This started as a comment to Jake and KoP's exchange, but grew to a rant.I've got no problem with going after the crooked companies who victimize illegal aliens, but I can tell you that as an architect it that is getting very hard to find good workers in the building trades. I swear by union craftsmanship. I advise all my clients to hire union crews because paying a decent wage for quality work will save them money in the long run every time. Unfortunately, despite the fact that they get paid more than I do (my little Subaru is always the cheapest car on the job site), the number of union trade workers is dwindling. Suburban American kids just won't do this kind of work anymore. They they'd rather get a communications degree and shuffle papers behind a desk.
I think that the unions should open their doors to illegal workers and push to slash the red tape and quotas designed to keep them in the shadows. I guaran-damn-tee that the moment they have legal status, they will demand the same pay and protection as their legal counterparts, and they will stand side by side with us in the fight. Without the option of abusing illegal immigrants in a tight labor market, contractors would be forced to treat their workers fairly or risk a strike.
I also guarantee that, fence or no fence, raids or no raids, as long as the current quotas and visa laws which keep illegal immigrants in a sub-human status and make legal immigrants into indentured servants of their employers, wages and working conditions will continue to decline for the rest of us, and the costs for honest business people in the building, farm and hospitality industry will continue to climb.
I suggest that workers should stop viewing illegal immigrants as the enemy and realize that the law purposely pits us against each other. Fuck the law. The law has been written specifically to keep us all divided and thus keep us all down. The sooner we realize that, the sooner we can actually come together. We all want the same thing whether we are legal or not, whether we work on a factory, construction site, or farm. We all want to make a decent living while producing the necessities of life.
Face it, workers have it good in America. Our living standard is the envy of the rest of the world. Worrying about credit card bills and college tuition is nothing compared to worrying about starvation and malaria. The life of the average American worker may may not be perfect, far from it, but it's a hell of a lot better than for it is 90% of the world's population. Treating the rest of the world as a threat is not going to help preserve, let alone improve, our lot in life. In doing so we only give ammunition to those who want us to owe our souls to the company store.
3 comments:
That was the trick in the early days of the American union movement. You'd unionize, go on strike, and the company would bring in a bunch of fresh Italian immigrant scabs. So you unionized them. Then they'd bring in black scabs. So you'd bring them into the union. And boy would that piss off the employers.
Actually the Teamsters do organize them. They actually had a successful picket of hotels here in Minneapolis a couple of years ago. X-I could agree with most of what you say here. My bitch isn't that they are immigrants, my bitch is the downgrading of our wages by working on the cheap, and the drain on on our resources, i.e. medical bills run up under false names, identity theft, etc. If they were working for the same wages & benefits & paying taxes I say problem solved. That's why I usually rant more against the employer then the worker. Can unions spnsor an H Visa? Hmmmm.
So X, why aren't we Unionized?
You're part of that little group with its supposed lobbying arm, why don't we hit the streets nationwide?
Post a Comment