Reason Magazine - Topics > Labor

It's Funny Because It's True

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:33:00 EDT

Maryland, like most states, would like businesses to open up shop within its borders. So the state put up a nice little website with all the great things about doing business in Maryland.

An educated workforce! Low taxes! Rolling hills! And very low union membership. Err, whoops? Did we say that last part out loud?

The “Choose Maryland” site said Maryland has a “quality workforce … key to achieving corporate goals” and pointed out that private-sector union membership in Maryland is below the national average and that between 1990 and 2001, unions won representation rights for only 1 percent of the total new firms.

Naturally, hilarity ensues and everyone has to apologize for stating the obvious.

Of course, touting low union membership is unacceptable. But a little South-bashing never hurt anyone:

“Outraged e-mails are flying across the state’s entire labor movement,” Maryland Politics Watch’s Adam Pagnucco wrote. “We cannot believe that rhetoric typical of Georgia and Oklahoma would be sanctioned at any level inside the [Gov. Martin] O’Malley administration.”

More reason on unions here.

Minimum Wage, Maximum Unemployment for Youths, or, Bummer in the Summer

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:56:00 EDT

Interesting piece in the DC Examiner, looking at the effects of minimum-wage hikes on summer job opportunities for teens and other relatively low-skilled workers. Snippets:

This year, it's harder than ever for teens to find a summer job. Researchers at Northeastern University described summer 2007 as "the worst in post-World War II history" for teen summer employment, and those same researchers say that 2008 is poised to be "even worse."
According to their data, only about one-third of Americans 16 to 19 years old will have a job this summer, and vulnerable low-income and minority teens are going to fare even worse.
The percentage of teens classified as "unemployed"—those who are actively seeking a job but can't get one—is more than three times higher than the national unemployment rate, according to the most recent Department of Labor statistics.
One of the prime reasons for this drastic employment drought is the mandated wage hikes that policymakers have forced down the throats of local businesses. Economic research has shown time and again that increasing the minimum wage destroys jobs for low-skilled workers while doing little to address poverty.
According to economist David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine, for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, employment for high school dropouts and young black adults and teenagers falls by 8.5 percent. In the past 11 months alone, the United States' minimum wage has increased by more than twice that amount.

More here.

For more about the minimum wage, check out this classic 1995 reason article on the subject.

Update: Here's something from Steven Horwitz on the subject:

If one is tempted to minimize the role of self-interest in the political realm, one might wish to read the debates surrounding the creation of the first federal minimum wage law in the US as well as similar laws as part of apartheid in South Africa. The backers of the US law were not ignorant of its effects; they knew exactly what it would do (shut out immigrant and black labor), which is precisely why they supported it, and also why a number of politicians voted for it.

For example, in the April Freeman, David Henderson reports the following story:
At a 1957 hearing on increasing the minimum wage, a northern U.S. Senator who favored the increase stated: "Of course, having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too-the wages of the white worker who has to compete. And when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage-and there are, as you pointed out, these hundreds of thousands looking for decent work-it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn't it?"
Who was the senator? Here's a hint: just four years later he was the President. His name: John F. Kennedy.
JFK was not ignorant of the economics of the minimum wage and neither were the unions he was responding to. The unions were looking after their collective self-interest and JFK knew where the votes came from.

More here.

New at Reason

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

From the June 2008 issue, Associate Editor David Weigel reveals the big political payoff that organized labor expects from the Democrats this fall.

Read all about it here.

Union Rules

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

If you ever want a window into the needs and desires of the labor movement, you should listen to Stewart Acuff. And if you get within 50 yards of Acuff, you’ll be listening: The snow-bearded activist, now the AFL-CIO’s director of organizing, projects his voice like an opera singer. He grips the podium, white-knuckled. He clasps his hands, then pulls them apart with a snap. When I saw him at the Take Back America conference in Washington in March, his reedy voice grew rougher and louder as his speech went on.

“My brothers and sisters,” he said, “if we go into 2008 with an even larger mobilization of workers behind this legislation, with even more commitment to win the election in 2008, and put this on the agenda in 2009, I’m here to tell you today that we will pass this legislation, in the House, overwhelmingly! We will pass it in the Senate! We will defeat a Republican filibuster! And we will have a president who signs the Employee Free Choice Act! And we can get back to the business of restoring the American dream for millions and millions of workers!”

What’s the Employee Free Choice Act? If you aren’t a lobbyist in Washington, a union worker, or an employer nervously trying to prevent your staff from organizing, you might not have followed the twisty history of the latest attempt to increase private-sector unionization. “Card check,” as it is usually known, would allow employees at a company to bypass secret-ballot elections and declare their intent to unionize by simply signing cards. If adopted, it could portend the most revolutionary change to labor law since the 1940s.

The battle over card check is part of a much larger story of Campaign ’08: the coming-out party of Democratic interest groups. For the first time since 1992, Democrats are eyeing complete control of the executive and legislative branches, with all of the spoils of appointment and legislative scheduling that would entail. Unions want to grow their numbers. Green industries want tax incentives. Trial lawyers want a ceasefire in the war on torts.

If these groups could actually form a line in January, the unions would be at the front. Card check was the brainchild of organizers who had watched their numbers tumble as manufacturing jobs moved out of the rust belt and successive conservative administrations made it tougher to organize. President Bill Clinton, signer of NAFTA, did little to stop the skid from labor’s point of view. The organizers have learned their lessons, pushing members of the House and Senate—including the junior senators from New York and Illinois—to commit in writing to card check.

“When we started working on this legislation five years ago,” Acuff said at Take Back America, “people in Washington said it would never be taken seriously, never pass the laugh test.” Bills were introduced in 2003, 2005, and 2007. The first two times, they never reached the floor, with Republicans arguing that labor organizers usually win unionization elections anyway and that 90 percent of those results are approved by the federal government’s National Labor Relations Board within two months. In 2007, with the Democrats in charge of the legislature, the same bill passed the House easily and won 51 votes in the Senate, but that wasn’t enough to proceed to an up-or-down vote. All along, the effort has faced a veto threat from President Bush.

