.7 million gallons of milk are dumped every day, enough to provide all 37 million food insecure people with two quarts a week. There is plenty of food to last while measures are taken to protect workers, both citizen and immigrant. The claim that workers must die to keep production flowing is a nefarious lie.
What the working class needs is not a haphazard dumping of goods into food banks and charities, but an adequate income so that all working people can afford to buy food, and an adequate supply so that the food is available to those who want it.
This should be combined with a coordinated effort to reorganize food supply chains to meet social needs. The vast resources of the state and private industry must be placed under the control of the working class, with a coordinated and scientific plan for the safe harvesting and distribution of agricultural goods.
The retooling of currently unused supply chains is a necessary and far from impossible task. Restaurants, schools and hotels must have their cold storage resources reconverted into temporary distribution centers for those in need. One restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland, called La Cuchara, has already repurposed its supply chain to create a makeshift grocery store. The widespread capacity for converting existing resources is apparent.
But such changes must be made to feed the working class, not to benefit the capitalists who would sacrifice millions of workers to the virus to keep their profits flowing.

Thousands Line Up for Donated Food in Texas’ Largest City

Houston volunteers load more than 4,000 cars with food during the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo: Houston Independent School District)
Photo: Houston Independent School District
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HOUSTON, Texas — Thousands of people lined up for hours to receive donated food collected by the Houston Independent School District and the Houston Food Bank. Lines grew so far in advance that organizers opened the event three hours early.
Houston ISD and the Houston Food Bank teamed up to provide enough food to last a family for two weeks and organized the delivery of the food at Harris County’s NRG Stadium complex, KTRK ABC 13 reported. More than 4,000 cars lined up in a mile-long caravan to receive the gifts that are meant to curb “food insecurity.”

Over 4,000 vehicles full of Houstonians showed up at NRG Park Saturday afternoon where 90,000 pounds of food were distributed by Houston ISD with the Houston Food Bank. It was a site I would not have imagined just one month ago. Full story @nkhensley: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Houston-ISD-hands-out-food-to-more-than-4-000-15210655.php#photo-19314380 






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Drivers lined up for hours in advance and the vehicles stretched along the roadway for more than a mile. Officials decided to open the even three hours earlier to relieve traffic and help volunteers avoid approaching thunderstorms.
One recipient of the food donations said the event was extremely well organized.
Workers distributed more than 90,000 pounds of food in what organizers called the first “mass food distribution site” in the city’s history, the Houston Chronicle reported. As each car approached in the multiple lanes of distribution, volunteers put bags of potatoes, meat, and milk in each vehicle.
“The goal is to accommodate working families who are unable to visit HISD-sponsored distribution sites during the weekday,” Houston ISD officials said in a written statement. “The site is expected to distribute 3,000 food bags — or 90,000 pounds of food — in three hours.” The organization exceeded that goal by a great margin.
The school district said that 120 workers gathered to organize the lines and place the tons of collected food bags into the waiting cars. The Houston Texans NFL franchise not only donated the space for the event, but provided a catered lunch for the volunteers. Exxon also donated $50 gift cards to the volunteers.
“Schools are more than just centers for education, they are the heart of every community, with strong connections and relationships with students and families,” said Brian Greene, president and chief executive officer of the Houston Food Bank in the joint statement with HISD. “Houston Food Bank is working with HISD to supplement their efforts to ensure children who rely on school meals are still receiving access to nutritious food during this unprecedented time.”
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s What’s Your Point? Sunday-morning talk show. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.
Hundreds line up to receive free food outside of Washington, D.C. area supermarkets

