The Real Reason the Middle Class Is Dead
http://www.alternet.org/real-reason-middle-class-dead
***SNIP
The argument given against paying a living wage in fast-food restaurants is that workers are paid according to their skills, and if the teenager cleaning the grease trap wants more money, he should get an education. Like most conservative arguments, it makes sense logically, but has little connection to economic reality. Workers are not simply paid according to their skills, they’re paid according to what they can negotiate with their employers. And in an era when only 6 percent of private-sector workers belong to a union, and when going on strike is almost certain to result in losing your job, low-skill workers have no negotiating power whatsoever.
Granted, Interlake Steel produced a much more useful, much more profitable product than KFC. Steel built the Brooklyn Bridge, the U.S. Navy and the Saturn rocket program. KFC spares people the hassle of frying chicken at home. So let’s look at how wages have declined from middle-class to minimum-wage in a single industry: meat processing.
Slaughterhouses insist they hire immigrants because the work is so unpleasant Americans won’t do it. They hired European immigrants when Upton Sinclair wrote “The Jungle,” and they hire Latin American immigrants today. But it’s a canard that Americans won’t slaughter pigs, sheep and cows. How do we know this? Because immigration to the United States was more or less banned from 1925 to 1965, and millions of pigs, sheep and cows were slaughtered during those years. But they were slaughtered by American-born workers, earning middle-class wages. Mother Jones magazine explains what changed:
“[S]tarting in the early 1960s, a company called Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) began to revolutionize the industry, opening plants in rural areas far from union strongholds, recruiting immigrant workers from Mexico, introducing a new division of labor that eliminated the need for skilled butchers, and ruthlessly battling unions. By the late 1970s, meatpacking companies that wanted to compete with IBP had to adopt its business methods — or go out of business. Wages in the meatpacking industry soon fell by as much as 50 percent.”
In Nick Reding’s book “ Methland,” he interviews Roland Jarvis, who earned $18 an hour throwing hocks at Iowa Ham…until 1992, when the slaughterhouse was bought out by a company that broke the union, cut wages to $6.20 an hour, and eliminated all benefits. Jarvis began taking meth so he could work extra shifts, then dealing the drug to make up for his lost income.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I read this book as well. It more or less tells how the demise of the USA can be found entrenched in the world of Methland as they call it. It is what happens to communities that once were. They have no where else to go/turn but to the world of meth and wow does that world ever suck!
I'd recommend this book to everyone out there! It puts the nail in that proverbial coffin so to speak.
Sad but true reality. 
false statements on this board.
I can tell you are off your footing when you begin with your sleazy insinuations. 
If my point that Democrats are more liberal on immigration policy and republicans are more conservative on it are just "sleazy insinuations" rather than historical realities, I stand corrected. 
against it. And Democrats would not favor it; they would oppose it.
Tea party types, who effectively control the House, have effectively prevented the passage of immigration reform and support a Super-Wall on the Mexican border along with the bogus romney policy of "self-deportation". Their anti-immigrant nativism should not be confused with their being pro-working class.
And I appreciate you going easy on posting any of my "demonstrably false statements".
Congresses started increasing legal immigration circa 1960s-1970s.
Legal immigration, when it creates a big supply of workers with lower expectations than the prevailing workforce, reduces the bargaining power of labor. It's no different from "illegal immigration" except in that being "illegal" makes your expectations even lower.
Immigration is one front on which capital has attempted to drive down wages since the 60s, & it's no accident that the percent of immigrants in the population now approach those that prevailed in the notably anti-labor, pro-capital "Gilded Age".
think we've had any for the past decade or so, have we? 
The American Working Class has not been represented either Political Party in our duopoly since LBJ.
The current Democratic Party Leadership pays Lip Service to the Working Class,
and is surviving more on unearned Brand Loyalty than by any REAL advocacy for Americans who Work for a Living.
[font color=firebrick][center]"There are forces within the Democratic Party who want us to sound like kinder, gentler Republicans.
I want a party that will STAND UP for Working Americans."
---Paul Wellstone [/font][/center] [center]
[/font]
[font size=1]photo by bvar22
Shortly before Sen Wellstone was killed[/center][/font]
You will know them by their WORKS,
not by their promises or excuses.
As soon as you can cite a post on DU where somebody says that "All politicians are the same",
I will remove the Goat Label from your post.
Until then,
you are just making stuff up,
and fighting with your own fantasies.
I must confess to a weakness.
My mother taught me that I should avert my eyes when someone makes an embarrassing spectacle of themselves,
but I can't help myself.