Things are different now. Democrats believe that as many as nine Republican-held Senate seats are vulnerable in 2008. The AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and allied unions plan to spend $360 million on the 2008 election. That’s around $200 million more than the unions spent in the Kerry-Bush race. As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slug it out for the nomination, the AFL-CIO is running a $53 million campaign attacking John McCain—portraying him as a right-wing ideologue who co-sponsored the Secret Ballot Protection Act, the GOP’s attempt at making kryptonite against card check.

All that union money comes with a promise: What’s good for unions will be good for the Democrats. Greg Tarpinian, a Change to Win organizer who spoke at the Take Back America panel, pointed out that union membership was one of the strongest determinants for a voter choosing a Democratic ballot. “If union membership was 10 percent in Ohio in 2004,” he argued, “John Kerry would be president.”

If card check passes, Tarpinian has only one worry: the ability of the National Labor Relations Board to “keep up with the demand” for brand new unions. Those new brothers and sisters of the labor movement will start paying dues; said dues will find their way to new Democratic campaigns like salmon finding their way upstream.

Republicans and business lobbyists are watching all of this with a sense of resigned horror. They know Democrats will have the votes, and they believe that the end of secret ballot elections will be not just bad for business, but bad for democracy. They also see card check as the tip of a spear. One Republican staffer worried to me about collective bargaining rights for public employees. “Do we really want fire-fighters to start striking?” he asked.

The unions stand to be the biggest beneficiaries of an all-Democratic Washington. Affordable housing advocates, meanwhile, want the 2007 Federal Housing Finance Reform Act, which created a $3 billion fund bankrolled with tax revenue and the profits of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, to be spent on more housing units instead of held up by concerns over budget deficits. Trial lawyers have paid their dues: The American Association for Justice spent $6.3 million to elect Democrats in 2006 through its political action committee, the most of any single PAC. For the first half of this decade, the plaintiffs industry fought a rearguard action against the tort reform movement, which Republicans have been using to limit the size of settlements. Trial lawyers lost a big battle when the Senate passed class action lawsuit reform in 2005, but they haven’t given much ground since then. When the Democrats come back, plaintiffs expect to go back on offense.

The Consumer Product Safety Reform Act, passed this year, is a model of what to expect in a Democratic future. The law doubled funding for the eponymous safety commission to $155 million by 2015, set no caps on damages, and empowered state attorneys general to make federal cases if they have “reason to believe that the interests of the residents of that State have been, or are being, threatened or adversely affected by a violation” of consumer safety. It passed the Democratic-controlled Senate by 79-13, aided by the scare over tainted toys from China.

But unions outmatch every other member of the Democratic coalition in demands and expectations. Now is their time. One organizer told me that a Democratic comeback would mean that the party had “no more excuses” for not giving them what they wanted. At Take Back America, Acuff said the party should gift-wrap anything wavering Republicans want if it will get the bill to a floor vote. “If we have to build a bridge somewhere to get it passed, then build the damn bridge!” he said. “If we have to rename a highway after somebody, rename the highway!”

Another activist, relaxing after a day of sessions and meetings, regaled me with stories of how businesses bust unions, how the National Labor Relations Board punctures budding movements, and how essential it was to change the system. He repeated my question back to me. “If we get a Democratic president, are we going to pass card check?” He leaned back and grabbed a Miller Lite from one of his brothers coming back from the bar. “If the sun comes up in the morning, we’re passing card check.”

David Weigel is an associate editor of Reason.

Unionizing the Village in Order to Democrat it

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:53:00 EDT

The Washington Post's resident Labor toady, Harold Meyerson, is refreshingly direct today about our coming union/Democrat world:

[H]ow, Democrats wonder, can they secure the white working-class vote?
Well, they could start by re-unionizing it.
[bunch of numbers showing unionized whites voting Democrat, unlike their non-unionized co-racialists]
What do unions do that has such an impact? Chiefly, they remind their members what's at stake.

That's the ticket! Meyerson goes on to let slip what a Democratic-run Washington would do within the first 100 minutes of a Hillbarry Clinbama presidency:

Today, the party is united behind the Employee Free Choice Act, which, by enabling workers to join unions again without fear of being fired, would also greatly help Democratic prospects at the polls.

What is the Employee Free Choice Act, a.k.a. "card check"? Get ready to read all about it in the June issue of reason, care of David Weigel! In other words, subscribe today, for less than 20 bones a year.

"Emergency Temporary Assessment to Build a Political Fight-Back Fund"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:57:00 EDT

The 2008 election season is upon us, and unions are still getting legal beatdowns for bad behavior in 2005:

A federal judge has ordered California State Employees Association (CSEA) union officials to offer rebates to up to 28,000 state employees who are not union members. Imposing a “special assessment” in addition to mandatory dues, union officials seized an additional 25% of forced union dues to wage their campaign against Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s modest reform measures on the 2005 ballot.

Turns out an “Emergency Temporary Assessment to Build a Political Fight-Back Fund” on every state employee isn't exactly kosher. The union managed to extract $3 million from non-union workers alone.

To extend your five minutes of anti-union hate, go here. Or wait it out for a great upcoming column on the impending horror of card check (the unions ask: what's so great about secret ballots anyway?) by David Weigel.

Full disclosure: I was once a deeply resentful and unwilling member of The New York Times' Guild. Needless to say, reason is not a union shop.

UPDATE: The decision applied to Service Employees International Union Local 1000, an independent affiliate of the CSEA.

Maybe He Is Another Reagan

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:30:00 EST

The Teamsters have endorsed Barack Obama.