While national news media outlets have sought to focus on the handful of right-wing protests which have called for a re-opening of the United States’ economy, a social catastrophe for the working population continues to develop in neighborhoods and communities across the country.
On Friday, hundreds of people from Maryland and Virginia lined up outside of local MegaMart supermarkets with the hope of obtaining free baskets of groceries to feed their families. The giveaways, held at four of the Latino-owned stores in the Washington, D.C. area, led to massively long lines which wound around the buildings and disrupted traffic.
Yoni Lopez, owner of the local supermarket chain, told press outlets that his stores quickly ran out of to-go food baskets. Lopez explained that staff began handing out $35 gift coupons to people in line. Anarel Mejia, who was waiting in line, told Fox News: “I don’t want to come out because I worry. I take care of my life. I take care of my son, that’s why… he’s not with me… but I need food… now I think everybody needs help.” Mejia is also an employee of the store.
Like food pantries all across the country, Washington, D.C.-area food banks have reported a sharp increase in demand. According to the local CBS affiliate, the Capital Area Food Bank, which is the largest regional hub for food distribution to the needy, reports a “30%-400%” increase in demand for assistance. The food bank relies on shipments from local supermarkets. Since the onset of the pandemic it has seen a 75 percent drop in such deliveries.
News media outlets were quick to leap on store-goers for violating social distancing procedures. Such acts of desperation, repeatedly seen in cities throughout the country, are an indictment of capitalism’s failure to properly care for the fundamental needs of working people during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Likewise, those suggesting that such conditions indicate the need for a speedy “re-opening” of the US economy, without proper protections in place for workers in grocery stores and other essential locations, will only hasten the spread of COVID-19.
According to Fox, over 400 people showed up Friday morning at MegaMart’s Takoma Park location. The working class suburb is situated on the northeast border of Washington, D.C. and houses a sizable immigrant population. The Washington Post wrote last week that the pandemic is proving to be “particularly devastating” in neighboring Langley Park, which has an 80 percent-immigrant population, a large number of whom are undocumented.
“Here, countless cooks, construction workers and cleaners are suddenly out of a job without any chance of unemployment benefits or federal stimulus checks. Those who still work often do so in close quarters and at high risk of infection,” the Post states. The publication cites a note given to leasers in a local apartment complex, informing them “that, although the coronavirus had closed the leasing office, it had not canceled rent payments, which should be dropped through a slot in a metal box.”
Other nearby jurisdictions, such as neighboring Washington, D.C., have also excluded undocumented and informal workers from receiving rent assistance and other basic help during the pandemic.
While the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region and its surrounding jurisdictions have reported lower numbers than other major population centers in the US, it is expected that the capital area will see a spike in coronavirus infections in the coming weeks. According to the University of Virginia, it is predicted that the commonwealth will see a “surge” in infections in late April or early May, reports WUSA9 .
The Post reported that known COVID-19 cases in the Washington region doubled from around 10,000 to over 20,000 in the week ending Friday. Maryland, which on Friday surpassed 10,000 known cases of the virus, Sunday reported that it had 12,830 confirmed cases and 23 deaths overnight.


What Makes a “Healthy” Economy?

