Pancho,

Most of us realize that everybody that makes lower than the mid 5 figures in the US is ultimately doomed to be "leveled down" until our choice of jobs will be the same here as it is currently in China, vietnam, etcetera. After all, the textile jobs originally migrated from New England to the Deep South, to Mexico, to Central America, to Southeast Asia, all the while laying waste to each economy that they passed through. Each time the manufacturers moved becuase wages were just too high.

We're now seeing the same pattern in a variety of skilled manufacturing and tech professions. Ain't the Free Market grand?

Pancho,

That reply, which addressed none of my points sounds pretty "faith based" to me. Cute, but devoid of substance.

Here's a simple one for you. Show me an example of a nation state where unregulated free market capitalism has been implemented for several generations without the capital all flowing to top to form a Corporatist or Crony Capitalist state.

a) No state has ever attempted it for more than a decade or two

b) No state has ever attempted it

c) All states that have ever attempted it have had to regulate or have turned into Crony Capitalist states.

Bonus points: Explain how unregulated free markets will benefit us in a global economy.

a) There is no empirical evidence for this argument either way

b) Extrapolating from the disasters seen after only a decade of "free trade" in the Western hemisphere, We should jump right in. God is on our side.

c) There has never been, nor will there ever be actual Free Trade. It's just a religious belief system sold to the masses to keep them docile while their pockets are picked. Whoah, that sounds very similar to the results you get when you try Communism. How could that be?

For a quick glimps of how the real world will shake out in the next couple of hundred years under your system, see any book by William Gibson.

David,

Long term, there is no "solution", and I said as much in my first comment. The idea that "we" can hoard a standard of living superior to the rest of the world's standards is both selfish and unrealistic.

That said, there's a lot we can do to help make the transition to a world economy as humane as possible for all None of it is to earth shattering, and most have been addressed in depth already by people a lot better informed than I am, but here's a kind of recycled laundry list:

Take a pinch of Chomsky. Publicly held corporations can't be allowed the status and protections of "personhood" and "citizenship" when it's useful to them, and then claim to be nothing more than an aggregation of shareholders seeking profit with no moral responsibility the rest of the time. Offshoring headquarters to evade financial regulation and tax burden; and offshoring labor to evade environmental regulation and reducing labor costs accelerate the race to the bottom.

A pinch of Lou Dobbs. Require that all workers in the US be here legally. Provide for actual legal penalties for employers who systematically violate the law on this issue. Results will be somewhat higher prices for labor intensive goods. Fresh strawberries out of season will just cost more money.

Prohibit all importation of goods manufactured abroad that fail to meet minimum livable wage and humane labor practices. (I'm not suggesting dollar parity here. When I worked in a machine shop in Paraguay in 1972, I was able to feed and cloth my family on an entry level wage of $40 in that local economy at that time. I worked 40 hour weeks, was able to use public transportation and put gas in my motorcycle and take the family to a couple of movies a month.)

Again, none of this stops the leveling down of labor's standard of living, but it spreads it out over many decades allowing the respective economies to adjust to the new realities. I'm sure that there a dozens of other things (like higher taxes on energy, demanding that the manufacturing standards of "planned obsolescense" instituted in the late '30s, be revised for a bit longer average life for hard goods, and so forth.

By hobbling foreign investment opportunities you offer a form of protectionism to American workers at the cost of opportunity to foreign workers.

Right Pancho, I wouldn't want to deprive foreign workers of the opportunity to be locked into compounds and forced to work 70 hour weeks churning out Barbie Dolls for Walmart. That would just be unfair.

The point is that as we blue collar workers in first world countries slide down the toilet into the sewer that typifies third world labor conditions, we'd feel better if we could take the Tidy Bowl Man along for the ride. Does your religion allow us to hope for this small surcease?

Pancho,

Your assumptions about consent are not founded in reality. People make their choices under constraints, and the constraints faced by individuals in the places to which manufacturing is moving are multifarious.

One partial way to address this would be to enforce the human right to form and join labor unions. Of course, that is a struggle that has to begin at home. I know you favor the right of owners and managers of capital to organize and bargain collectively but oppose it for workers -- quite why that form of consent is so repugnant to you is less clear.

Likewise, it is unclear why "I never promised you a rose garden" should apply to workers, but not to the desires of businesses not to be regulated in their natural tendency to try to externalize costs onto the public while privatizing public goods for their own benefit.

And, come to it, actually, market ideologues, possibly including yourself in discussions formulated a little differently, quite regularly do promise us rose gardens.

Pat,

Employer sanctions lead to discrimination against legal workers who look "risky" in some categorical sense, usually ethno-racial attribution based on either perceived appearance or speech accent. (By perceived appearance I mean cases like my high school friend who is a dark-haired, dark skinned Jew, who was set upon in the Boston subway in 1979 by some guys who decided he was Iranian during the hostage crisis).

Should we wonder at the ironies of the ribbon magnets when the troop-supporter-in-chief sends the reserves and national guard troops first, i.e. not keeping them in reserve, because the highly trained regulars are too valuable to sacrifice as occupation IED-fodder, and meanwhile cuts veterans benefits?

