The Confederacy was a con job on whites. And still is.
There should be a lot of working class solidarity with poor southern whites. Frank Hyman takes an insiders look at the dupers and the duped.
The Confederacy – and the slavery that spawned it – was also one big con job on the Southern, white, working class. A con job funded by some of the ante-bellum one-per-centers, that continues today in a similar form.
You don’t have to be an economist to see that forcing blacks – a third of the South’s laborers – to work without pay drove down wages for everyone else. And not just in agriculture. A quarter of enslaved blacks worked in the construction, manufacturing and lumbering trades; cutting wages even for skilled white workers.
Read more here: www.mcclatchydc.com
Conservatives love to blather on about how the country was founded by people seeking religious freedom, but they are, as usual, stealing credit for something they didn’t do.
The states that conservatives control were founded by rapacious Brits who couldn’t inherit Daddy’s wealth and so set about dispossessing the Natives Americans of their land so they could set up their bizzaro-world version of the English aristocracy. They never admit this because it makes them somehow look worse than they already do.
“You don’t have to be an economist to see that forcing blacks – a third of the South’s laborers – to work without pay drove down wages for everyone else. ”
Careful, or you might find yourself agreeing that allowing imported and/or illegal labor drives down wages and working conditions today. Which is an inconvenient argument for liberals of today.
No, actually, it’s not inconvenient at all. In a country with a negative birth rate — that’s us — immigration is essential.
If you accept the capitalist framing of life on Earth — if you don’t work you don’t eat — then you end up endorsing the entire system that exploits labor markets. Is that where you’re at — capitalism will last forever if we just do it right? Because, while I won’t live to see it, that’s not a tenable recipe beyond the next 20 years.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22411236/immigration-census-population-growth
It is a common fallacy to respond to criticisms of “illegal immigration” by arguing the virtues of “legal immigration” as if they were the same thing. The current bipartisan policy of maintaining a large population of non-citizen workers with second-class status is not defensible on moral or economic grounds.
If every undocumented worker were made a citizen tomorrow, employers would immediately begin seeking to displace them a new cohort of illegal workers to exploit.
I agree with the economic argument about population growth. Immigration is needed, but not uncontrolled illegal immigration. Let more in the front door, but shut the back door (in the workplace). Force employers to compete for legal labor.
Maybe it is time to go back to the Ellis Island approach, where you become a citizen on arrival. Let’s see how anxious employers are to compete for employees with rights.
The difference between legal immigration and illegal immigration is as mutable as the law, which is very mutable indeed.
As you have no doubt noticed, corporate America will take the lowest-cost approach to any problem. Its preferred option is to send the jobs overseas. Hiring American workers is their least-preferred option.
And, for the record, economic research does not back your position on wages. The consensus is that it lowers low-skill wages by up to 2%, but also raises other wages because those workers produce other economic activity that somebody profits from.
The effects of immigration, legal or. not, on the job market is the same in supply-demand terms. The only difference is that you can treat illegals worse, but I hasten to add that they treat low-wage American workers like chattel as well.
I’m not going to dig through the News Journal archives to check my memory, but back in the ’80s, when the chicken plant jobs were held by poor Blacks instead of poor Guatemalans, the owners locked the fire doors to keep workers from taking smoke breaks. When a fire broke out a couple of people died, IIRC.
With all respect, I think your argument is with unfettered American capitalism, not immigration of either sort. Your complaint shows that policing the border is a poor substitute for policing the employers.
“The consensus is that it lowers low-skill wages by up to 2%, but also raises other wages”
Taking your statistic at face value, that is a major engine of economic inequality, and a driver of the race to the bottom. I don’t want to “improve” the economy by pumping up high-end wages among the few while driving down wages for the many.
Lowering wages by 2% doesn’t sound like a lot for an individual, but it’s like climate. If average temperature were to rise by 2%, you might die in a heat wave.
Let workers negotiate their wages on a legal and level playing field.
I suggest you read the research rather than rely on my one-sentence summation. The consensus is that the net effect on wages is close to zero. BTW, two percent of minimum wage is about $8 in a 40-hour week. Raising the minimum wage will do far more to increase pay than ending immigration would.
Actually, low-skill immigrant labor doesn’t drive down wages for the many so much as it leads to fewer low-wage jobs, and automation/AI is going to do the rest.
The problem is the age-old insistence on making people “earn their daily bread.” Republicans are obsessed with forcing everyone to work, presumably because it makes them too busy to string them up by their worthless necks.
We already have a class of disposable, disposed-of people who don’t show up in the statistics because they don’t bother to look for work. There already aren’t enough jobs to go around, and it’s going to get worse year by year, decade by decade, to the point where a basic universal income is adopted by necessity. I won’t live to see it, but it’s pretty clear that’s where we’re headed.