Exploitation is the missing word because exploitation is not
what our two party system is talking about.
We had a client named Andrews. His business was contracting. His complaint about today’s immigrant
standing outside the hardware store hoping to pick up day labor was that they
want to much and that the do not come “hat in hand” like they used to. I did not hit him because I do not do things
like that, so we quietly got rid of him and his business.
He could not be more wrong.
The undocumented live day to day and in a state of insecurity and are
very “hat-in-hand” all the time. That is
the whole deal. A major segment of
American employers want to have labor that is below legal costs, without
benefits and unable to demand legal treatment under our employment laws or join
a union. Yes this kind of immigration is
illegal, and so is the employment offered.
It is not just the fact that they have hired someone illegally, but
these employers continue to act illegally in how they treat these workers. The illegality is part of how this group of
people are exploited all across our economy, but especially as
farmworkers.
All US workers are exploited by this mistreatment of the
undocumented. Employers are not held to
account for breaking these laws or any other labor laws in any significant
way. Thirteen million people have dissolved
into the US society as the bottom rung of our labor force. We all suffer the dangerous conditions, the
unpaid extra work hours, the insecurity and lack of recourses when wages and
benefits are never paid. The same
lobbyists who have made sure that the immigration side of employment law has
become unenforceable in the fine print have done the same job to the rest of
employment law. Many US workers live
under the threat of being replaced by an undocumented worker and thus accept
basically the same conditions.
Unemployment and the treat of even deeper poverty is another wall of the
prison that so many workers are trapped into.
Politically many working people are exploited by those responsible
for our national problems but blaming our issues on the Spanish speaking undocumented. Somehow the biggest banks in the world can lose
more money than ever existed in history on speculative investments and the
biggest military in the world can have a fleet of floating airports with atomic
power plants in the hold, but the costs involved are never mentioned as a
reason our nation lacks funds for the needs of the common people. Instead our lobbyist shills that pass
themselves off for elected officials blame our nation’s problems on milk
credits for the nanny’s kids. Blaming
your problems on an ethnic minority is an ugly old game.
The whole discourse of who deserves to be here and if “illegals”
should have a “path to citizenship” is ugly.
It speaks to a lot of racism of course, and it is a symptom of the
insecurity of the situation of working class whites. Are they really willing or even able to do
the work offered these 13 million? And
why do they feel so threatened? Are
Americans so reduced by the post Regan economy that one of the few things they
have to boost their self-image is their citizenship?
As long as a serious number of working class Americans are
so seriously exploited by this anti-Latino rhetoric we are all going to
continue to be exploited in bigger ways than who picks the strawberries.
Exploitation extends to the nations of the world who educate
their youth only to lose them to the 21st century brain drain. These high tech immigrants find themselves
hat-in-hand working in Silicon Valley.
At the same time our schools are hat-in-hand and not providing the kind
of education needed for that Silicon Valley job. One should notice that at the same time
Silicon Valley has voiced the “need” for more H1 immigration visas for tech
work and have that provision in the Senate Immigration Reform bill, Apple Corp
has been caught laundering their profits in Ireland. Would it be too much of a stretch to say that
on the one hand these US companies avoid taxes to the point of impoverishing our
schools while at the other hand get free access to education paid for by other
nations and at the same time have those H1 Visa workers in a beholden “hat-in-hand”
position where they are dependent on their employer just to be here?
We have a system drawn up by the lobbyists. The farm lobby, the building lobby, the high
tech lobby all have more influence in Washington than any of people doing this
farm work, building work or programing work no matter what the worker’s citizenship
or status. We have the system that the
economic interests have turfed out between each other and the politicians they
own.
And our democracy is being exploited by the narrowness of
the issue as described inside the beltway and in our media. For all the talk of the “partisan divide” on
this issue and how many Latinos will vote for a Democrat after Obama, our two
party system is silent on the word “exploitation”.
All the focus is on the boarder and the people crossing it
is combined with silence on the exploitation at work here in our country. Another boondoggle is offered the crony
capitalists who will build this multi-billion dollar electronic fence and
another with an on-line verification system. Obviously thirteen million people did not
cross the Arizona desert, especially the millions of them who are not from
Mexico and Central America. What about
all the others?
Our relations with Mexico have a lot more on the table. There is some serious question to how independent
Mexico really is from the US corporations and government. It seems that US capitalism is addicted to Mexican
drugs, Mexican petroleum and Mexican cheap labor on both side of the
border. The two party silence on the
nature of the relationship between the US and Mexico is stunning. How is it that we are having this “Great
Debate” on immigration and the Mexican border and never discuss the two nation’s
bilateral relations?
What the on-line employment eligibility check does for
employers who are INTENTIONALLY hiring undocumented workers is not discussed by
our press either. The fact that most
employers who hire the undocumented do it knowingly and intentionally because
they are seeking out that lower price and exploitive conditions, is glossed
over if even mentioned.
Working people are not treated as people, we are treated as
a labor market in this surreal public debate.
Totally unacceptable things are being done to our workers, yet there is
not a single word about labor protection in the proposed Senate bill.
How could there be when the discussion is missing the word
exploitation?
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