Is anyone replacing entire lower skilled workcrews in your area with with minimum wage employees? I mean, you know its happening even if you have yet to run across it. But here's what you definitely have seen. Daily. This perk is cut. That benefit is reduced. The work that you used to count on for O.T. now has to be completed in the regular 40, or else.
Our relentless race to the bottom continues, and we all know that it will unless and until unemployment falls back to 5%, or it gets so bad that the overreachers try getting away with hiring Senior Vice Presidents for foremens pay.
And you know it's bad when even illegals are going back to Mexico because they can't get jobs. (And you know that even all of them leaving wouldn't save us the way things are now.)
And you know it's still getting worse when the Federal Reserve announces interest free money for fat cats for the next two years.
And you wonder "how do we even have a chance in hell" when you read the blurb the other day saying that the government now wants to scoop up 200,000 vacant foreclosure houses to use for low income rentals (and did the teabaggers ever get an erection over that one).
So is anything too drastic if it would actually right this ship? I mean, even like giving citizenship to millions of our illegal neighbors in return for making a major contribution to helping us kick start the economy.
Let's trade a Green Card and a Social Security Number to any and every undocumented mortgage applicant willing to buy one of those 200,000 white elephant houses from HUD at a completely unsubsidized combination of price and mortgage terms. And let's keep the deal going until we either run out of housing inventory or qualifying undocumented buyers. Because until we put a floor under the residential real estate market, we don't have a floor under anything else in this economy either.
So sure, we're going to have to let them get more than one family together per house, but that sort of goes with the territory when you market to fast food workers and housekeepers, and at least that fits their concept of family so that won't be a deal breaker for them either. And, yeah, making many of these folks legal should entitle them to past income tax refunds that they've been paranoid to file for, but require all of those dollars to go to down payments, and that would actually be a "win-win".
Interestingly, the right wing will come around on this deal also. Look at relative real estate holdings and you'll see that they have far too much to gain to stand on what seems to them today to be principles. Besides, pump a fast couple of trillion dollars into the economy that no one had to pay for, and what businessman (or even Teapartyer) in his right mind would complain?
And since we also need to address the subject of how we move forward next, I'd suggest a major increase in the minimum wage that would be triggered by an index that uses a computation tied to an increase in home prices and a decrease in the unemployment rate. Because if we let the economy overheat by keeping wages too low after getting real estate/housing/construction back on track think of how many folks would be tempted to move north seeking jobs left open because of cheap (for us) wages.
So we ratchet wages up substantially and it seems to me we would see employers facing the quandry of "well, should I take a risk on an undocumented worker at $12.00 per hour, or should I get in touch with my old $11.00/hr crew and try to get them to come back for thirteen?"
And here's betting that they all could and would hold out for fifteen!