Unemployed Like Me

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 08:34:00 EST

Blogger extraordinaire (a.k.a. film critic extraordinaire) and Hit & Run regular Alan Vanneman takes issue with a Wash Post story on long-term unemployment among the people who really matter, i.e., those more likely to read the Wash Post:

"The problem [long-term unemployment] is ensnaring a broader swath of workers than before. Once concentrated among manufacturing workers and those with little work history, education or skills, long-term unemployment is growing most rapidly among white-collar and college-educated workers with long work experience, studies have found, making the problem difficult for policymakers to address even as it grows more urgent."

OK, so far, so good. But what evidence does Mike have to prove that "long-term unemployment is growing most rapidly among white-collar and college-educated workers with long work experience"? He refers to "studies" but provides no data from them. He provides anecdotal evidence for a grand total of two workers-two! two!-both of whom departed from their last employer under less than ideal circumstances. One felt the job was a "bad fit," which could mean anything from "my boss was an idiot" to "they told me that if I didn't quit they'd fire me." Mike's other hapless victim had a "sleeping disorder," which resulted in his, well, in his not showing up for work very much. Some swath!

More Vannemanium here.

Guests in the Machine

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:54:00 EST

The towers of Marina Bay Sands will reach 50 stories into the sky, narrowing in the middle and splaying at the tops and bottoms, arching toward the water’s edge like giant joysticks in play. A thumb shaped pier, known as the “sky garden,” will hover above the complex, and a lotus-shaped museum will flower from the bay itself. Together the towers will house 2,500 hotel rooms and lord over the heart of the casino complex, a million-square-foot convention center that will sweep from the feet of the towers to the edge of the South China Sea.

Singapore’s first casino, a $5 billion project on some of the most expensive property in the world, has been billed as a microcosm of the city itself. Ambitious, futuristic, pristine, and not especially humble, it is the ideal urban physiognomy of a country straining to stand out among its much larger neighbors. “People know Singapore,” Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong assured his countrymen in a 2006 address to the nation. “They no longer think that Singapore is somewhere in China. They know Singapore is special.”

Three miles from Marina Bay, in Singapore’s Little India, many thousands of young Bangladeshi and Malay men gather every Sunday—their one day off—to eat, drink, and spend. Weaving through piles of coconuts and stacks of steaming naan, men shout to one another across streets packed tight with bodies. Here the air grows sweaty, the streets smell of garlic, and incense fumes waft from vendor to buyer. This is not the aseptic, polished Singapore of Marina Bay. It is the muscled hodgepodge that will take the Bay blueprints, unload ships full of steel, and build a casino.

As the world gradually learns to locate Singapore on a map (it’s on the tip of the Malaysian Peninsula), Little India is expanding. The Ministry of Manpower says the construction industry will need between 40,000 and 50,000 more foreign workers if projects like the Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort are to rise from the page. When the visas are granted, these workers will add to a non-resident workforce of 670,000. That may not sound like much by the standards of the United States, where 670,000 doesn’t even capture the number of undocumented workers who cross the border in a single year. But Singapore is a city-state little larger, and far more densely populated, than the city of Chicago. Its growing foreign population is party to a radical experiment in labor mobility.

If any nation has reason to feel threatened by country-level disparities in wealth, Singapore does. The city-state is an oasis of prosperity in a region packed with countries far poorer than, say, Mexico. Yet it has shown itself to be more open to immigrants willing to work than is the relatively empty, relatively well-protected United States. Using the latest data available, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs puts Singapore’s foreign-born population in 2006 at 42.6 percent. In the U.S., the proverbial nation of immigrants, the foreign born comprised 12.9 percent of the population that same year.

That gap is likely to grow, as neighboring countries spill workers and Singapore’s hungry economy sucks them in. The economy created 176,000 net new jobs last year, with foreigners filling half of those slots, and the Ministry of Manpower predicts that 450,000 new jobs will be created over the next five years. The country’s birth rate is below replacement level and among the lowest in the world, offering little hope to Singaporean isolationists. Employers know they cannot rely on natives to fill their payrolls, and they will increasingly draw from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and elsewhere to stave off shortages.

If larger economies were to introduce guest worker programs like Singapore’s, the impact on migrant welfare would be enormous. The number of foreign-born residents in the wealthy countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is now a mere 7 percent of the total population, as compared with the Asian city-state’s 43 percent. The Harvard economist Dani Rodrik estimates that if OECD nations were to administer small temporary labor schemes, with the imported workers totaling just 3 percent of the countries’ labor forces, the result would “easily yield $200 billion annually for the citizens of developing nations,” dwarfing the $60 billion the same countries offer in official development aid.

Beneath these clean numbers lurks a tangle of ethical quandaries and unanswered questions. For those who want a less restrictive regime, these programs are a compromise and an accommodation. There is no constituency for a policy of open borders in any of the wealthy countries of the OECD, and government-run guest worker programs are a politically viable means of increasing mobility. Like tightly regulated medical marijuana dispensaries, they are a highly regimented alternative to prohibition. In a political environment where full mobility is as unlikely as full drug legalization, such incremental change may be the only alternative to stasis.

In the United States, where guest worker plans have been part of a heated conversation about immigration reform, supporters of mobility rights are operating in an extremely hostile political environment. The events of 9/11 have intensified American nativism, and age-old debates about collective identity are now infused with the lexicon of terror and national security. Five minutes of talk radio should make clear what pro-immigration groups are up against: a fear of chaos, an aversion to illegality, a need for structure and predictability. Singapore, a country best known in the United States for the caning of a graffiti artist, has found a way to combine an obsession with order and a highly fluid economy of movement.

