“We’ve Adapted Before, And We’ll Adapt Again”: Immigrants’ Energy And Vitality Ought To Be Celebrated
“This is a blessing from God.”
“I’ve always had to look behind my back. Now I don’t have to worry so much.”
“This is a very amazing moment.”
According to news reports, those sentiments — hope, relief, gratitude, joy — have been expressed by immigrants heartened by President Obama’s decision to delay deportation for as many as 4 million people who entered the country without papers. They are ordinary folks eager for a semblance of normalcy — the right to a driver’s license, the ability to get a job legally, the respite from constant worry — in the adopted country they now call home.
While Obama’s action has drawn withering criticism from his conservative critics, the president framed his decision as an attempt to keep families from being torn apart. According to the Migration Policy Institute, some 3.7 million adults who came into the United States without authorization have at least one child who was born here or has legal permanent status and has been here five or more years.
Those children are firmly ensconced in their communities, anchored in their schools or workplaces, and strangers to the nations in which their parents were born. They speak English; they surf the Internet; they obsess over the latest smartphone. In other words, they are as American as your kids and mine.
What sort of country would separate them from their parents or force them to leave? Why not embrace them for the vitality they bring to us?
Opponents of Obama’s executive order are given to a heavy reliance on the rules and regulations of permissible entry, the legal codes that govern borders and visas and citizenship. It’s certainly true that unauthorized immigrants have violated those statutes — stealing across a river, sneaking through a desert, ignoring a previously agreed-upon departure.
But surely there is something to be said for leniency, for mercy, for generosity toward those who have, after all, committed only a misdemeanor, which is how the law characterizes a first-time illegal entry. (Obama’s executive order pointedly excludes those who have committed felonies.)
That mercy ought to be freely meted out since Americans bear some complicity in the law-breaking, some responsibility for the unauthorized sojourns taken by so many gardeners, cooks and nannies, painters, ditch diggers and fruit pickers. Back in the go-go 1990s, we practically threw open the gates and invited in low-skilled workers who were happy to do the jobs that Americans didn’t want to do.
There was more than enough work to go around in an economy where the unemployment rate dropped to as low as 4 percent, and native-born laborers shunned sweaty work picking Vidalia onions, toting drain pipe and laying sod. Undocumented workers proved cheap and compliant, unable to complain when safety regulations were violated and wages were substandard.
So they came by the millions, in Democratic and Republican administrations. They stayed, they worked hard, they married and had children. They adopted our values and called this country their own.
Perhaps it was inevitable that a backlash would be swift and furious, especially after the economy turned sour and the middle class shrank. Besides, every immigrant wave in the nation’s history — whether Irish or Polish or Chinese — has provoked an eruption of anger and resentment.
This backlash has been building since at least the early aughts, when President George W. Bush tried to pass legislation that would give the undocumented legal status and a path to citizenship. Ultraconservatives in his party rebelled, even as business executives pleaded for a compromise that would satisfy their need for workers.
The resentment was seeded, in part, by the reality of demographic change — by, yes, the discomfort produced by racial and ethnic differences. Older Americans, especially, have recoiled at a country that grows browner and more diverse, where Spanish-language signs dominate some neighborhoods and soccer fields replace baseball diamonds. That, too, has happened before in our history as immigrants brought their customs and religions and languages.
But the nation adapted before, and we’ll adapt again. That constant rejuvenation is one of the nation’s strengths, that energy and vitality is one of our advantages. We, too, ought to be grateful those immigrants are getting a shot at the American dream.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, November 29, 2014
“It’s Always Black Friday For Clerks”: The Result Of Decisions And Policies That Have Had A Hideous Impact
Contrary to what you may assume about me, I actually enjoy the occasional trip to the mall. It’s a kind of a sociological expedition of the sort I find instructive and entertaining—I love watching the gangly teens, for example, as I recall going to the mall myself when I was 16, combing my hair and hoping to run into the girl of the moment. I find the big-box stores similarly interesting. The biggest downside these days is the parking, an already Hobbesian horror that has been exacerbated in the smart phone era by this new thing whereby now when you see a person get in his or her car, you can’t assume they’re leaving immediately because they’re probably going to sit there and check their phone for at least two minutes, and thus your search continues.
So I don’t want to be a killjoy here. I’m good with commerce, I’m fine with Christmas, and I will even defend Christmas music up to a point, a topic to which I may devote a column sometime between now and the fateful day.
