Post #82 -- will tell you though, the low pay issue is not what most think it is. It's cultural - our spoiled entry level work force will not perform, they will not show up day after day reliably, and they easily get bored with rote jobs - but these are jobs that need to go on day after week after month after year.
There is also way too little emphasis put on the welfare state's place in this, and too much on the low pay issue - and a total lack of acknowledgement that the low pay issue benefits all consumers as well as businesses. If you can bring home 50% of a full time job salary laying about, many will. Until we let folks go hungry a little, lose their obama phones, their flat screens, there ability to hang out at Starbucks 20 hours a week - they are not going to do the really boring repetitive jobs.
Post #83 -- I think pay is a big driver in the tech fields, just like you said. I think pay is a much smaller factor in the unskilled labor fields. I think those who say "Americans won't do the work" are both right and wrong….right to some degree on labor, wrong to some degree on the tech. Two totally different faces of the same problem.
The arrogant, corporate class cares more about the bottom line than it does about the future of the country and the welfare of our own citizens. You are part of the problem, not the solution.
Jeff Sessions gets it. His Becoming the Party of Work-- How the GOP can help struggling Americans, and itself, should be required reading for every Republican.
When Americans went to the polls in 2012, the following was true: Work-force participation had sunk to its lowest level in 35 years, wages had fallen below 1999 levels, and 47 million Americans were on food stamps. Yet Mitt Romney, the challenger to the incumbent president, lost lower- and middle-income voters by an astonishing margin. Among voters earning $30,000 to $50,000, he trailed by 15 points, and among voters earning under $30,000 he trailed by 28 points.
And what did the GOP’s brilliant consultant class conclude from this resounding defeat? They declared that the GOP must embrace amnesty. The Republican National Committee dutifully issued a report calling for a “comprehensive immigration reform” that would inevitably increase the flow of low-skilled immigration, reducing the wages and living standards of the very voters whose trust the GOP had lost.
Over the past four decades, as factories were shuttered and blue-collar jobs were outsourced or automated, net immigration quadrupled. Yet the corporate-consultant class has pronounced that an insufficient level of immigration is the problem. A more colossal misreading of the political moment has rarely occurred.
Perhaps the most important political development now unfolding in the U.S. is the public’s growing loss of faith in our political and financial elites of both parties. To open the ears of disaffected voters, the GOP must break publicly from the elite immigration consensus of Wall Street and Davos. Republicans have a clear path to building a conservative majority if they free themselves from the corporate consultants and demonstrate to the American public that the GOP is the only party aligned with the core interests, concerns, and beliefs of everyday hardworking citizens.
“Most business leaders have long favored more open immigration. Different businesses want different kinds of people,” a prominent GOP fundraiser declared on TV. “A restaurant may want waiters and cooks; a hospital wants nurses and doctors; a university wants physicists; a business like Exelon needs more engineers.” Asked by the interviewer about hiring U.S. workers for open jobs, he replied that many of those now unemployed are “unable to compete for them.”
Is that the message of a winning party? It might win a majority of votes at a dinner party in a gated community in Bel Air, but it is an act of profound delusion to think that plan can form the basis of a nationwide Republican resurgence.
The GOP cannot win a bidding war with Democrats, carried from election cycle to election cycle in perpetuity, about who is willing to embrace the most generous amnesty and the most expansive immigration policy. Moreover, polling shows that by a margin of two to one Americans wish to see immigration curbed, and that by a margin of three to one those earning under $30,000 — the very group the GOP is hemorrhaging — favor a reduction over an increase.
Is it not time for the GOP to make a clean public break from the special-interest immigration lobby and let Democrats own — solely, completely, and exclusively — the unwise and unpopular policies they are pushing on these groups’ behalf? Isn’t it time we made President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and each of their rank-and-file members defend their near-unanimous embrace of an immigration plan that is so contrary to the wishes and interests of the American people?
The last 40 years have been a period of uninterrupted large-scale immigration into the U.S., coinciding with increased joblessness, falling wages, failing schools, and a growing welfare state. Would not the sensible, conservative thing to do be to slow down for a bit, allow wages to rise and assimilation to occur, and help the millions struggling here today — immigrant and native-born alike — transition from dependency to self-sufficiency? Indeed, the heart of the GOP’s pro-worker, pro-middle-class agenda should be a bold reforming of our welfare system. The current welfare structure is unfair both to the taxpayers who fund it and to the struggling Americans it has failed to rescue from poverty.
Currently, the federal government administers roughly 80 means-tested poverty-assistance and welfare programs, on which it spends $750 billion a year — that’s a larger cost than defense, Medicare, or Social Security. It is a sprawling, growing bureaucracy with almost no meaningful oversight or guiding vision. Federal agencies seek higher enrollment to swell their budgets (the USDA, for instance, trains food-stamp recruiters on how to “overcome the word ‘No’”), while states have an incentive to overlook fraud so they can get a larger slice of the tax dollars flowing from Washington.
If these myriad programs were combined into a single manageable credit, with clear job-training and work requirements, not only would it cut down drastically on fraud but it would help struggling Americans rise out of poverty and into good-paying jobs — uplifting the worker while reducing costs for the taxpayer.
What if, instead of applying for guest workers, companies applied to hire workers receiving job training at a local welfare office? Able-bodied adults, in turn, would be required to accept employment or lose benefits. In other words: instead of a guest-worker program, a welfare-to-work program.
Would that not be in the national interest? Would that not improve the quality of life in struggling families, schools, and communities?
Understand the connection between immigration, jobs, and welfare?
i’m glad you’ve wasted an hour of your time on three, four threads I’ve not wasted my time with.
Great post...Some people don't get it or are just in on the con-job. What most people are being paid nowadays is obscene, considering what the dollar is actually worth and buys.
Working for most employers in today's America is a punitive meat grinder.
Instead of deserved raises to keep up with the ever higher choking costs and prices, employers promise unobtainable phony concocted schemes like incentives, and bonus which seldom ever seen.
Then throw in all the foreign owned businesses where the employees are looked at as the enemy...Today's business strategy and executive think tanks are all about how to pay employees as little as possible, eliminate any and all benefits etc. I feel for the young people today...They're totally screwed...