Thursday, December 14, 2006

The Reason Behind Immigration

I think this comment from the Des Moines Register website really shows the conditions at meat packing plants in this country now and why immigrants are filling those jobs.

25 years ago I worked at Swift. It was the companies wish to bust the Unions and pay lower wages with immigrants that has turned a good paying middle class job into a low paying job. Bush and company continually say that illegals do the jobs regular Americans don't want. It is the Republicans that have decimated the middle class by lowering the standard of living for "regular Americans". Democrats aren't completely clean on this issue either, but it is the greed of the corporate Republicans that have drove this country down toward the lower economic societies of Mexico and India.

What Swift pays their workers now, I was getting paid 25 years ago. And the benefits are practically non-existant compared to 25 years ago. It's not that Americans don't want to do this type of work, it's that Americans don't want to work for what could be considered "slave wages" compared to 20-25 years ago. How hard is this to comprehend?

It isn't that Americans won't do certain jobs. They just won't do them for low wages and poor benefits. It is basic economics. Americans don't want to work in a meat packing plant for $12 an hour, so the company needs to provide a wage that would make the job more attractive. Instead, the company has found a way around the system and found a source of cheap labor.

When I was younger, a person work at Swifts and be part of the middle class. Today, that is no longer the case. Is that the fault of the immigrants that are coming here, the companies paying the low wages, or the government for allowing it to happen?

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

And do you want your pork chops to cost $9 a pound? Neither Swift & Co. or any other employeer is just going to eat higher labor costs. Those costs will be passed along to consumers. I could be wrong but it seems to me the family of four earning $30k a year would probably still like to have some protein in their diet.

9:09 PM
noneed4thneed said...

According to this website: http://www.reapinc.org/ProfileIntro_Meat.html slaughter workers in the meat packing industry made $1.22 more an hour compared to manufacturing jobs in 1980 and in 2000 they made $3.44 less than manufacturing jobs.

I agree that some of the higher labor costs would be passed onto the consumer, but if pork was at $9 a pound Swift & Co. wouldn't be selling much pork. They would have to eat some of the higher costs to sell their product.

If workers in the meat packing industry made more $ then workers in other fields would make more. Then more and more people would have more money to spend.

2:29 PM
Anonymous said...

One word....inflation.

I know very little about economics, but I do know that rising wages and rising prices means inflation. Inflation is almost always a bad thing particularly for sectors of the economy that can't keep up with it such as agriculture.

The unfortunant fact is there is no easy solution to the problem of illegal immigration and the industries that exploit it.

2:57 PM

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