But for supporters of immigrant rights, it has never been clear that this compromise is one worth making. In the United States, opponents of guest worker programs point to historical abuses of Mexican migrants, seemingly threatened ideals of political equality, and America’s history as a land of assimilation and settlement. They question whether the United States can invest in such a program without losing the very values that make it a place worth breaking into. Such moral probity may be heartfelt and is surely anguished, but it ultimately does little to help the poor in the developing world make their lives even a little less wretched.

Guest Workers in Singapore
Gener Manalac said goodbye to his children, and to the Philippines, on June 25, 1993. Things had gone sour for the family ever since the Filipino government refused to renew the lease for Subic Bay, the U.S. naval base where Manalac and his wife earned a solid living for his family of five.

He worked as a crane operator, and she in the military commissary. When the base closed following a contentious political debate in the Philippines, he and his wife were immediately jobless. “The government closed the base,” he explains, “and offered no alternatives.” He describes it as the worst time of his life.

Manalac looked for work but never really expected to find it in central Luzon, where his family waited anxiously as money began to run out. When a recruiter from Bahrain showed up looking for construction workers, he knew his future was no longer in the Philippines. He tried Bahrain, hated it, and returned to look for something else. The something else was Singapore.

Fourteen years later, Manalac is still here. He is now a supervisor for a construction company, and he helps build condos and cluster houses for Singapore’s growing population. His family is still in the Philippines, and he has managed to keep his kids clothed and in school with remittances he sends home monthly. His older daughter is studying to be a nurse, his son a computer engineer. His youngest daughter is 17 and studying English. Manalac has seen his children three times since he left that day in 1993, and he winces as he talks about the separation.

It’s not the experience of fatherhood he might have hoped for, but Manalac is delighted with his good fortune. Fifty-two and no longer trim, he smiles broadly as he describes his climb up the ranks of the construction industry. In 2000 he was promoted; suddenly he was in charge of a team of newly arrived immigrants. He works 15-hour days, six days a week. In what spare time he has, he studies conversational Mandarin in hopes of better communicating with his Chinese coworkers.

And yet Manalac is very much a guest in this country. He says he’ll remain for as long as they’ll have him, though he doesn’t presume to have any right to stay. If he were fired or became unable to work, he’d have to leave within seven days. He is subject to regular medical examinations to ensure that he is HIV-negative. He can’t bring his children here. He can’t bring his wife here. Were his marriage to fail, it would be illegal for him to marry a Singaporean. Were he female, a pregnancy would mean repatriation or abortion. The Singaporean government has made itself very clear: Foreign workers are here to build a nest egg, not to build a nest.

Perhaps the most significant restriction on Manalac is the nature of his work permit and the limits of his freedom to find employment. Only select industries are open to foreigners. On my way to meet Manalac in his apartment in the suburbs, I asked the taxi driver whether he too was a guest here. He laughed. A foreign taxi driver? Absurd.

Manalac is permitted to work only in construction, and only for the employer who brought him here. If he is unhappy with his employer or feels he is being mistreated, he can return to the employment agency and request a new job, but the process is cumbersome and can be difficult to navigate.

None of this seems to bother him in the least. It’s just part of the deal, and the deal has worked out well for him. He says he harbors no resentment toward the government of Singapore: He is angry at his home government for depriving him of a job, not at Singapore for giving him one. He has never really had to wade into the bureaucracy; never had to fight to stay or to change employers. Those that have faced such problems have reason to feel more conflicted about the well-guarded doors Singapore opens for the region’s poor.

If there is one collective experience that should give the world pause about guest worker programs, it is the plight of Indonesian maids. Unlike male workers who are given housing, a day off once a week, and regulated hours, domestic workers often live with families with full control over the terms of their employment. They run a higher risk of abuse than other foreigners, and Asian tabloids are full of horrific headlines to that effect. There are stories of maids being burned with hot irons, scalded with boiling water, sexually abused by male employers and then physically abused by jealous wives.

Behind a locked iron gate in one of Singapore’s outer suburbs live a hundred or so women with stories that might not be quite so tabloid-ready, but painfully illustrate the vulnerabilities of foreign nationals at the mercy of hostile employers. Many claim they have not been paid or have been illegally deployed to do work they weren’t contracted for, and some say they’ve been physically abused. Their cases are wending their way through the court system, and they are biding their time in a shelter set up by a privately funded NGO called the Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics, or HOME.

Adjudication can take a long time. When I visited HOME, a 29-year-old Indonesian woman named Sri Uli Darti explained that she had been living in the shelter for a year and a half, before which she had been doing time in a Singaporean prison. Loquacious and poised, Sri was something of a media star in July 2007, and her self-possession distinguished her from many of the other women who quietly waited along with her in the Singaporean suburbs.

Two years ago, Sri ran away from the home of her employer, Tan Kok Quan, a prominent lawyer with a firm specializing in intellectual property and real estate law. She had been with him and his wife for nearly three years before she became exasperated enough to leave. The pay was too low, she thought, for a now-experienced maid, and Tan wanted her to do work she considered dangerous, like washing windows from perilous heights. She wanted out, so she went to the Indonesian Embassy and asked for shelter.

The embassy didn’t want her; they gave her back to the employment agency that had brought her here. But she wasn’t there long before the police showed up to retrieve her and place her in a cell at Changi Women’s Prison. The lawyer who had employed her had accused her of stealing a bag of rare coins, and he said he could prove it with the remittance slips Sri had left in her room. The slips added up to more than they had paid her, he argued, so she must have been sending the stolen moneyback to her seven siblings and other family in Northern Sumatra.

Sri was terrified and desperately wanted to go home. She could explain the remittance slips: She had a boyfriend who had given her $6,000, which she sent home to her family. Singaporean employers tend to frown on domestic workers with relationships; there is a fear that they will become pregnant and have to be repatriated, leaving their employers liable for the cost of the return trip. (There also seems to be an assumption that foreign maids are especially libidinous.) “No one would believe me,” she recalls.

