Instead of importing workers, pay a decent wage to those already here ( more guest workers on tap?)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.workers02may02,0,3619740.story

By Ross Eisenbrey
May 2, 2008

With unemployment rising, hundreds of thousands of American families facing foreclosures on their homes, and wages flat-lining (especially for workers without college degrees), the nation needs ... more workers who are willing to accept low wages and are less likely to organize or otherwise assert their rights.

That's what a well-funded business coalition, with well-connected lobbyists, is telling Congress. Many members of the U.S. House and Senate - including Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland - are listening attentively and getting ready to give these low-wage employers just what they want.

These special-interest lobbyists have been all over Capitol Hill demanding that Congress allow tens of thousands of additional "guest workers" into the U.S. to pick crabs on Maryland's Eastern Shore, can corn in the industrial Midwest, and serve as dishwashers, hotel maids and other low-paid workers all over the country. That would be bad news for the nation's low-wage workers, whether immigrant or native-born.

Current law permits a maximum of 66,000 foreign nationals to enter this country each year under a special visa program known as H-2B, if employers fail to find qualified U.S. workers after only three days of advertising in local newspapers. If you're skeptical that dishwashers and crab pickers are so hard to find in a sinking economy, you're right. But because the law allows the businesses to advertise so briefly - and six months before the jobs become vacant - more employers each year somehow manage not to find anyone to do the work. That's because the whole process is designed to obscure this simple fact: There isn't a shortage of workers willing to do these jobs; there's a shortage of employers willing to pay a decent wage.

Ten years ago, only 20,000 H-2B visas were issued. In 2007, 130,000 were issued, even though more than 7 million Americans were unemployed and millions more had part-time jobs but wanted full-time work. Why are so many more businesses turning to foreign workers? Because the U.S. government lets them pay poverty-level wages.

Almost all H-2B employers pay less than a living wage, including most of the Maryland restaurants and crabmeat processors that use these visas. Some pay less than the minimum wage. In 2007, when Maryland's minimum wage was $6.15 an hour, a dozen crabmeat processors were certified to pay foreign workers $5.36 an hour.

FULL story at link.

[Hidey]

1. I can't help but think slavery...

Every time I read one of these articles.

If American employers REALLY NEED the help and these are truly "jobs that Americans won't do" then why not pay a competing wage? I mean, you'd pay these Americans you supposedly can't locate a competing wage, or at least the minimum, right? Because you'd have to..

No, no, no.. Just like in the days of slavery, this is all about businesses and business owners who have labor intensive work to do, and don't want to pay for it. We're told it's good and moral that you're supposed to go out and compete for your wage. Then they stack the deck to avoid competing for your labor, which is the other side of the coin.

Slavery ended, but the slavers are still amongst us. Their tactics have changed, but you can still identify them by virtue of their ceaseless greed.