No, this is propping up unions.
Ping
Union promotion editorial. Blames union busting not immigration.
It’s a pro union propaganda piece. They’re claiming that not being able to join a union drove wages down.
Because they work for cash under the table
This article’s logical conclusion is that immigrants should have unions and make union pay. Unions are also the logical outcome of immigrant labor and trade restrictions. Unions thrive at any grovernment created point of scarcity. Ports, public schools, public constructions, arenas, and any industry that is government protected. The whole idea of restrictions in trade and immigrant labor restrictions is to create higher prices.
It’s a paradox MAGA may result in resurgent uionionism which will then lead to a Dim/Socialist comeback. But this time we will go full Venezuela.
What is most interesting is that the Mexicans don’t want to join the unions and get high wages. They want to start their own small business construction companies instead - they are entrepreneurs and capitalists!
Meanwhile, when the unions try to recruit apprentices in US high schools, they get few takers - the kids all want to go to college, and look with scorn at manual trades.
I don’t think so. Even though they may be trying to prop up the unions, if you think about it, it shows how unions priced themselves out of the market.
They did not make the point you said they did. They did not blame immigration for the lower wages. Their story was the construction industry LED an advance into non-union lower wage workers, FIRST. The immigrants followed as the lower-wage non-union jobs were not picked up sufficiently by locals, who mostly thought the wage to low for them for the work - even though the supply of other jobs was also decreasing. It then became a cycle, of more contractors succeeding without the union workers, and their higher wages, and more locals still not attracted to a situation where the wages had declined. Thus, more immigrants gravitated to the jobs, because they were a job, and even though the wages were below what locals wanted.
THAT was the LA times line/story.
I think it is neither totally right, or totally wrong. With family in Southern California, I have some folks I know who’d say the LA article was mostly right. They got out of high school with no college prospects. Went into construction but the union jobs diminished. Then got consistent work, leaving the union and hiring on as a subcontractor, not an “employee” himself. At first it was O.K. but then the pay was getting less and the competition willing to work for less was growing, and taking work form him. He left construction.
The truth is Unions don’t give a crap where their members come from, legal or illegal, just so long as they can suck in the dues to pay the vultures at the top and have money to support democrats.
duh.
Go to BLS. Not many construction workers are in a union. Heck only 10% of the non - government workforce is in a union.
Hate to rain on this parade but Unions brought this on them selves with the constant strikes and pay increases that priced them out of the market!!!
Dubya and his amnesty loving GOP flunkies told us this was a good thing.
Make California Mexico Again, with all of its poverty and squalor.
20 years ago in a medium sized southern city and old girlfriend’s son was making $18/hr. framing houses. Not bad pay for a high school graduate in that location.
Within 5 years the Mexican framing crews drove the wage down to between $8-$10/hour.
Does anyone here remember the construction site portajohn graffiti wars between mexicans and Americans in the mid-90’s?