In Singapore, the state provides legal counsel to foreign workers only if they face the death penalty. Those who can’t afford it, and few can, hope for pro bono help. As expected, Sri lost. She was sentenced to pay S$3,000 that she didn’t have—the equivalent of about $2,050 in U.S. currency, approximately a year of her pay—and to spend two weeks in jail.

HOME volunteer Lim Tanguy Yuteck visited her in prison and offered to take her case for free, if she wanted to appeal. “She wept during the entire interview,” Lim recalls, “and looked as if her entire world had collapsed.” HOME paid her S$10,000 bail, and Sri began a long period of waiting at the shelter.

Finally, on July 14, 2007, a high court reheard Sri’s case. The judge deemed the prosecution’s case too speculative, and she was acquitted based on lack of evidence. The Straits Times ran a picture of her bawling with relief under the headline “Maid’s 2-Year Nightmare Ends with Acquittal.”

Guest Workers in America
“Give the Senate some credit,” James Suroweicki wrote in the June 11 New Yorker: “In shaping the current immigration-reform bill, it has come up with one idea that almost everybody hates.” Hates was an understatement. President George W. Bush had been pushing for some sort of guest worker program since before the 9/11 attacks, and as that idea inched closer to realization in 2007, his critics grew more vitriolic. Right-wingers who fervently believed the U.S. government would succeed in rebuilding the Middle East excoriated Bush for his starry-eyed idealism, and left-wingers who wanted amnesty suddenly came out against the entrance of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants.

The New York Times complained that no worker should be sent home; National Review complained that no worker would go home. The New Republic said the plan fell within “the tradition of the African slave ship,” and the right-wing Center for Immigration Studies, which wants more deportations of peaceful undocumented workers, called it “morally dubious.”

In Asia and the Gulf States, the term guest worker is most often associated with domestic workers like Sri and construction workers like Manalac. In the United States, the term is almost universally associated with farm workers, and very often with abused, impoverished, exploited farm workers. Memories of the United States’ largest experiment with transient labor have not aged well, and they haunt proposals to bring more workers, agricultural or otherwise, across the border.

The original Bracero Program was an exception to the restrictive 1917 Immigration Act, which prohibited both illiterate immigrants and those “induced…to migrate to this country by offers or promises of employment.” Mexicans, needed to tend farms and lay railroad track, would not be subject to these restrictions. The Bracero Program known to most came later, between 1942 and 1964, during which time millions of Mexicans found work on U.S. farms.

The second Bracero Program was an agreement be-tween two governments. The U.S. government would permit entry of migrant workers and collect paycheck deductions of 10 percent to be deposited in accounts in Mexico. During their time here, migrants were at times housed in dreary camps, used to break strikes, and subjected to abuse. Many returned home to find their promised savings nonexistent.

When President Bush raised the specter of a temporary worker program in 2004, opponents were many and bracero was the first word on their lips. Opponents also spoke of Germany’s experience with Turkish guest workers in the 1960s, many of whom came on one-year visas and never left. As the novelist Max Frisch put it: ‘’We wanted workers, but we got people instead.” The workers who stayed depended heavily on the German welfare state, but they were not granted the option of German citizenship until very recently. The program’s failures have contributed to the idea that “temporary immigration” is a bureaucratic misnomer, a utopian futility akin to a “drug-free zone.”

These historical examples illuminate the obstacles any guest worker plan faces, but they can obscure what we know to be possible in countries like Singapore: large-scale temporary migration. They also fail to account for the guest worker schemes in place in the United States right now. The H2-B Visa program brings thousands of au pairs, hotel workers, and farm workers to the United States every year. Aspects of the program are cumbersome and problematic, but it is not associated with high rates of permanent migration.

Any guest worker scheme is going to involve a large and fallible bureaucracy; such programs are an alternative to prohibition, and their terms must be made palatable to many constituencies if they are to survive. In order to placate Singaporeans who worry that foreigners will push them out of work, the government imposes levies on employers who hire non-Singaporean workers and sets limits on the percentage of a company’s workforce that can be foreign. Manalac, for instance, costs his employer S$80 a month in fees and contributes to the “dependency ceiling” on foreign hires.

Other functional programs have devised a series of incentives that encourage workers to return home. Some, such as South Korea’s, involve some amount of money being withheld until workers leave. Other countries actively enlist the help of governments such as the Philippines, which has an incentive to maintain the goodwill of countries that employ Filipino citizens. Dani Rodrik, the Harvard economist, has suggested decreasing the sending countries’ quotas relative to the number of immigrants who fail to return, which would in turn encourage such countries to provide incentives to returning workers.

In the United States, the plan President Bush was pushing drew crucial lessons from the bracero experience and other experiments in extending mobility rights. Immigrants would need a job offer in order to gain entry, but—crucially—they could change jobs once here. Employers would not be able to threaten workers with deportation, but only with unemployment, the same threat hanging over native-born workers’ heads. The program was designed to maximize opportunities while minimizing abuse, affording foreigners the same protections as their American coworkers.

As originally conceived, the new program would issue 400,000 two-year visas, each renewable up to three times. In May 2007, the Senate slashed that 400,000 to 200,000. In June, they inserted a sunset provision ensuring that the program would end in five years if not renewed. Later that month, they put the whole tortured immigration bill, the largest proposed overhaul in decades, out of its misery.

If support for a guest worker program was hard to find among elites, it wasn’t among Americans generally: A May 2007 USA Today/Gallup poll found 66 percent of the nation supporting “a program allowing people from other countries to be guest workers in the U.S. for a temporary period of time, and then be required to return to their home country.” In 2006, 79 percent told Time pollsters that they supported a guest worker program for undocumented workers already in the United States.