But just take a few minutes with me to ponder the side of all this that most people don’t bother to think about. On Thanksgiving morning, I awoke to a batch of emails like the Nordstrom “Black Friday Is Here Early” one; when I brought in my Washington Post, I flipped through the circulars and really was gobsmacked the number of stores from Macy’s to Sears to H.H. Gregg and loads of others opening Thanksgiving night at 5 or 6 or 7 pm. Yes, I was aware that this is a thing, but I guess I’d thought it was an unpopular thing and had peaked a couple of years ago. Evidently not.
Who’s working at Sears or wherever on Thanksgiving evening? Maybe she doesn’t mind. Maybe it’s the most ironclad excuse going to escape the family. But…is she getting overtime? Does she make decent money to begin with?
On the overtime question, chances are she is not, and this is a huge and hugely overlooked issue that has had a dramatic effect on stagnating middle-class incomes over the last three decades and has surely contributed, in turn, to our growing inequality. Nick Hanauer, the Seattle venture capitalist and admirable class traitor (and friend of mine, I guess I should say), laid it out last week in a terrific column he wrote for Politico.
“In 1975,” Hanauer wrote, “more than 65 percent of salaried American workers earned time-and-a-half pay for every hour worked over 40 hours a week. Not because capitalists back then were more generous, but because it was the law. It still is the law, except that the value of the threshold for overtime pay—the salary level at which employers are required to pay overtime—has been allowed to erode to less than the poverty line for a family of four today. Only workers earning an annual income of under $23,660 qualify for mandatory overtime.” He then cited a study from the Economic Policy Institute calculating that just 11 percent of American workers, well down from that old 65 percent, qualify for overtime pay today.
In an issue paper it released in June, the Center for American Progress suggested that the overtime threshold be increased from the current poverty-level maximum to $960 a week, which would match the 1975 levels after adjusting for inflation. This would restore overtime rights to workers earning up to around $50,000 a year, which is roughly the current median. Remember—American workers work longer hours and are more productive today than they were in 1975. But they are paid less, and the vanishing overtime pay is a big part of why. The CAP paper estimates that if current trends continue unabated, overtime pay will disappear entirely by 2026.
If it were raised, who would be covered? Well, a hell of a lot of people. There’s this web site glassdoor.com that lists typical salaries. Wow, are these salaries terrible in some cases! A Best Buy sales associate makes, according to glassdoor’s information, $10.36 an hour, which (assuming a 35-hour week and 50 paid weeks a year) comes out to $18,130. So that person would qualify for some overtime now. But that’s a poverty wage. Try to keep that in mind the next time you start fuming when you can’t get the young man’s attention.
Over at Sears, a sales associate makes just $8.44 an hour, $14,770. Managers of course do better—an assistant manager pulls down $46,629, so she or he would still qualify for overtime if it were brought up to 1975 levels. A sales manager at Macy’s gets $47,324. Even at the higher-end Nordstrom, a department manager hauls in a mere $41,828. All of these people, and millions more like them, deserve a little overtime.
I know the counter-arguments. Yes, it would cost businesses more. Tough. Businesses have been cheating American workers for three decades. Would businesses merely lay off workers? Some would, some would not. Every capitalist isn’t Ebenezer Scrooge. Communities and society as a whole would reap huge benefits if we had a larger and more prosperous middle class that had more money to spend, as capitalists like Hanauer know well and preach regularly.
So just remember this season that if you’re purchasing anything that costs north of $300 or so, the person who’s selling it to you probably can’t afford to buy it herself. And that this state of affairs is not just the way things are. It’s the result of decisions and policies that have had a hideous impact. They can be reversed, too, someday.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 28, 2014
“Don’t Be Fooled, GOP Not Trying To Help Hourly Workers”: The Next Attempt By Republicans To Mislead On The Affordable Care Act
If you were paying close attention, you would have heard a new phrase being repeated by Republicans, particularly Mitch McConnell, over the last few days: “restore the 40-hour workweek.” You may have said, “Wait, is the workweek not 40 hours anymore?” If you had no idea what McConnell is talking about—and I’m pretty sure he’s hoping very few people do—it sounds like he’s advocating some kind of pro-worker initiative. And indeed, that’s how he and John Boehner put it in their op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, saying that one of the top items on their agenda is to “restore the traditional 40-hour definition of full-time employment, removing an arbitrary and destructive government barrier to more hours and better pay created by the Affordable Care Act of 2010.”
Now we’re getting closer. The government, with that damn Obamacare, is cutting your hours and pay! As Boehner put it, we have to “restore the 40-hour workweek for American workers that was undone by Obamacare.” Since we’re probably going to be hearing this from a lot of Republicans in the coming days as they wax rhapsodic about their deep concern for America’s hourly workers, it would be good to clarify just what it is they’re talking about here.
