In Phoenix, Foreign-Born Workers Find Jobs Faster
Ted Robbins, NPR morning report 2/17/2011
I heard this driving to work:
Poor Mareena lost her DHL job. She’d like to make $25 an hour, but will probably settle for $15/hr, if and when she finds something. She gets unemployment, for now.
Nasty energetic Luis, he lost his job, he has no papers (nudge, nudge) he gets no unemployment. He'll take a part-time job installing car alarms for $30/day.
What does this mean? Flexibility and desperation. If NPR thinks that Latinos are desperate, wait until the word gets out- the foreigners get the jobs, the native born do not. Lock, load, and lynch them.
Here's the NPR analysis: “The Difference Is A Safety Net”. Luis “has no papers” and no unemployment. He has to scramble. Maria Echeveste of the Labor Department says flexibility and desperation are two reasons foreign-born workers are getting jobs.
The real issue problem is that our society, encouraged by government policies, has been sending good jobs overseas for more than 30 years. They can’t send car repair work, food service work, and security guard jobs overseas. There are mostly low-end jobs available. Most US citizens won’t take a $30 a day job. So NPR implies that the illegal immigrants are the reason that Mareena can’t find a high level job. Mareena will take an employer to court who doesn't pay her; Luis probably can't. Bash the middle class and let the foreigners take the blame.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops said in 1986 that the amount of inequality in the US was “shocking and morally wrong” in their report, Economic Justice for all. Nobody in this allegedly Christian nation paid much attention. Inequality is much worse today than it was in 1986. Obama’s December deal increased inequality: gave big tax savings to the richest Americans and socked the poorest with a tax increase. Replacing The Making Work Pay tax credit with the Republicans' payroll tax cut raised taxes on workers earning $20,000 or less (and couples making less than $40,000) That tax increase hit about 50 million Americans. Obama wants to hit them again by cutting heating oil subsidies, claiming that the price of heating homes is going down. He is squeezing the working poor in a futile attempt to appease the fanatical tax-cutters, the guys who want to outlaw all public sector unions. Just as Arizona attitudes spread to other states, so will Wisconsin’s union bashing.
Where did the morning report end up? "There is research suggesting that more and more, the U.S. economy is creating jobs not in the middle of the skill spectrum but more at the low end and the high end," Mealy mouthed and misleading, I give it a c minus. Michael Moore had a much better analysis years ago. As to those high-end jobs that are being created, just where are they? Not in US IT work, which is being outsourced at breakneck speed. Americans should feel close to people rioting in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, and other Muslim countries- those countries have handfuls of very wealthy people with most people living in poverty, doing routine jobs that take very little skill. Take away unions, food stamps and unemployment and many of us will be in the same hole. As for NPR, this garbage is just a calmer version of FOX News.