Business backs Bush's braceros

The headline pretty much says it all.

Business Cheers Bush's Plan to Hire Immigrants More Easily, but Labor Is Wary

The article notes all the blah blah employer complaints about not enough people, nobody wants to work, nobody will take entry-level jobs, the usual. Of course, the real reason they can't find enough people to fill those slots is because they pay crap.

It's not that people won't do low-end, entry-level jobs - millions of folks are doing them right now - it's just that people would like if possible to get paid enough to live on. And $8 an hour, which is mentioned as entry-level pay in the article - a little over $16,000 a year full-time - just doesn't cut it. (And that even assumes a 40-hour pay week. Many such jobs are either 37.5 or even 35 hours a week, depending on how much unpaid meal time you're allowed.) That would be especially true in Massachusetts, where one of the employers the article focuses on is located. (I worked in Massachusetts for $13/hour and that was low enough that I was eligible for a rent subsidy.)

And frankly, it's also true that a lot of those jobs are such damned hard work that even if $8 an hour was a living wage, they'd still be underpaid. Even so, there are many who struggle daily to do that work and to live on the crumbs it provides.

An important point here is that the minimum wage reached its real (inflation-adjusted) peak in 1968. If it had kept pace with inflation since 1968, it would now be over $8 an hour.

What this means is that those people working at $8 an hour jobs are economically worse off than people who got paid minimum wage 35 years ago. That is shameful and disgraceful and a testimony to how effectively business-think has come to dominate our economic discourse. The answer is not to bring in people to work for, very likely, even lower wages but to raise the standard of living of those low-wage workers.

And if that means more control over business, if that means higher taxes on the rich, if that means something of a lowering of the living standards the elite in order to insure the very existence of a living standard for the rest, then so be it.

And if you call that "class warfare," I'll say "damned straight."