So let’s be absolutely clear: what they’re proposing is to make it easier for large employers to have full-time employees to whom they don’t provide health insurance. That’s it.
This is about the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act. It required that companies with 50 or more employees provide health coverage to full-time workers. The mandate has been delayed—for companies with 100 or more workers it takes effect in January, while those with between 50 and 99 will have to comply in 2016. The law’s authors had to define “full-time” somehow, and they knew that if they defined it as someone working 40 hours, then employers could just cut people to 39 and deny them coverage. So they set the line at 30 hours, partly on the assumption that if an employer has a full-time employee, it would be difficult to cut them all the way down to 29 hours to declare them part time and avoid offering the coverage.
One really important thing to understand for context: almost all large employers already offer health coverage. In fact, 96 percent of firms with 50 or more workers do so, even before the mandate kicks in. Among larger firms the number is even higher. For all but a small number of firms, this provision doesn’t matter.
Republicans have always objected to the employer mandate, and they’d like to repeal it entirely. The fact that now McConnell and Boehner are suddenly talking about the question of where the line between part-time and full-time work is suggests strongly that they’re going to be introducing legislation to move that line. It takes a lot of gall to present it as some kind of pro-worker initiative, since what it actually means is, “We want to let your boss cut your hours from 40 to 39, then he’ll be able to take away your health coverage.” But they’re surely hoping that the debate will sound to the public like Republicans want to mitigate the job-killing effects of Obamacare and stand up for workers, while the President just wants government sticking its hand in everybody’s business. And who knows, they might be right.
For the record, there are strong arguments that the employer mandate should indeed be repealed—provided it’s replaced with new provisions that protect people whose employers drop coverage. And I’ve advocated de-coupling health insurance from employment for years. But don’t let Mitch McConnell fool you into thinking he’s trying to help hourly workers.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor,The American Prospect, November 7 2014
“Vote For Yourself Tuesday”: When The 99% Vote, They’re More Likely To Get What They Want From Politicians
The rich always vote for themselves. They go for their self-interest, their tax breaks, their liability escapes (think Wall Street). Meanwhile, they’ve relentlessly instructed the non-rich that they too must vote for the rich.
They’ve promised for decades that if the 99 percent just comply with the wishes of the wealthy, bow down, kiss their feet, shine their shoes, then some paltry portion of the bucket-loads of dough that the rich are amassing will dribble down upon the 99 percent.
That trickle-down trick didn’t work for the vast majority of Americans. The rich got richer, all right. But the rest slid backwards. Now income inequality is worse than it was during the era of robber barons. It’s time to turn that around. Political leaders must focus on the needs of the 99 percent. For that to happen, the 99 percent must vote for themselves on Tuesday. They must go for their self-interest, their wages, their health insurance, their Social Security.
Vote for higher wages for the 99 percent.
Minimum wage workers in the United States are paid so little that taxpayers subsidize the likes of Walmart and Wendy’s through government programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. That doesn’t happen everywhere.
As the New York Times pointed out last week, McDonald’s, Burger King and Starbucks all pay their workers in Denmark at least $20 an hour and provide paid vacations and pensions. And the companies still make profits.
The one percenter CEOs of these companies, who demand millions in pay for themselves, have squashed efforts to raise the U.S minimum wage, a pittance stuck five years at $7.25. Instead of improving paychecks, McDonald’s told its workers to get second jobs, forego heat in their homes and find health insurance for $20 a month.
When the minimum wage rises, it bumps up pay for everyone else. The 99 percent benefit. And the majority supports lifting the wage.
Voting for raises means voting for Democrats. President Obama has called for an increase, and U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez said the U.S. minimum wage is an international embarrassment. “I mean, we suck. We really do,” he said.
Republicans have consistently blocked a raise. New Jersey’s GOP Gov. Chris Christie, the nation’s fourth highest paid governor at $175,000 a year, said last month that he is “tired of hearing about the minimum wage.”
Vote for health insurance for the 99 percent.
The majority of Americans believe that health insurance should be accessible to everyone. The Affordable Care Act moved the nation closer to that, enabling tens of millions to get covered.
It prevented insurers from dumping clients when they get sick and from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, like diabetes. It covered millions of young people to age 26 on their parents’ plans. It protected millions with an expansion of Medicaid.
National surveys have shown that low-income Americans are obtaining health insurance at a faster rate than the rich. There are two reasons for this. The rich already were covered. And the law was designed to help the working poor. This is creating fairness in access to medical care.