The coronavirus pandemic shows that we don’t have one.
Wikimedia Commons
Last week, Janet Yellin, former chair of the Federal Reserve, gave an upbeat assessment of the pre-pandemic U.S. economy. “Very fortunately we started with an economy that was healthy before this hit,” she told the PBS NewsHour. “The banks were in good shape, the financial system was sound, Americans at least overall on average had relatively low debt burdens.”
But how “healthy” was that economy, really? How healthy is an economy whose workers have so little savings that they can’t make the rent after missing just a couple of paychecks? How healthy is an economy whose small businesses have so little cushion that they face almost instant obliteration when their cash flow is disrupted? How healthy is an economy where hourly employees performing many essential services earn so little that they have to go to work sick to keep their jobs? And how healthy is an economy whose housing costs force millions to cram into overcrowded homes in polluted slums replete with high stress, malnutrition, asthma, diabetes, heart problems, and other chronic disease?
“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with our economy,” said Fed chairman Jerome Powell in March. It was “resilient,” he said in February. Yellin concurred, citing the old good news in her hope that the “economy will recover much more speedily than it did from any past downturn.”
Recover for whom? The experts look at conventional measurements, which painted a picture of prosperity before COVID-19. The unemployment rate last September hit a fifty-year low, at 3.5 percent, and the rate for people without a high school diploma dropped to a new low of 4.8 percent. The GDP had been growing within the range considered ideal—two to three percent—and Powell reported a rising willingness of employers to hire low-skilled workers and train them.
But alongside the bright figures on unemployment and job creation, consider a competing set of numbers from before the pandemic: The poverty-level wages for those who harvest our vegetables, cut our Christmas trees, wash our cars, cook and serve our food in restaurants, deliver groceries to our doors, clean our offices, and even drive our ambulances. The 14.3 million households (11.1 percent) uncertain that they could afford enough food, and the 5.6 million families (4.3 percent) where at least one person has had to cut back on eating during the year. The 14.3 percent of black children with asthma, double the rate in the population overall. The 20 percent of children living in crowded homes shared with other families or three generations of their own, and the 50 percent of urban children who have lived in those conditions by age nine.
A pernicious dynamic of financial stress is the unexpected link between housing costs and malnutrition. For many low-wage families without access to such government subsidies as Section 8 vouchers or affordable housing, rent can soak up 40 to 60 percent of income, which can leave too little for other necessities. You have to pay the rent. You have to pay the electricity, phone, and fuel bills. If you need a car to get to work, which the vast majority of employees do, you have to make the car payments. Those are not optional. The category that can be squeezed is for food, and that’s what many poor families have to do.
A result is childhood malnutrition. It sometimes manifests itself in obesity resulting from cheap, bad food, which in turn can promote diabetes. It compromises the immune system. Even more seriously, deprivation of nutrients such as iron during key periods of brain development, both before and after birth, can lead to lifelong cognitive impairment. Studies show that children who suffered iron deficiency as infants, even if they’re fed properly later, still suffer as adolescents, scoring lower in math, written expression, and selective recall. Their teachers see them displaying “more anxiety or depression, social problems, and attention problems,” according to a National Academy of Sciences report.
So when federal and state governments are stingy with housing subsidies, as they always are, they are effectively, perhaps unwittingly, damaging children’s brain development and life opportunities.
The booming economy since the Great Recession 
of 2008, amplified by Republican tax cuts that 
gave corporations huge benefits, has begun to 
raise hourly wages, but not significantly.
If median hourly wages in certain jobs are put next to the official poverty line—currently $25,750 a year for a family of four—it’s clear why so many people are in desperate trouble so soon after the economy’s lockdown. Most poor families have only one wage earner, so assuming a full-time, 40-hour week, that person would have to be paid $12.38 an hour just to reach the poverty line. As of May 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly wage for ambulance drivers and assistants was just $12.45; for workers in retail sails, $11.37 to $12.14; for building cleaners, $12.68; for parking attendants, $12.11; and for fast-food and restaurant cooks and servers (some of whom also get tips), $11.00 to $12.45.
The lesson is to look beyond the unemployment rate and number of new jobs and examine how well those jobs pay. The “healthy” economy did little to narrow the wealth gap. The most recent Federal Reserve figures, from before the pandemic, showed the top 10 percent of households with a median net worth of $2,387,500 and the bottom 10 percent with minus $962—that is, they owed more than they owned.
Adding assets and subtracting liabilities as of the fourth quarter of 2019, the wealthiest 10 percent had 70 percent ($78.5 trillion) of the country’s total household net worth, and the bottom 50 percent had just 1.5 percent ($1.7 trillion). The top had miniscule debt, and the bottom half had miniscule financial assets alongside huge mortgage and consumer debt.
So, Janet Yellin was only partially right when she said that Americans had low debt burdens. Consumer debt reached a record high in 2019 of more than $14 trillion, according to Experian, the credit agency. But it was lower as a portion of income. And defaults and late payments were low enough to drive the average FICO score—a person’s credit rating—to a high of 703, up from 689 in 2010 at the end of the Great Recession. (A perfect score is 850.) Given the high credit card and other debt among the unwealthy, however, delinquency rates can now be expected to soar, pushing credit ratings down.
In that prospering economy, then, the glass was either half full or half empty, depending on whether you were looking from the top or from the bottom. There was no need to exaggerate the hardships at the bottom, as some Democratic candidates did with one misstated statistic.
BLOG: INTERESTINGLY HARRIS, WARREN AND SANDERS ALL WANT AMNESTY SO 40 MILLION ILLEGALS CAN BRING UP THE REST OF MEXICO. NOW DO THE MATH ON JOBS, HOUSING AND THE HOMELESS CRISIS
Senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders all said last year that 40 percent of Americans could not come up with the money to pay a $400 emergency expense. In fact, the contrary was the case, according to the Federal Reserve’s annual survey, “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households.”
Asked to check all the ways they could pay for a $400 emergency, only 12 percent said they could not pay right now, 45 percent checked “with the money currently in my checking/savings account or with cash,” and 33 percent said they’d use a credit card and pay it off entirely at the next statement. To a follow-up question, 85 percent said that making the unexpected payment would not prevent their paying other bills.
On the other hand, 25 percent told the Federal Reserve that they were just getting by or finding it difficult to get by. That number is troubling enough, one bound to spike as stay-at-home orders continue. The economy was not “healthy” for those folks in the first place, and will not be so for many more.
Improvements will come not from the stalemate of left and right, or from their manipulating statistics, but from a new ideology of practical realism that honors the complex facts, without distortion. The free-market system is the one we have, and it can work for virtually everyone if everyone in government and business works for everyone. Too idealistic? Naïve? Probably.

Nearly a third of apartment renters failed to pay landlords for April

Nearly 1 out of every 3 renters did not pay their April rent.

The coronavirus tore apart the U.S. economy, leaving many people unemployed or furloughed for the time being. The ripple effects of those firings left many landlords without a check on the first of the month.
According to data from the National Multifamily Housing Council and a consortium of real-estate data distributors, 69% of renters paid their landlords for April compared with 81% who paid for March. For an annual comparison, 82% of renters paid their landlords in April 2019.

The rental statistics included renters who had issued partial payments in the data. Some renters who are waiting on a paycheck may still make their rent payment before the end of April. The data set included only data from those who rent apartments and did not include single-family homes or low-income housing facilities. In total, data from more than 13.4 million renters was included in the report.

 

THE REASON TRUMP IS NOT PROSECUTING EMPLOYERS OF ILLEGALS IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!

