Chap wrote:Brackite wrote:For example, the Labor Department yesterday reported that the unemployment rate fell to a 50-year low, while wage growth stalled. “The wage numbers here are INSANE,” the MSNBC host Chris Hayes tweeted. “The tightest labor market in decades and decades and ordinary working people are barely seeing gains.”
Hmm. That is strange, certainly.
I wonder if it would help raise wages if working people in a particular kind of job joined together in some kind of association where they all agreed they would not work for an employer who did not pay them a wage level that they were happy with? Wouldn't that force employers to pay better wages in a tight labor market?
Has anything like that ever existed, do you think?
Oh, wait ....
ajax18 wrote:Globalization has killed unions, not Republicans. There's always someone willing to work for less. Indeed Brackite believes we need illegal immigrants to keep our lettuce affordable.
Ajax18 has one solution for everything: it's the illegal immigrants. Now, if we were talking about the wage rates for lettuce-pickers or floor-scrubbers, he might have at least the beginnings of a point. But the key is this:
“The tightest labor market in decades and decades and ordinary working people are barely seeing gains.”
We are talking about the whole range of paid employment here, including relatively skilled occupations in areas of work where illegal immigrants have virtually no impact. In those industries such things as 'right-to-work' laws have ensured that if the employer can find 'someone willing to work for less', the existing workers can do nothing whatsoever to make the employer pay the new arrival the same rates that they are getting - which was one of the keys to the long-lost prosperity of blue-collar Americans.
Hmm, organised labor has lost most of its power, the share of the national wealth owned by extremely rich people is rising steadily, while the share owned by wage earners is diminishing, and wages are stagnant even in a time of a tight labor market due to low unemployment. But there's clearly no connection there, and all the problems are due to illegal immigration, not to a sustained and successful effort to break the economic power of organised blue-collar Americans on the false promise that doing that would make everybody better off ...