BTW, the next time the prez or one of his minions asserts his right or power to violate the constitution on the basis of being commander-in-chief, we should remember that the word 'emperor' is a corruption of the Latin 'imperator', which means, yep, that's right, 'commander'.

Nobody is putting a gun to the heads of people working in those other countries. It may be hard for privileged Americans to imagine, but finding a job sewing shoes for $10 a day is an opportunity for many people. Especially if the alternative is having no job at all and starving.

Well, apart from other countries that like the U.S. employ under-market prison labor (e.g. China), or coerced child labor, and so on, in considerable numbers of countries when people form voluntary associations to negotiate better terms of employment (unions), someone does put a gun to their heads, even fires it, or puts a goon to their bodies. I've lived in southern Africa and am quite familiar with the the ways people "less privileged" i.e. poorer people assess their available opportunities under the constraints of choices offered. I daresay I might understand them better than you do, given the arid and inhumane application application of abstract theory you seem to employ.

I promise to support your right to organize a labor union with the same amount of zeal that I support the right of a business owner to fire your ass for attempting to do so.

There is no such right in either U.S. law -- it is explicitly illegal in the U.S., has been since the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932--nor in international law, nor morally.

It is clear to me that you have no idea what a "right" entails. You make them up as you go along trying to politically engineer a world that makes you happy.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (emphasis added). Found in a document relating to explaining a substantial effort at politically engineering the world to increase human happiness.

Are you seriously going to say that conservatives don't try to engineer the world politically every day to make themselves happy?

The right to form trade unions is stated clearly, prominently and fairly early on in the enumeration of basic human rights in the International Declaration on Human Rights of 1948, and in other human rights conventions.

Employer sanctions lead to discrimination against legal workers who look "risky" in some categorical sense, usually ethno-racial attribution based on either perceived appearance or speech accent.

Umhaki,

Is it your position then, that we should enforce laws selectively? Maybe we should quit arresting men who beat the crap out of their spouses and children, 'cause it just pisses 'em off thus goading them into beating the crap out of their spouses and children......

Well, you get the idea, right? I mean, I take your point that idiots can be incited to hate crime by any number of stimluli, but so what?

If we enforce immigration law, employers will be required to pay enough to attract legal employees. That's the old Free Market Mantra of Supply and Demand. The only other apparent alternative is to open all of our borders to any and all immigrants.

I believe that any thinking person would agree that having a pool of illegals to exploit drives wages and living standards down.

Pat,

My point actually derives from the fact that the law when it has been enforced more vigorously at points in the past has been enforced selectively, and discriminatorily. This in turn derives from the fact that the old INS was structured to be beyond the law in some ways and that as a result it developed an internal culture of arrogance due to people holding unaccountable power. These problems have only been made worse by the security restructuring following the September 2001 terrorist atrocities.

Your analogy to domestic abuse does not fit. I wasn't talking about the effect on employers of workers in the country illegally, I was talking about the effect on employers of legal non-citizen immigrants and citizens, employers who choose to discriminate on ethno/racial perceptions as an insurance measure against being raided or the risk of dealing with false papers. Thus of the effect on legally present non-citizens and citizens.

What drives wages and living standards down is having a pool of people who are vulnerable to something and can be exploited as a result.

A policy which is aimed at increasing the punishment of the people here illegally and at their employers, particularly when enforced by a discriminatory and unaccountable agency, may catch some people, but it also increases the vulnerability of a great many more, and pushes law-breaking employers and employees closer together. Increased vulnerability means increased expoitability & profit of exploitation. So we have to ask whether the disincentive posed by the risk of punishment will be enough to offset the incentive of even greater profit of exploitation.

One approach to this would be to focus the potential punishment of employers primarily not on the fact of hiring workers present illegally, but on the exploitation. If the concern really is living standards, the issue is exploitability, and the aim of law or policy should be to reduce exploitability.

In many areas employers get around various aspects of current law by using third party labor contractors. The contractors can be really vicious. There has been pretty wide coverage of a particularly bad area for this type of exploitation around Immokalee, Florida.

So, another approach would be to try to close the loopholes that let the real employers outsource the enforcement function of exploitation to the contractors.

Another approach would be to try to drive a wedge between lawbreaking employers and illegally employed workers. Here's a weird idea. Suppose the law said that if a illegally employed worker turned in a law-breaking employer, the worker could become eligible to stay legally. (A lot of thought as to mechanism would be needed -- I'm just raising a principle and I'm not sure if it could be made practicable).

That would substantially raise the risk to a would-be employer of law-breaking immigrant workers, and create a disincentive to exploitation and abuse as well as a disincentive to hiring illegally-present workers, particularly if it went with legal reform that focused on punishing exploitation and abuse as well as on illegal hiring.

Ultimately though it might pay off better to work to raise wages and employment and living standards in the countries of immigrant origin, particularly by supporting labor organizing rights, and to reform the INS or whatever it has become within the Department of Homeland Security.

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