Category Archives: Labor

Business Is Already Mounting Pressure To Import Cheap Labor

Business, Donald Trump, Education, IMMIGRATION, Labor, Morality, Paleolibertarianism

On August 31st, President Trump signed an “executive order to boost retirement savings.” It’ll allow “small businesses to band together to offer 401(k)s.”

But what do you know? A businessman present lamented “a very tight labor market, which is tight because of the success of [the president’s’] economy. And we’re all grateful for that, but it is causing us a little bit of problems.”

There we go again.

Replied Trump obediently:

We have so many companies coming back to our country, which nobody thought was going to happen. And they want to be where the action is. And we’re going to — I can tell you, we’re going to start looking at, very seriously, merit-based immigration. We have to do it, because we need people. We need people to run these great companies that are coming in.

Big or small, American business is focused above all on elephantine-like expansion and greed.

It is not enough to do well and train American talent, so that fellow Americans can become part of the success story: this is never an option. If business is able to petition The State to import the world at a price subsidized by the American taxpayer—why not?

Again: It’s not enough to be doing smashingly well with the labor available. Or, with a view to training American talent. Or, with a view to paying more for American labor. Oh no. Greedy American Business is forever poised to pull one over the American worker.

The New York Times has featured the “heartbreaking” story of “Rob Hurst, manager of Edgartown Commons on Martha’s Vineyard, has had to scrub bathrooms this summer because five Jamaican workers who had long worked at the hotel couldn’t get visas.”

It concluded:

In practice, businesses say the increased red tape has made it harder to secure employment-based visas. That has added to the difficulty of finding qualified workers with the unemployment rate falling to 3.9 percent.
A recent analysis of government data by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan research group, found that the denial rate for H-1B visa petitions for skilled foreign workers had increased 41 percent in the last three months of the 2017 fiscal year, compared with the third quarter. Government requests for additional information for applications doubled in the fourth quarter, a few months after Mr. Trump issued his order.

See: “Companies Say Trump Is Hurting Business by Limiting Legal Immigration.”

Isn’t this about growth per capita, too—and perhaps community? And not just about GDP growth.

‘The Kochtopus’ (Koch Brothers) Want Outsourcing & Globalism Back

Donald Trump, Labor, Outsourcing, THE ELITES, Trade

Bless the farmers. A pox on the Koch Brothers, known by good libertarians as that invasive organism called “The Kochtopus.”

The Koch Brothers, or the “The Kochtopus,” worship the Gods of Globalism, says Laura Ingraham, and the American Worker be damned. He is just a stick-in-the mud. He hasn’t embraced progress. Therefore, he should be left behind.

The brothers’ bailiwick is outsourcing jobs and relocating overseas, as Laura Ingraham points out. Of their employees, 120,000 are employed abroad; only 65,000 in the US.

And they object to President Trump’s attempts to optimize outcomes for the American Worker by driving a hard bargain on behalf of his American constituents in the context of “state-managed trade.”

While the elitist Kochtopus, an enemy of Trump from the inception, is committing to fighting Trump’s efforts to neutralized the adverse effects of centralized, managed trade on American workers—the latter are supportive of the president.

“They like that he’s fighting for them.” “I’m willing to take my lumps for the good of the country. The Scottish in me says to the death.” So say Trump supporters about the tariffs.

“The Kochs can learn a lot from these deeply patriotic Americans,” inveighs Ingraham. And she’s right.

See also: “Dissecting the Kochtopus.”

‘Labor Shortages’: Business Leaders Are Bitching, Workers Are Celebrating

Business, Economy, Labor, Outsourcing

Workers are happier than they’ve been for a long time.

“For the first time since data began to be collected in 2000, there are more job openings than there are unemployed workers.” By the Economist’s telling, “Fully 5.8m more Americans are in work than in December of 2015.”

Workers may be happy, but not businesses.

Big and small, business is nattering about labor shortages. “Ninety percent of small businesses who are hiring or trying to hire workers report that there are few or no qualified applicants, according to the National Federation of Independent Business.”

Excerpted from, “Worker shortages could heal America’s economy: Why a scarcity of labor is probably something to celebrate”:

The shortage is reaching a “critical point”, read one recent CNBC headline. A lack of applicants for blue-collar jobs such as trucking and construction has received particular scrutiny, as have states like Iowa where the unemployment rate is especially low (it is just 2.7% in the Hawkeye state).
But portraying widespread labour shortages as an economic problem is misguided. While they may be bad for firms, they are a boon for society—so long as inflation remains contained. In fact, a labour market in which firms must compete for workers, rather than workers competing for jobs should help resolve three of America’s biggest economic problems.

* Inadequate wage growth.

* “Faster productivity growth, which has been disappointing in America—and in other rich countries—since the financial crisis. If less profitable firms have to fold because they cannot pay enough to attract workers, their labour and capital can be put to better use.”

* Wage gains accrued “to the poorest workers. Full-time employees at the 10th percentile of the income distribution are earning almost 4% more than a year ago.”

TRUMP Trade Tactics Are About WINNING Negotiations

Canada, Free Markets, Labor, Taxation, Trade

I love Canada, am a Canadian (and American) citizen, have Canadian loved-ones. I don’t want to see Canadians hurt.

It’s true, however, that, in the artificial universe of trade agreements, previous US leaders have shown they don’t care about US workers. Trump’s the opposite. He’s using American power to muscle deals he believes are beneficial to American workers.

Canada taxes purchases of American goods starting at $20, whereas America starts taxing Canadian goods at $1000. Trump has said he’d love for trade to be entirely and mutually without tariffs:

“No tariffs, no barriers. That’s the way it should be. And no subsidies. I even said, ‘no tariffs’,” the US president said, describing his meetings with fellow Group of Seven leaders as positive “on the need to have fair and reciprocal trade”. “The United States has been taken advantage of for decades and decades,” he continued, describing America as a “piggy bank that everyone keeps robbing.”

But since that’s not going to happen …

“Canada is going to have to make some concessions,” says Laura Dawson, head of the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington, DC. Among them might be raising the threshold at which Canada taxes purchases of American goods from C$20 to around C$1,000, the American level. Canada might consent to more onerous conditions for a vehicle to be imported duty-free within NAFTA, including on wages and the amount of North American content.

And of course, the American market is enormous. Trump knows it. Leaders before him no doubt knew the power of American markets but refused to use it:

Canada gamely argues that the United States would also be hurt in a trade war. Canada is the biggest destination for exports from 36 of the 50 American states. Bilateral trade in goods and services is immense: $674bn in 2017. It is also, despite what Mr Trump says, balanced. In 2017 the United States had a small surplus with Canada, of $8.4bn. Yet Mr Trudeau’s bargaining position is weak. “We absolutely need them, but they could live without us,” says Philip Cross, an economist.

BESIDES,

Canada’s system of supply management, which sets limits on the production of dairy, poultry and eggs, has long irritated the United States (and should anger Canadians, who pay more for food than they need to). Canada subjects imports of those products beyond a ceiling to punishing tariffs (298% in the case of butter). Mr Trump has been angry about this since he met dairy farmers from Wisconsin in April 2017.

The article is “Canada: Breaking a few eggs: The economy is already feeling the effects of Donald Trump’s trade war,” courtesy of The Economist.