About

There was a time when we were told that if we just went to school, worked hard and played by the rules that we Americans could achieve the American dream. Many of us did just that yet American workers and the middle class has been under attack from multiple angles for decades now. Economically speaking due to inflation, workers pay has not budged significantly since the 1970s (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/), and that is calculated using government measures of inflation which many have argued is understated (http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts). With the astronomical price of housing only having increased for almost every year since the early 2000’s, most Americans are struggling to even own a home, a staple of the American dream. Politically, Americans are more divided than at any time since the civil war (https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/409718-analyst-says-the-us-is-the-most-divided-since-the-civl-war/) and are unable to speak with one voice for their concerns. Therefore we are ignored by our elected leaders in government while it seems just about every special interest need only crook a finger and those same politicians will jump to it for them. Just about every major city in America more and more resembles the third world with scores of homeless camping in tents in public, littering the streets with needles and worse while the sympathies from their respective municipal governments, if any, goes to the homeless and even the criminals who brazenly commit crimes without even trying to hide it and if arrested at all, are soon released to go back to their lawless ways. When Americans were not being ignored we were locked down, forced to mask up and take an experimental vaccine while the makers of these vaccines were granted civil liability. The list of indignities goes on. It doesn’t have to be this way, though. We can have real, positive wage gains, a real quality of life not measured merely by the DOW, which benefits mainly just a few. A quality of life that goes up along with a rising standard of living. A government not forced to borrow in order to support massive spending which has the effect of inducing a lot of pain when, not if, interest rates must rise which we’ve already begun to see. Our government needs only to act on our part. For that to happen, Americans in general, and American workers in particular, need to come together and agitate for the same set of goals. The good news is that for the most part good laws have already been passed. What is needed now is simply for government to act in the interest of the people and not the special interests, to enforce existing immigration law, the laws surrounding foreign workers and reign in and punish the corporate bad actors by raising their taxes when they don’t hire Americans and seeing that the regulatory agencies are used more effectively in the interests of the American people. Simple but not easy. 

   One need only watch the nightly news to see that there are massive numbers of people coming across the border, unvaccinated, unnamed, and un vetted. This has the effect of increasing the supply of labor. To be fair, the lion’s share of this increase in labor is unskilled labor. By the numbers we would expect this since acquiring advanced job skills takes work as well as resources and time, which if a person had that, would probably not be so motivated to cross the US border as they would likely not be in such dire straits in the first place. There is still another side to the influx of labor however and that is the foreign workers who do have skills that not incidentally, are in high demand by US employers. These same employers, faced with only their current domestic force, would be obligated to pay very good wages to meet this demand. And in the not too distant past they did exactly that. The influx of foreign workers though changed that. These workers often fall under the h-1b program and others like it. The h-1b program was designed to allow employers to only use said workers in cases where the domestic supply falls short https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b) and further, the wages to be paid shall exceed the prevailing market wages as per the letter of the law (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62g-h1b-required-wage). These simple requirements are too often ignored, as in the case of Disney, well known for its abuse of the program, laying off it’s domestic, American workforce in favor of h-1b visa holders but not without first requiring the outgoing American workers to train their replacements. This begs the question, If Disney already had American workers that were qualified enough to train someone else to do the job, did Disney obey that part of the law which says they may only hire an h-1b visa holder if there were no qualified Americans? If not, what were the penalties paid? I think we all know the answer to these questions but a cursory search using your favorite search engine will tell you. Apparently Disney isn’t the only firm to break this law, nor is it the only law it’s been found to violate. Not surprisingly given the lack of enforcement, the Disney new hires were not paid at or above prevailing wages (https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage-theft-in-the-h-1b-program/). Worse yet, many firms have been found to have engaged in wage theft from their h-1b hires. This all needs to stop for both American and foreign workers sake. What American workers, especially in the tech and/or STEM fields need to do is insist that these practices are put to an end and moreover punish those that have violated not only the letter but the spirit of the law as well for everyone’s sake, everyone that is, but for the corporations who do this since they are the only ones who benefit from this.

   Ronald Reagan once quipped “If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it.” (https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1136725). Price is always a function of where supply meets demand. It makes sense that if all other things being equal, if supply of something rises relative to demand, the price goes down. Labor is no exception and there is no reason any government official should attempt to, or allow an increase in, labor supply, skilled or not, in our economy. In fact, the number one priority ought to be to keep supply constrained especially for skilled labor since those workers have put in the time and effort to hone their skills and usually at their own expense. Since taxation is the opposite to subsidization, it would make sense to proactively tax those firms that do seek out and hire foreign workers, even if as merely a balance to the subsidization those foreign workers received by their governments to go to school and gain the same skill set since our government doesn’t neccessarily subsidize our workers’ education. Tax the importation of labor and you will get less of it. Continuing on this train of thought, one might look at the existing tax code which allows for tax cuts for firms who close their on shore plants only to reopen overseas. It requires a modest change to existing law yet it’d be far better for every American if the tax code punished these firms yet rewarded those that stay, better yet expand, on shore.

   Slapping a tax on any given activity is not the only way to discourage that activity. It is not only in the purview of government to tax a firm, and courts have ruled the legislature have a lot of leeway in the taxes they do levy, but our government has in its 200+ years evolved and grown a plethora of agencies charged with the regulation of industry, from the EPA to the IRS and the SEC. If a firm truly wants or needs to shutter an onshore facility, of course it should be their right to do so. However, at that time any and every government agency should be tasked with a review of that companies operations and officers in their domain. For instance, before abandoning their plants the EPA has every right to ensure that the surrounding environment of that plant has not sustained any damage. The IRS should be flagged to investigate every C-Suite executive involved with the decision to relocate overseas. This goes for those firms that throw their back-office functions “over the fence” to an overseas subsidiary or partner as well. Since engineers, IT specialists and other highly trained workers may face job loss OSHA needs to be involved to investigate current labor practices with special attention given to the concerns of outgoing employees. These are functions that regulatory agencies ought to have been involved with regardless of any decisions to go offshore by the firm yet manpower and resource constraints have often been cited as to why coverage is not 100%. That may be, but the cases where focus is paid should be directed first and foremost to those firms that wish to ship jobs overseas.

   Government not only should, from a moral point of view, it can, and it is their responsibility to work for the majority of the American public. The war on the middle class has gone on long enough and it is high time Americans stop squabbling about nonissues or issues of a minor subset of the population and look out for the vast majority of people who have been suffering in silence while only a priviledged few have their every interest serviced by a government which has for too long ignored the interests of we, the people. With the standard of living falling fast for the vast majority in society, allowing massive in flows of migrants, legal or otherwise, benefits only those who want to hire unskilled labor on the cheap. Few else are served. Americans who scrimped and saved to pay for college, which costs have risen exponentially in the last 20 years by the way, are the ones who pay the real cost when fortune 500 companies have a talent pool of skilled workers who’s education has usually already been bought and paid for by their home countries’ and thus have little debt meaning more bargaining power than their domestic counterparts and so by definition brings down the prevailing wage. Meanwhile the corporations who routinely and brazenly break the law with impunity just as much as street criminals have learned to do in the last 5 or so years, reap all the benefit. It’s time to fix this.

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