We can decide not to make more money by outsourcing for the good of the country.
We can employ people who speak English (Damn Sears to Hell) to speak with our customers, my private dog in this fight.
Yep. In the end, automation is going to end almost all unskilled work, but as of 2016 there is still lots of demand for unskilled and low skill work in factories and warehouses. Americans just aren’t being hired for these jobs as much as they used to be. As soon as wages threaten to rise, companies go straight for bringing foreign workers in. If you want to know why wages are stagnant, that’s a big part of it.
We need a law increasing the tax burden on companies that hire foreign workers.
Yeah, I know, “Good luck with that.”
You don’t need tax incentives, just tighten up the work visa rules and actually enforce them. The rules should state that you can’t get a work visa unless you can’t hire an American at any price. Wages should be allowed to rise as demand for labor rises. Instead, the government, regardless of party, allows the labor supply to rise to keep up with demand so that wages never go up. The poiltics are easy to understand: Republicans are beholden to corporations and Democrats are beholden to their precious “New Majority”. And it’s Political Science 101 that when a major issue of importance to the public is being ignored that a new force will seek to fill that void. Thus Donald Trump. And the thing is, both parties knew this was pissing people off, but they both thought they could lie their way through it forever. They were wrong. Thus Donald Trump.
It’s a bit more complicated than that on the Dem side: The “New Majority” is going to happen regardless of immigration policy, and many if not most immigrants will never become citizens anyway (or even want to stay here permanently; many just want to work a few years, earn some good money, and go home); many rank-and-file Dems are sincerely sympathetic to immigrants; and, the Dem Establishment is almost as beholden to corporations as the Pubs.
And a nontrivial portion of the “New Majority” demographic will turn out to like (gasp! shock!) more moderate and even conservative policies when it comes to straight socioeconomics…
Who’s “we”? I’m all for the social responsibility of business, which includes not wrecking your hometown. I’d be willing to settle for “good enough profit”. I don’t need to make ALL the money and corner ALL the whole market.
But try and be the first truly major public company to say they’ll take a smaller profit on purpose… watch the stock price tank and a stockholder uprising sack you for not looking out for their benefit.
THe problem for Democrats is that work visas are a nice legal way for families to reunite. Restrictions on work visas make that tougher. So there’s a political interest in treading lightly on the enforcement.
But that’s not a problem for Democrats; as I said, many Dems are sincerely sympathetic to immigrants, and family reunification is the kind of thing morally hardest to say no to, so they don’t want to obstruct it anyway. That a liberal policy happens to coincide with corporate labor-cost interests is just that – a coincidence, no more – at least to the rank-and-file who don’t need corporate donations to get re-elected. So, the Dems are not really deeply divided on this issue – unlike the Pubs; when W tried to enact immigration reform it split the party almost as roughly as it is split now.
There is some truth to what you’re saying. But I think in every level of society, there are people who thrive on unpredictability, and people who thrive on predictability. I’ve been everything from a book editor to an x-ray tech to a machinist; my husband has been a teacher, a programmer, and an accountant, and both of us much prefer things to be regular, predictable, and orderly.
But I also just have to point out that machining, just for one example, is not a job for dummies. A white-collar person watching you run a machine typically has no idea of the amount of knowledge and understanding you have to have just to be able to hit the START button. To become a competent machinist takes several years; to be an excellent machinist takes about a decade.
Frankly I don’t think that blue-collar = unintellectual and white-collar = intelligent is really a fair division. I’m pretty sure that my job requires more skill than that of the perfume salesperson at a department store, though they are classified as white collar.
I agree, I know it’s not a pro-corporate thing, it’s a “We need Latino voters” thing. But it’s the biggest example on the books of a law that exists primarily to appease the working class but one that the authorities never had any intention of enforcing. That creates anger.
No, it’s not that either; see post #225. America will have roughly the same number of Latino voters regardless of immigration policy. The only electoral advantage to the Dems of a liberal policy is that it will keep those Latinos who are citizens voting Dem out of sympathy for the noncitizens (and antipathy for the xenophobic Pubs).
But that’s kinda skeezy. Having a policy that companies should first hire American workers before casting about for foreign workers is a very reasonable policy that has nothing to do with xenophobia.
Why do you think such companies don’t hire american workers right now?
One would assume that if there were plenty of local people willing to do the same job for the same pay they would be the first and obvious choice.
The issue for companies is that there are enough workers, but since demand for labor outstrips supply a little, it forces wages up. Importing more workers keeps wages down. For example, in Kentucky, the opening of a very large Amazon facility caused other warehouses to have to compete for labor with a new large employer entering the market. So at least a few of those warehouses started bringing in foreigners(in one case, almost all Cubans, using some federal program I didn’t even know existed). So wages didn’t rise even though Amazon showed up and had an immediate need for thousands of workers.
The Louisville unemployment rate is pretty low, between 3.8 and 4.5% in recent months:
But there’s still more than enough joblessness locally to hire local workers. But the labor market is tight enough that wages should go up. That’s not happening because companies can now just import workers at will from other countries.
But practically everything else about Pub immigration policy and rhetoric does. The shameless and astonishing way that Trump talks about such matters (and not those alone) is merely the Republican id with the mask taken off and the dog-whistle snapped in two.
Which in theory should make enforcing the law cost-free for Democrats since Republicans are so much worse. But if anything the Obama administration has been even more lenient than Bush or Clinton was. Wages simply are not rising. Companies can even now use visa programs to reduce their labor costs in direct violation of the law, as Disney is doing:
And not just Disney, according to the article. It’s become standard practice now to fire American tech workers and replace them with foreigners. The loophole they use is to have another company hire the foreigners, who their own workers train to replace them.
“Now, this always works, Jose…it is called “Fdisk”.”
I guess blaming TARP on ‘the Dems’ is all about perception not reality, because I hope you’re aware that TARP was signed into law in October 2008 by George W. Bush as part of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. It’s true that some Democrats voted for it, but it was broadly bipartisan, passing 74-25 in the Senate and 263–171 in the House. It wasn’t even a party line vote for either party- 15 Republican and 9 Democratic Senators (plus Bernie Sanders-I) voted against it. It is true that more Democrats voted for it than Republicans in the house, but 91 house Republicans did vote for it and GWB signed it into law.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to classify that law as being implemented by ‘the Dems’.
Unions are starting to freak out about Trump’s level of support among their membership:
Donald Trump’s Working-Class Appeal Is Starting To Freak Out Labor Unions | HuffPost Latest News?
I work in the tech industry and this is a gross oversimplification.
First of all, it’s very hard to hire American (white) “tech workers” who actually know how to program competently. Most are looking to get into sales or management as soon as they can.
Second, sponsoring H1Bs is expensive.
Third, it is difficult to compete with offshore rates. My last company, we had developers in various parts of the world and we charged rates based on location. Clients simply couldn’t afford to have the work done in North America.
Finally, who “imports workers”? There are outsourcing firms the do work overseas for domestic clients. But I’m not familiar with factories recruiting in other countries to transplant workers to America.
Also who gives a shit? Conservatives are all for free markets when it’s telling poor people to suck it when it comes to raising minimum wage. But all of a sudden there are too many brown people working at the local factory and they demand protectionism.
Point to a single credible economic theory that states that the economy benefits from excluding foreign workers.