Yeah, that is what most businesses are about. Maybe we should follow through on the logic of your post and attempt to eliminate the profit motive like the Communists did for 70 years in the Soviet Union.
Import of cheap labor by corporations seen driving wages down
Posted: August 1, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jon Dougherty © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
Corporations allowed to import large numbers of lesser-paid foreign workers to fill jobs in the United States, coupled with numerous "free trade" agreements, have caused depressed wages and unemployment for American workers, say economists and experts.
Worse, they say, some firms are set to import even more foreign workers, despite current unemployment levels standing at their highest in years.
According to Eagle Forum founder, syndicated columnist and author Phyllis Schlafly, the "scandal" of the H-1B and L-1 visa programs "is why this year's college graduates face the worst job market in recent memory."
"The big argument for the tax cut [recently] signed by President Bush is that it will create much-needed jobs," she writes in the June issue of "The Phyllis Schlafly Report," her organization's monthly newsletter. "But one big question remains: Will those jobs be created for Americans, or will corporations simply hire more job-seekers from India and China?"
The visa programs, authorized in the 1990 Immigration Act, "allow corporations to import up to 65,000 cheap skilled workers from foreign countries to fill alleged labor shortages," said Schlafly. The common claim of a labor shortage advanced by some corporations, she said, "was always a fiction and now is nonsense."
In June, unemployment rose to 6.4 percent, up from 6.1 percent in May, representing 9.4 million jobless Americans, the Labor Department reported. Though the department said new claims for unemployment fell last week to 388,000 – the third week in a row new jobless claims have dropped off – a separate report said U.S. corporations are reporting cheaper labor costs.
"U.S. employers incurred a much smaller increase in the cost of hiring and retaining workers during the second quarter of 2003 than they did in the previous three months," said the Dow Jones news service, rising only 0.9 percent from April to June. "The cost of wages and salaries grew even more slowly, rising just 0.6 percent."
Schlafly, in her report, says some U.S. job sectors are being hit harder than others, resulting in unemployment rates surpassing the national level.
Citing U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, Schlafly wrote: "Unemployment among American electronic engineers has soared to 7 percent, and among computer hardware engineers to 6.5 percent."
"Despite hundreds of thousands of unemployed American engineers and computer specialists, corporations continue to import foreigners at the same time … they lay off U.S. citizens," said the report.
Recently completed free-trade deals also have some lawmakers and economists concerned about the future of American workers and wages they are paid.
Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Thomas Roeser, quoting banker and manufacturer John E. Jones, is critical of free-trade policies because, he claims, they have depressed American wages for 30 years.
"Jones says one reason is that 'free trade economists preach that whatever produces the lowest possible cost is best. All things being equal, everyone would agree that this is true. But if you need not consider anything but cost, a slave economy is better because it is lower cost,'" Roeser writes.
According to Roeser, Jones says "real wages" for Americans peaked in 1973, ''shortly after the U.S. became an unprotected economy in 1971," when they were 176 percent of what real wages were in 1946. Jones also says real wages have fallen to just 92 percent of what they were in the mid-1940s.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported in July illegal immigration was "undermining American workers" and pulling down wages while pushing taxes higher, especially in California – now saddled with a $38 billion budget deficit.
Also, immigration-reform group Project USA criticized Bush administration trade policy last week as further endangering American workers.
"The Chile/Singapore free-trade agreements will allow 'American' corporations to move an unlimited number of 'employees' from those countries to ours," the group said, in a statement. "In other words, multinational corporations not the American people will dictate the number of foreigners allowed into the United States."
The Federation for American Immigration Reform, another group opposed to unrestricted immigration, also criticized the trade agreements as detrimental to U.S. workers.
Said FAIR, "making these provisions especially dangerous, the Bush administration is touting them as a model to be replicated in future trade agreements with numerous other countries."
Longtime critic of corporate work-visa abuse Rob Sanchez, writing in May 2002, said, "These trade bills are unique from other types of immigration laws in one major way: They cannot be repealed by Congress without the consent of the country the agreement was made with.
"Once these agreements are passed, American workers will be powerless to stop the flood of workers that will arrive to compete with them in the job market," Sanchez said.
On his website, Sanchez says over 17 million visas to allow foreigners to work in the U.S. have been issued since 1985. "By the end of the year 2001, more than 890,000 H-1B workers were employed in the United States," he said.
"With 18 million Americans struggling to find full-time employment, the Bush administration has no business making agreements with foreign nations to flood the labor market with an unlimited amount of imported labor," added ProjectUSA.
Schlafly believes Americans were duped into accepting the loss of millions of jobs, mostly in the manufacturing sector.
"When U.S. corporations built hundreds of plants in Third World countries, we were told not to worry because we were keeping the service jobs," she writes. "Now the high-paying white-collar service jobs are going overseas, too, particularly jobs for engineers and computer specialists." "Follow the money," says Schlafly. "The big corporations hire aliens from India and China at half or a third the [U.S.] wages, work them long hours without overtime pay and treat them like indentured servants unable to quit for a better job.
"What makes this racket possible is the partnership between corporations and government," she said.