First half, correct. But I’m afraid being legal is no guarantee of receiving a fair wage, never has been. I would amend the second half to, “ ALL workers in the USA must be UNIONIZED to receive a fair wage.”
The only leverage the people have is their numbers, in labor and purchasing. Stop working or buying and the capitalists pay attention.
Re: $100k for H1-B visa.
They tell us current system is a lottery. Company puts in multiple applications to get a few granted. $100k fee for a sure visa might be very acceptable to many.
Can’t be unionized if you are not legal. One of the problems unions had in the 1940’s was that certain minorities were excluded or segregated. It does not take being illegal to break a union, rather just a large group of disenfranchised.
There seems to be a principle that everyone must be included and no group of people disenfranchised based on anything other than their ability to work. In other words, for the sake of inclusiveness it would be improper to require the use of 5 foot tall women as brick layer for the sake of inclusiveness.
Divided we beg, united we bargain.
Cheers
Qazulight
If that were to happen overnight to all undocumented workers, US agriculture and Meat and Dairy processing wouldn’t recover for the next decade. Just the U.S. dairy industry alone has a total economic impact of $780 billion, supporting over 3 million jobs and generating billions in wages and taxes. Now, the H-2A visa application will cost $100,000. Good luck without undocumented workers
EXACTLY. The sick truth is that our situation with “illegal” workers is not the result of failing to protect the border. It is the result of conscious hidden yet INTENTIONAL bipartisan policy to have a large highly exploitable workforce in the specific parts of the economy willing to pay Big Constitutionally Protected “Corporate Free Speech” ($$$) to have them.
The conversation needs to shift to putting the burden for enforcement on employers, but beginning with requiring employers to examine a very hard to counterfit ID that the USA will issue to all citizens requesting and all immigrants in the country legally.
THIS IS NOT DIFFICULT. IT IS OBVIOUS. IT IS WHAT EUROPE MOSTLY DOES. WHY NOT US? BECAUSE $$$ TALKS FAR MORE THAN VOTES.
A crux macroeconomic issue.
And how is a lettuce field worker going to afford $100,000 application fee for a work visa.
REALLY? That is the central point — the cost of labor both economically and morally, ought be born by the employer as a cost of labor. BUT, guess what, the price of that application fee is overwhelmly politcal rather than economical, and exploitative rather than simply and fundamentally humane.
What humane means probably ought be discussed in a different thread.
Businesses will not operate a business for a loss. They will shut down if labor costs become too onerous or allocate more capital to automation to reduce labor. Automation in the long run will replace manual jobs.
Exactly! Any business model based on exploitation
is a business that should be destroyed. When labor is cheap, methods of reducing labor never get implemented. When it is expensive, businesses learn how to apply labor effectively.This is not a new thing. The phone company used to have extremely efficient labor use practices precisely because labor was expensive.
Cheers
Qazulight
I admit I haven’t done an extensive search, but I am seeing the $100K for H-1B, but not for H-2A.
This is exactly what happens. If labor costs for agriculture in the United States become too expensive to compete., UnitedStates agriculture will simply cease to exist.
In the 1960s, Dole’s total annual pineapple production in Hawaii was over 800,000 tons. Today, there is no pineapple production in Hawaii, due to the high cost of labor in Hawaii compared to global labor cost..
Hawaii shut down agriculture due to labor costs.
…and their discovery of the tremendous profits available from having vacation condos instead of pineapples on their vast, mostly piratically illegally seized from Hawaiians, real estate.
Lānaʻi plantation was the largest in the world. There are some existing condominium developments on Lānaʻi, such as the Kōʻula that predates Larry Ellison purchase. Today, Lānaʻi is owned by one person and is off limits to most but his billionaire friends from time to time.
It is the accumulation of wealth that forebodes the exploitation of 8 billion to the emancipation of the 400 thousand Larry Ellisons
Most of the mass vacation condos replacing pineapples is on Kaui. Oahu had sugar cane fields (C&H sugar was an alliance of California sugar beet and Hawaiian sugar cane growers jointly marketing, but most importantly jointly preventing the far cheaper Philippines from competing by covertly buying votes in Congress to maintain tariffs and other regulations.
Nothing is stopping folks on this board from putting up capital, starting a business and paying top $ to the employees. You can also pay higher corp taxes.
Too hard ? Thought so.
My point was NOT about paying top dollar to employees (I usually do and have had great results), but rather the wretched stoopid profitability of paying top dollars and other inducements
(https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/politics/fanne-foxe-dead.html)
to Congresscritters.