Pitting Worker Against Worker

[marmar]

from Truthdig:



Pitting Worker Against Worker
Posted on Apr 30, 2010

By Moshe Adler


Editor’s note: In this May Day special feature, economist Moshe Adler argues that the answer to our immigration, labor and broader economic problems is more immigration and more welfare for all.

All that is wrong with our immigration and labor policies—for the two cannot be separated—is on full display in New York City, where it plays out every day in the city’s small grocery stores. Virtually all of the workers in these stores are undocumented Latin American immigrants. Yet in the adjacent supermarkets, the same jobs are held by American-born workers of all colors. The usual excuse that these are jobs that “Americans won’t do” obviously doesn’t apply. What is the explanation then?

In 2002, then-New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer discovered the answer: The small grocery stores pay their workers about half the minimum wage. And what did he do about it? Not much. In exchange for a promise from the grocery store owners not to do it again, he forgave them for their past wage theft. What Spitzer did not do was hire workers to enforce the minimum wage law. (This would have required tax money, and he had his eye on the governorship.) Instead, Spitzer devised a plan by which the merchants would pay for the enforcement themselves. Nothing came of it. Eight years later, the workers in these small grocery stores are still overwhelmingly undocumented immigrants and there is little doubt that their employers continue to steal their wages.

Do illegal immigrants depress the wages of other workers? Of course they do. Supermarket owners will refuse to pay much higher wages than the wages that their competitors pay. Yet the law is not enforced, either against the illegal immigrants, although they swell the ranks of those who seek employment, or against the employers, even though they hire these immigrants at illegally low wages. What is a worker to do?

The academic literature about whether immigration depresses wages is contradictory; some studies find that it does, while others find it does not. But all of these studies suffer from the same methodological problem, which is that interpreting them requires broad assumptions that may not actually hold. These assumptions are significant enough that each camp can continue to dismiss the other. When I present these studies to those of my students who are union construction workers, they laugh them off. They have no use for complex mathematical models when they can drag anybody to construction sites that employ illegal immigrants at low wages—and they know firsthand that this puts direct downward pressure on their own wages. This is what employers tell them. “You are too expensive,” they hear all too often. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/pitting_worker_against_worker_20100430/

[Scuba]

1. They're good at this.

Religion, abortion, immigration rights, etc. For goodness sakes, they convinced Medicare recipients to be against "government takeover of health care".

[meow2u3]

2. Pitting workers against one another is the whole philosophy behind union-busting

It's also an indicator of illegal hiring practices.

Unscrupulous employers think they can have their cake and eat it too. They use illegal immigrants, who would accept work at outrageously low wages that no self-respecting American would accept, as pawns to provoke American workers, especially the unemployed and/or underemployed, to use undocumented workers as scapegoats, when in fact it's the bosses who are running afoul of the law. "Illegals" are only violating a civil law; the employers who hire them are the damn criminals.

These shyster bosses want to pit worker against worker and, at the same time, demand that their workers cooperate and get along as if they were one big, happy family. No wonder there's so much bullying and backstabbing in the workplace.

Unions have the effect of workers coming together for the sake of decent, living wages; working conditions that respect the dignity of individual workers; collective bargaining; and safety in numbers. Employers know that they can't readily take advantage of employees who have one another's backs, so the sociopathic bosses try to break up the unions so they can turn workers against one another.

Next time you hear of big businesses who fight tooth and nail against unions, look to see how many undocumented workers are working under the table. I'd look at employee records. If the official workforce either consists of few or no workers lawfully employed, I'd be suspicious of who they're hiring. They might have a big problem trying to explain that away.

[Scuba]

3. Nailed It

Thanks for your spot-on analysis. Instead of going after the immigrants, law enforcement should be going after the employers who are breaking the law to hire these earnest people at slave wages, with no benefits, no rights.