 

More Americans Are Going on Strike

For decades, the decline of the American labor movement corresponded to a decline in major strike activity. But new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, indicates a recent and significant increase in the number of Americans who are participating in strikes or work stoppages. As a report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute explained on Tuesday, strike activity “surged” in 2018 and 2019, “marking a 35-year high for the number of workers involved in a major work stoppage over a two-year period.” 2019 alone marked “the greatest number of work stoppages involving 20,000 or more workers since at least 1993, when the BLS started providing data that made it possible to track work stoppages by size.” Union membership is declining, but workers themselves are in fighting shape.
EPI credits the strike surge to several factors. Unemployment is low, which bestows some flexibility on workers depending on their industry. If a work environment becomes intolerable or an employer penalizes workers for striking or organizing, a worker could find better employment elsewhere. (Though federal labor law does prohibit employers from retaliating against workers for participating in protected organizing activity, employers often do so anyway, and under Trump, the conservative makeup of the National Labor Relations Board disadvantages unions when they try to seek legal remedies for the behavior.)
The other reason undermines one of Donald Trump’s central economic claims. Though the president points to low unemployment as proof that his policies are successful, the economy isn’t booming for everyone. Wage growth continues to underperform. People can find jobs, in other words, but those jobs often don’t pay well. As the costs of private health insurance rise, adding another strain on household budgets, Americans are finding that employment and prosperity are two separate concepts.
Without a union, exploited workers have few options at their disposal. They can take their concerns to management, and hope someone in power feels pity. They can stage some kind of protest, and risk the consequences. Or they can find another job, and hope their new workplace is more equitable than the last. Lackluster wage growth suggests that this last option is not as viable as some right-to-work advocates claim. Unions afford workers more protection. Not only do they bargain for better wages and benefits, union contracts typically include just-cause provisions, which make it more difficult for managers to arbitrarily fire people for staging any sort of protest at work. Discipline follows a set process, which gives a worker chances to improve. Retaliation still happens, but would likely happen more often were it not for union contracts, which are designed to act as a layer of insulation between workers and managers with ill intent.
The new BLS data reveals that despite their relatively small numbers, unionized workers are exercising the power afforded them by their contracts. Elected officials ought to listen to what this activity tells them. A strike wave is a symptom that the economy is actually not as healthy as it superficially looks. Nobody withholds their labor unless they’ve exhausted all other options. Strikes and stoppages stem from exasperation, sometimes even desperation. Workers know they’re playing a rigged game, and they’re running out of patience.

“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”

 

Donald Trump is ‘just wrong’ 

about the economy, says Nobel 

Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz


President Donald Trump told business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland last week that the economy under his tenure has lifted up working- and middle-class Americans. In a newly released interview, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz sharply disagreed, saying Trump’s characterization is “just wrong.” 
“The Washington Post has kept a tab of how many lies and misrepresentations he does a day,” Stiglitz said of Trump last Friday at the annual World Economic Forum. “I think he outdid himself.”
In Davos last Tuesday, Trump said he has presided over a “blue-collar boom,” citing a historically low unemployment rate and surging wage growth among workers at the bottom of the pay scale.
“The American Dream is back — bigger, better, and stronger than ever before,” Trump said. “No one is benefitting more than America’s middle class.”
Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize in 2001, refuted the claim, saying the failure of Trump’s economic policies is evident in the decline in average life expectancy among Americans over each of the past three years.
“A lot of it is what they call deaths of despair,” he says. “Suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism — it’s not a pretty picture.”
The uptick in wage growth is a result of the economic cycle, not Trump’s policies, Stiglitz said.
“At this point in an economic recovery, it’s been 10 years since the great recession, labor markets get tight, unemployment gets lower, and that at last starts having wages go up,” Stiglitz says.
“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”
As the presidential race inches closer to the general election in November, Trump’s record on economic growth — and whether it has resulted in broad-based gains — is likely to draw increased attention.
BLOG: THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH OCCURRED DURING THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME
“The middle class is getting killed; the middle class is getting crushed," former Vice President Joe Biden said in a Democratic presidential debate last month. "Where I live, folks aren't measuring the economy by how the Dow Jones is doing, they're measuring the economy by how they're doing," added Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate and former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Trump has criticized Democrats for tax and regulatory policies that he says will make the U.S. less competitive in attracting business investment.
“To every business looking for a place where they are free to invest, build, thrive, innovate, and succeed, there is no better place on Earth than the United States,” he said in Davos.
Stiglitz pointed to Trump’s threats last week of tariffs on European cars to demonstrate that turmoil in U.S. trade relationships may continue, despite the recent completion of U.S. trade deals in North America and China.
“He can’t help but bully somebody,” Stiglitz said.
Max Zahn is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Find hi

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