But opposition to an American guest worker program is loud and deeply impassioned, if not broadly shared. Though it’s probably the only politically viable way to significantly increase legal immigration, supporters of immigrant rights are as likely as not to oppose a program that invites immigrants to work but not to stay. “There is little that is more antithetical to the American ideal than a guest worker,” explained the center-left editors of The New Republic in April of 2006, echoing a 2005 piece from the hard-right Human Events that explained, in fine detail, why the “guest worker plan is un-American,” and foreshadowing a May New York Times editorial that called the guest worker program “a shameful repudiation of American tradition.” The pieces referred to different plans, but none of them bothered with the details; the broad outlines of any guest worker plan strike many as offensive.

“Until now,” the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly wrote in 2005, “the American ideal of an immigrant has been someone who comes here with the ambition to work harder, earn more, save more, perhaps start a business, and succeed in the free-enterprise system.” Guest workers also come to earn and save, but Schlafly was getting at something else: The American ideal of an immigrant is someone who becomes an American.

Because U.S. immigration is so readily conflated with Americanization, the mythology of America’s immigrant past cuts against acceptance of a guest worker program. The story of the American Dream does not include a chapter for those who want to take the money they’ve earned and buy a home with a white picket fence and two-car garage in Mexico. The narrative allows no space for transience. Even the terms we use, from “anchor baby,” to “chain migration,” belie an inability to accept the essentially fluid nature of world migration patterns.

“There is that traditional mythology—that the rest of the world is just dying to be American,” says the Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey. “In the past that wasn’t true. There was heavy return migration of Italians and Poles in the 20th century, but it gets lost in historical memory.”

Because the collective memory is largely shaped by the immigrants who stay, it’s easy to forget how many came and left. According to the historian Mark Wyman, author of Round-Trip to America, at least a quarter of the 23 million immigrants who came to the states between 1880 and 1930 eventually made their way back home. The return migration rate for Italians was even higher, at 50 percent.

Statistics show a similar fluidity today, though these numbers tend to get lost in our culturally narcissistic debates over contemporary immigration patterns. Massey heads Princeton’s Mexican Migration Project, which has been collecting data on immigration for 25 years. In 1997, the Public Policy Institute analyst Belinda Reyes used that data to conduct a study of 42,000 documented and undocumented immigrants from western Mexico. Fifty percent, she found, returned in two years; 70 percent in 10 years. The immigrants who decided to stay were also the most desirable from a policy perspective: the most educated and the most integrated into the labor market. Those most likely to leave were uneducated men—the demographic that peoples guest worker programs from Saudi Arabia to Singapore.

One would expect return migration to increase as the cost of travel drops, and indeed this is what researchers have found. But the cost of border crossing has risen sharply since 1986, when the Immigration Reform and Control Act militarized the border. Human smugglers charge more for their services, and the risk of death has trebled. The result, says Massey, is that return migration has halved. “People used to circulate, but now they don’t, because the cost of reentry is too high. Rather than go out and have to face the gauntlet again, they just stay,” he says.

Massey attributes the growth in the population of undocumented workers over the past two decades to the fact that circulation is more difficult than at any point in history. “In-migration has been fairly flat for 20 years,” he explains, “The explosive growth we realized in the 1990s and 2000 is mainly due to a reduction in out-migration.” Militarization of the border has encouraged huge numbers of workers to stay up north, cementing the idea that American immigration is intrinsically permanent.

Tolerating Inequality
HOME is one of a few new Singaporean organizations advocating improvements in the treatment of guest workers, and if the burgeoning immigrant support infrastructure in Hong Kong is any guide, there will be more to come. These nascent organizations suggest a decreased tolerance for the abuse of foreigners within Singaporean borders. “The Ministry of Manpower has been in the dark ages for the past century,” says Jolovan Wham, HOME’s executive director. But as Jolovan deals with a phone call from a Bangladeshi worker on his mobile phone, an administrative call on his landline, and a family of Sri Lankan refugees in our presence, he explains that the concept of foreign worker rights is becoming slightly less alien.

For HOME, “equal rights” means a minimum wage, decent housing, and at least a single day off from work every week for women like Sri. They’d like foreign workers to be able to move between jobs, and to move into whatever sectors they like. As Jolovan tells it, the government has a total of two responses for everything HOME advocates: “social stability” and, oddly, “free markets.”

Employers are tied to the foreign workers they sponsor through S$5,000 bonds they receive only when the worker is repatriated. If workers were allowed some amount of freedom to change jobs, there would likely be periods during which they would be jobless, leaving no employer responsible for them. “The government is afraid there will be riots,” says Jolovan, “afraid that large numbers of workers hanging around without jobs will lead to social unrest.”

The government’s response to HOME’s request for more regulation is to defer to the market. But given the state-created lack of mobility within the labor market, it’s not at all clear that this makes sense. Workers can’t shop for a good wage once they’re in Singapore, so the usual reasons for giving competition free rein are not in play. “It’s not free,” says John Gee, president of Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), another foreign worker advocate organization. “That’s the nonsense about the argument. In so many issues we come up with, we’re told, oh well it’s better left up to the market. But the market isn’t operating.”

Despite their criticisms, neither of the organizations that represent foreign workers is pushing for anything like an end to the program. It’s easy to see why: The gains to the immigrants themselves are highly visible. Talking to immigrants in Singapore, it can seem as if the city-state is supporting all of Southeast Asia. Manalac lives with four other foreign workers in a spacious apartment in the suburbs; each is supporting dependents back home. Reyaz Uddin, a young Filipina accountant, is helping to send five of her seven brothers and sisters to school back home. “Also some nephews and nieces,” she explains, “we’re a close-knit family.” Her pay doubled the moment she started working in Singapore, and she seems not at all perturbed by the responsibility of caring for her family. “Maybe I’ll go to Hong Kong next,” she says, with the air of a well-off retiree deciding where to summer.