Republicans hate the law. Two dozen GOP governors refused to expand Medicaid in their states, and those places now suffer from the highest rate of uninsured residents. Republicans are so intent on denying health care to the working poor that they rejected a program that would cost them nothing for three years.
Now, Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, has again pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act if the GOP takes control of his chamber. Republicans want to regress to higher inequality in health insurance coverage.
Vote to preserve and expand Social Security and Medicare.
These programs are not priorities of the rich. The wealthy are riding high on golden parachutes, gilded pensions, tax-sheltered off-shore accounts, and the built-in security of immense salaries. Social Security wouldn’t pay their country club fees.
For the rest, however, Social Security and Medicare mean fear relief. They’re crucial to the 99 percent.
For years now, however, Republicans have tried to privatize, cut and destroy these programs. U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, repeatedly has issued a “roadmap” for an America in which the rich drive new Ferraris bought with tax breaks and the rest forfeit their wheels because of cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.
The overwhelming majority of Americans oppose cuts. Among Democrats, there’s a movement to increase benefits by lifting the $117,000 cap, after which income no longer is taxed for Social Security. The cap means that the rich pay proportionately less into Social Security than the rest.
Vote for the overwhelming majority, the non-rich, to get their needs met.
The nation’s richest are more politically engaged and get easier access to high-level politicians than the 99 percent. That isn’t just obvious. It’s also according to surveys and interviews of one-percenters conducted by three university professors. They are Northwestern University’s Benjamin I. Page and Jason Seawright and Vanderbilt’s Larry M. Bartels. Their report is called Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans.
The rich minority gets its way. Bartels and another researcher showed in earlier studies that federal government policy corresponds much more closely with the wishes of the rich than the needs of the rest.
Bartels, author of Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, has noted that no other rich country came close to the United States in cutting the budget based on class preferences. It went this way: the workers lost programs; the wealthy kept perks.
This has got to change. And it could. In states with low voter turnout inequality – that is balloting by the non-rich more closely matching participation rates by the wealthy – there are higher minimum wages, stricter anti-predatory lending laws and better health benefits for the working poor. In other words, when workers vote, they’re more likely to get what they want from politicians.
Vote for yourself on Tuesday.
By: Leo W. Gerard, International President, United Steelworkers; The Huffington Post Blog, November 3, 2014
“The Same Supply-Side Ideas”: Republicans Have Known All Along That Their Jobs Plan Wouldn’t Work That Well
If you’ve read my work over the past few months, you’ve probably heard me argue that Republicans don’t have a jobs plan. I’ve said it a few times. Never has that point been clearer than in the New York Times Thursday morning, where economists on both sides of the aisle—and even House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman—admit that the Republican “jobs” plan wouldn’t actually help the economy very much.
“Some of those things will help,” Matthew J. Slaughter, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, told the Times about Republican economic ideas, “but, it just struck me as sort of a compendium of modest expectations. If you ask me, ‘What’s your ballpark guess for how many jobs are going to be created?,’ it’s just not many.” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a conservative economist and former director of the Congressional Budget Office said, “I don’t think any of these are particular game changers.”
The traditional Republican ideas to boost the economy—cutting spending, reducing regulations, and reforming the tax code—represent a misunderstanding of the underlying problems with the economy. Those are all supply-side policies, intended to boost investment and improve productivity. Those aren’t bad goals, of course, but they don’t solve the demand-side issues that are actually holding back growth.
When the Great Recession struck, households cut back on their spending, forcing businesses to fire workers, who then cut back their own spending—thus, a lack of demand. This creates a nasty cycle of reduced spending and job losses. The government’s role in these situations is to fill the hole in demand by using fiscal or monetary policy. We did both and they were moderately successful. But they weren’t sufficient to fill the entire hole in demand and we’ve had a lackluster recovery as a result, made even worse by a premature turn to austerity.
The most revealing quotation in the Times article came from Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Boehner. When asked about the 46 bills that Boehner has outlined as the Republican jobs package—most of which would cut regulations and taxes—Smith said that the bills were not “a cure-all, but they would be a good start for our economy; we need to do more.” In other words, after six years of critiquing Obama’s economic policies, House Republicans still don’t have an economic agenda to fix the economy’s ills.
In some sense, that’s OK right now. The recovery has taken a step forward this year and we no longer need a big jobs package to save the economy (although more infrastructure spending would help). But during the beginning of the Obama presidency that wasn’t the case. Then, we did need a big jobs plan, but Republicans offered the same supply-side ideas they’re proposing now. Based on Smith’s comments, it seems the GOP was aware of this too.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, October 23, 2014
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