"Guest" Workers

More like indentured servants if the NYT has its facts in order. Here's the scam, recruiters charge people in foreign countries large sums to get temporary work in the US. After these workers get to the US they suddenly find that 3 years of work is really 3 months or none at all. And where there is work the conditions are abominable. These workers may not like the way they're being treated, but once their erstwhile employer has their passport and they have no money, they're kind of screwed. (not to mention being on the wrong side of a large ocean)

It doesn't take a heck of a lot of brains to see how this could happen, in fact it wouldn't take a heck of a lot of brains to see it coming before setting this system up. What you have to remember is this is work that Americans won't do (cough). While that is the rationale, the actual case is that it is work Americans won't do for that kind of money. Think about this for a second, if they are going to pay to import workers from Thailand, half way around the world, and send them back and still pay them here, there's a lot of money on the table. Unless, of course, there's some serious cheating going on.

Just exactly how brain dead do you have to be to not have a problem with THE WEALTHIEST NATION ON EARTH unable to pay its own people to PICK CUCUMBERS!!!??

In the morning I will go out in the snow and probably mud and start putting together the sticks on a new house. I'll spend a few days mucking around with my crew laid off because I can't afford to pay them for the messing about that it will take and it would mess up their UE checks late in a work week/benefit week. I'll do alright from the house, they'll do...ok if somebody else in their household makes up for what their wages are. Alright for me is skidding around the edge of disaster on a consistent basis, the guys are just teetering on that edge. This is so wrong on so many levels I don't have time to write it - or you to read it.

We keep sending our jobs overseas and giving tax breaks for doing it, our manufacturing, our tech work, and for pete's sake when was the last time you got a cold call from a Sam whose real name was Sam and not Jamilwabberjonkey. Do you have any idea how bad cold calling in this country paid? The jobs we don't send overseas (outsource) we insource. I'm not trying to kick anybody because of where they come from, but I'm real tired of watching the really fat cats of this country get fatter and sell out the workers of this country. There is actual unemployment in this country and then there is the segment that is no longer counted and then there's the segment that isn't about to go out into a job market that will just starve them. I'm not talking about lazy no good lay about drug dealing pimping wastes of skin, I'm talking about the folks that take one look at what they can realistically expect to earn and decide to stay home because it's ridiculous to go do it for that kind of money. Yes, we could do the good Republican thing and yank the safety net out from under them and say, "work or starve," so they'd go work and starve. What are you going to get from a Catch 22 scenario? A Yossarian solution, take your clothes off and quit.

Do I have a good answer? No. I have a partial answer, take away all the abilities to game the damn employment system, no guest workers, no illegal hires, a real wage bottom - tied to a lower "in school minimum." Oh yes, no games, full time students only. Get caught outside the rules, fines and jail time to make a hardened criminal sweat. The labor market will force wages up, it does not do so now because it is not a market, it is seriously gamed by the damn plutocrats. Just to make sure things are getting paid for fairly, a tax code that doesn't favor the plutocrats. Unless you're a tax accountant or use one, you have no idea how favored they are. By the way, if you happen to be illegally working, you can go home and we'll see if we can't work out a way to bring you in first, legally, and as needed. (as an alternative - see illegal employers)

Sound draconian? I'll tell you what's draconian, the life of trying to make it on the scraps off the table - in the wealthiest nation in the world.