Little India is dotted with remittance centers, small windowed shops with plastic chairs full of men waiting to send money home to mothers, wives, and children. The need to send cash home has spawned an industry in itself, with over 100 remittance transfer companies now competing to send cash faster, cheaper, and more reliably from Singapore to origin countries. According to a 2006 report from the Asian Development Bank, immigrants in Singapore are sending home between $500 million and $700 million annually.

Thanks to the efficiencies of the remittance system, these immigrants are able to direct their money to parents and children rather than watch it dissipate as entire villages stake a claim. Some guest workers hesitate to visit their homes simply because, as comparatively wealthy and newly high-status returning workers, they will be asked to share their new wealth with distant cousins and relatives they didn’t know they had. In a 2005 study of Bangladeshi migrants in Singapore, the sociologists Md. Mizanur Rahman of the Asia Research Institute and Lian Kwen Fee of the National University of Singapore write that Bangladeshi villagers see money earned abroad as “easy money,” to be generously expended.

The same analysis found that migrants spend a considerable amount of money on “prestige goods” that will help accord them high-status positions when they return. One of Manalac’s five housemates has stuffed his closet-like bedroom with an electric guitar collection and a flat-screen TV. Migrants spend money “conspicuously in order to indicate that it has been earned easily (which is prestigious) and are lavish in their generosity to fellow villagers as well as to village causes in order to secure the goodwill of the community and a higher social standing.” Back home in Bangladesh, prominently displayed Singaporean goods reflect “families’ access to the foreign labor market, a source of prestige for their households.” Families who have sent guest workers abroad are referred to as “Singaporean families.” When outsiders visit a Singaporean family they expect to see goods bought in Singapore, all of which signal heightened status.

It is possible to acquire enough skills and time in Singapore to become a permanent resident, and therefore exempt from visa renewals or employment levies. The vast majority of low-skill foreign workers don’t plan on it, and no one expects them to try to assimilate while they’re here. No one demands that they learn English or teach their kids Singaporean history. “Hierarchy and segregation are part and parcel of the Singaporean psyche,” says Leong Chan Hoong, a psychologist at Singapore National University and an expert in the public perception of foreign workers. “Because of that, you are able to accept foreign workers more readily. You are assured that you will have some space, that your social, spatial identity will not be compromised with the huge influx of foreigners coming in.”

Superficially, it’s strange that states like Singapore and the United Arab Emirates are more welcoming to large numbers of immigrants than the United States and Western Europe. Singaporeans exhibit personality traits that predict hostility to immigrants—a comfort with hierarchy and traditionalism, for example—while residents of the U.S. and U.K. are more likely to exhibit immigrant-friendly traits like egalitarianism and openness to change.

Partly, this is explained by contrasting modes of government. Singapore’s authoritarian regime is unabashedly pro-immigration; it’s not clear that a democratic Singapore would be so welcoming. As important, Chan Hoong explains, is Singapore’s willingness to accommodate conservatives through policies of segregation that Americans would probably find odious. Singaporean conservatives mirror the American right in their fear of cultural erosion and social disorder, but they have largely been placated by a system that invites immigration while emphasizing legality and distance. A comfort with hierarchy expresses itself as a comfort with inequality, and countries that can tolerate inequality can allow huge influxes of poor people.

The Great Migration
To liberal American opponents of guest worker programs, Sri and Manalac are branded second-class citizens, members of an underclass. The editors of The New Republic locate them within a tradition of slavery. It would be better for Manalac and Sri, in other words, if they’d never had the opportunity to come, best if they’d stayed home and scraped by. Their decision to renew their status simply signals the continuation of this confusion and a false consciousness that propels them toward exploitation.

This ordering of priorities—equality first, migration later—should strike students of American history as odd. Over the course of the 20th century, millions of America’s second-class citizens made progress in just the opposite way. They moved north, to cities where they weren’t always welcome and certainly weren’t treated as equals. The story of black progress in America is intimately connected to their mobility rights, and a North that refused to let them travel until they had attained full equality would have greatly decelerated their political, social, and economic advance.

Between 1914 and 1970, 7 million Southern descendents of slaves left en masse for cities in the North and West. The changes wrought during these years—especially during the peak decade of the 1940s—would horrify anyone crying crisis in 2007. Chicago was 2 percent black in 1916, 33 percent black by 1970.

As in Singapore and the United States today, laborers were needed. The cause today is prosperity; the cause then was war. Soldiers heading to the battlefield left labor shortages behind, even as World War I was stimulating the industrial economy. Robert S. Abbott, founder and editor of The Chicago Defender, used his position at the country’s most widely circulated black paper to launch a campaign encouraging the migration; or as he called it, the exodus. For Abbott, this was biblical—a “flight out of Egypt” and on to “the Promised Land.” Supplementing the rhetoric was practical information for helping the poor black Southerner move North: rail timetables and job listings.

White Southerners typically refused to circulate The Defender, and with good reason. The paper was encouraging their labor supply, once literally captive, to pack up and leave. Many of those who did leave were escaping a sharecropping system that often as not left blacks in deep debt at the end of the growing season. Southern whites threatened to throw recruiting agents in jails and arrested blacks near train stations for “vagrancy,” but were unsuccessful in stanching the flow of bodies. The gains for blacks were just too huge.

“That moment in the black rural South,” Nicholas Lemann writes in his history of the Great Migration, The Promised Land, “was one of the few in American history when virtually every member of a large class of people was guaranteed an immediate quadrupling of income, at least, simply by relocating to a place that was only a long day’s journey away.” In 1925 the Howard University philosopher Alain Locke wrote of the “New Negro,” a self-actualized, assertive, urban black man borne of a generation of serfs, elevated from the sad status of his parents simply because he fled the rural South. “Money and dignity,” writes Lemann, “were indisputably in greater supply in Chicago than in the [Mississippi] Delta.”

