How US immigration and globalization policies depress middle class wages. [View All]

[pnwmom]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/white-house-wealth-inequ_b_61421.html

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"A North American economist at Merrill Lynch, he is one of a number of economists who say the concerns about too few workers are vastly overblown. Rosenberg recently studied the issue and put out a report entitled Is There a Labor Shortage? If employers are having trouble filling jobs, "perhaps they're not looking hard enough," he says. The issue may not be the number of workers, but rather the level of pay. Economists like Rosenberg argue that in a market economy, there's really no such thing as a true shortage. If you want more of something, you can pay more and have it. When employers say that there's a worker shortage, what they really mean is they can't get enough workers at the price they want to pay, the argument goes. 'While it makes for nice cocktail conversation, the data aren't saying there is an acute labor shortage in this country," Rosenberg says...According to the basic laws of economics, the tighter the supply of labor, the more it should cost. So if the economy were operating with full or near-full employment, we would be seeing an 'explosion in labor compensation,' he says. The price of labor, however, is hardly surging. In fact, key indicators of employee costs show they are tracking or trailing inflation."

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The White House may say that this economic persecution of America's middle class "is not a very interesting story" but most Americans find it more than just interesting -- they find it a cause for outrage. The booing at that AFL-CIO meeting is a good example. It came because American workers understand that what we are now getting from politicians of both parties on on immigration and globalization is shenanigans -- shenanigans aimed at making sure the laws of supply and demand work not to address the inequalities laid out in today's New York Times, but only to help Big Money interests that buy public policy in Washington.

Just consider the bait-and-switch quality to all this. We are told that when there is a short supply of a good or service that is in demand, the market dictates that the price for that good or service rises (as just one example, we hear this justification all the time when it comes to the supply of oil and the price of gas). This results in higher profits for the corporations producing the good or service. But we are simultaneously told that if there is a short supply of labor that is in demand, the market should not raise the price (a.k.a. wages) for that labor (which would, of course, lessen the wealth disparity in America). No, instead we are told that we should rig the labor market by flooding it with a supply of workers who will exist under a legal framework that makes them more easily exploitable than other workers (i.e. they can't form unions to demand better wages/working conditions without fearing their employer will deport them).

This is the governing ethos of economic/globalization policymaking in Washington. Couple it with tax policies that target most of their rewards to the handful of Gordon Gekkos who run Wall Street, and what you have is a pretty open, pretty vicious economic war being waged on America's middle class.