If Big Business was willing to pay the proper wage for these jobs, there would be plenty of Americans happy to do the work. But it isn't really the fault of Big Business that our current system is designed for their benefit--it is the fault of citizens who continue to support Big Government, despite 50 years of proof that
Big Government works for Big Business, while both bleeding dry, and sabotaging, the working class citizen.
As any REAL student of American history knows, [b]our nation was NOT built on open-door immigration--that did not happen until 1965. Before that, very strict immigration restrictions during the post-WWII manufacturing boom had given us
a successful balance between labor and capital, which gave each enough bargaining power to ensure a fair distribution of profits. The result: the largest, and most prosperous, Middle Class in human history, and the expectation of children doing even better in the future.
All that changed in 1965, when Washington abandoned reasonable immigration standards, and opened the floodgates to the ultra-poor nations to our south. The merit or productivity of the prospective immigrants was ignored, as was the cost of schooling their children, providing police and law enforcement, and funding the generous welfare system and social support that lured them here. So not only was the working class hurt by flooding the labor market, they also had to pay for huge increases in welfare and social services costs (plus the extra Big Government needed to administer all the new programs). For example, in lily-white Manchester NH, we have to pay for dealing with 76 different languages spoken by schoolchildren: it is no wonder NH citizens are taxed right out of their paid-for homes (if they are lucky enough to find a buyer at all before they go bankrupt).
Here are the 2 events that explain the demise of the American working class:
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In 1965, the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act threw out the standards that had brought us upwardly mobile Eastern Europeans that integrated quickly and needed little welfare support.
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c. 1969: "...Median wages have been stagnant since 1969" (
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/20...s-of-men/?_r=0). Do not be fooled by graphs of average wages or household income; those statistics average in the tiny group of ultra-rich that have accumulated more and more of America's wealth. The fact is, the working class has both stagnated and lost ground in the past 45 years, as a direct result of their loss of bargaining power.
It is true that automation hurt the working class--but since productivity gains were shared equitably between "labor" and "capital" up to the 1970s, it shouldn't have. It is also true that "Free Trade" sent American jobs out of the country, proving Ross Perot correct in his prediction of
the “giant sucking sound” of jobs going south to the cheap labor markets of Mexico.
Looks Like Ross Perot Was Right About The But
it was actually Washington's "open-door" immigration law in 1965 that ended the prosperity of the working class, by flooding the labor supply and thereby destroying the bargaining power of labor. In other words, the two most devastating blows to the working class (and the Middle Class) were deliberate actions by Big Government politicians that flooded the labor supply while simultaneously decreasing the number of jobs in the economy.
Remember when a full time job was 9 to 5, a full hour off for lunch every day (with multi-hour lunches also popular), paid vacations, flex time whenever you needed it, and the employer paying for health insurance for the employee and his entire family? Remember when a liberal arts college education was a guarantee of a supervisory/managerial career and all the perks? I don't remember either, but that was the standard in my parent's generation.
Have you ever watched the animated TV show "The Jetsons," premiered in 1962 (just before the end of the Baby Boom)? Do you realize that "it was
based on very real expectations for the future." (
50 Years of the Jetsons: Why The Show Still Matters | History | Smithsonian). One wage earner with a stay-at-home wife, a robotic maid, minimal work hours and all the conveniences and toys you could want. In grade school in the late 1960s,
I remember serious discussions of a 4-day (8 hour) workweek becoming standard, and sociologists worrying about how Americans would deal with all their free time (a result of increased productivity).
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