Not even the effusive Abbott would argue that the blacks who stepped off the train from the Delta during WWI, or at any point afterward, were stumbling into an egalitarian utopia. Housing and labor discrimination were endemic. Like Manalac and Sri, Chicago blacks could not drive yellow taxis or marry anyone they wanted. They had to be physically present to fight for space in white neighborhoods, to picket for equal pay, to agitate for their civil rights. It’s harder to demand just treatment from behind a fence.

The gains for immigrants today are at least as great as they were for itinerant blacks during the first half of the 20th century, simply because the differences in pay for the same work have ballooned. “The gaps in income across countries are now much larger than gaps within countries,” the Harvard economist Lant Pritchett writes in his book Let Their People Come. “Nearly all of the earnings gap between workers in poor countries and rich countries appears to be due to their location, not their personal characteristics.” Pritchett argues that no development intervention comes close to helping individuals from developing nations the way simple, temporary relocation does, and a guest worker program would allow these gains to be broadly shared.

Moral Harms
This dynamic of mobility and advocacy has profound implications for the immigrants of the future. In Singapore, maid abuse is becoming less acceptable and is increasingly seen as déclassé. The government is insisting on better housing conditions for workers as NGOs draw attention to unscrupulous employers. And yet it’s not clear how much the government can liberalize its immigration regime without engendering a backlash that cuts against mobility. A U.S. program would require the same awkward balancing act between compassion and political viability. The existence of a program would depend on a supportive political constituency, but that constituency would likely erode if such workers’ advocates demanded that immigrants receive public services.

As Americans struggle with the implications of immigrants who come to live but not to stay, their single greatest objection to a guest worker plan may have nothing to do with migrant well-being. The gains for immigrants are demonstrably too big and the need too great to lend credibility to those who cast all guest workers as victims. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, migrants send $62.3 billion in remittances to Latin American and the Caribbean last year, keeping 8 to 10 million families above the poverty line. The unexplored opportunities for mutually advantageous cooperation are massive and undeniable. But it seems dirty. “It simply feels exploitative and un-American to allow migrants in without giving them a shot at becoming citizens,” writes Jacob Weisberg in Slate.

The economist Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard, has expressed this objection in somewhat loftier terms. In a critique of Harvard’s Pritchett, Summers explains: “Lant’s kind of compassionate libertarianism carries the risk of a morally problematic coarsening that we resist in many other ways.” The problem with guest worker programs, in other words, has nothing to do with the good of guest workers, and everything to do with the moral harm that proximate poverty might cause to their hosts. Allowing workers entry to the United States might be mutually beneficial for employer and employee, all the while producing corrosive cultural externalities. Summers seems to think that guest workers will inure Americans to a system of class stratification and undermine a shared, naive sense of global solidarity.

The moral calculus, then, is to be weighed between the welfare of potential workers and the preservation of an idealized American narrative. Does it reflect better on the American character to lock poor people out than to permit them entry on limited terms? Guest worker programs do clash with deeply held mythologies about our relationship to the global poor. We live in a state of relative political equality nested awkwardly within a deeply unequal world, and it can seem better, kinder, to keep the inequality outside, walling it off and keeping our hands clean. Perhaps American egalitarianism, like a dress too precious to be worn, is a value too dear to expose to the real world. As the essayist Richard Rodriguez, himself the son of Mexican immigrants, has written, “Americans prefer unknowing.”

In the end, the best argument for a guest worker program isn’t Manalac’s experience, but Sri’s. I met Sri a few days after she had been acquitted. She was planning her first trip back to Indonesia in four years, two years of which she had spent battling false accusations in a foreign system stacked against her. Asked what she would do next, she said she’d like to earn some capital to start a business in Indonesia. How would she earn that capital? She smiled. “I’ll come back to Singapore.”

Host countries are right to worry about the moral complexities of a legally divided society. But if they lock down the borders and slam shut the gates, it won’t be Sri they are protecting.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at Reason.

Workers of the World...What?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 11:43:00 EDT

In July, the snazzy futuristic Burj Dubai gained the official title of the tallest building in the world. But more importantly, it’s currently the world’s tallest unfinished building. And this week it looked like the capstone might be significantly delayed when thousands of non-citizen workers went on strike for the first time in the United Arab Emirates, following up on a construction worker riot last March.

In the United Arab Emirates, striking is outlawed and labor union formation is forbidden. The workers sought a wage increase of between $140 and $270 a month (the average income in Abu Dhabi is $29,175), improved transport to construction sites, and better housing. The foreign workers are usually tied to a single commercial outfit, and live in housing blocks owned by the company or the government.

The strike was resolved with a carrot and a (big) stick, as Dubai started proceedings to deport 4,000 workers while simultaneously promising to crack down on employers guilty of health and safety violations. On the terms of the deal, workers promised to return to work today. (Some returned to work yesterday, and the government claimed the strike was officially over, but at least 2,000 workers at Sun Engineering & Contracting and Construction Co. remained off the job site as of this writing.)

Senior labor ministry official Humaid bin Deemas told the Arabic newspaper Emarat Al-Youm there would be a “deportation of 4,000 laborers who went on strike and committed acts of vandalism.” He added, "The laborers do not want to work and we will not force them to."

Which is fair enough. Since foreign workers frequently can’t stay in Dubai without employment, being deported is the inevitable consequence of firing. They’re mostly from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and most send money back to their families.

Actually, thanks to the booming Indian economy, many workers are ready to go home. In June, the government offered free one-way plane tickets to illegal workers hoping to leave. There were 280,000 applicants.

Still, it’s refreshing to see unions doing what they were designed for: aggregating workers and agitating for better conditions using a resource they actually own—their own labor. They’re bravely acting without the benefit of the special government protections that unions enjoy in the U.S. and Europe. In fact, they’re striking in spite of government aggression against them, and against significant odds.

The businesses in the UAE were not given the choice of dealing with strikers on their own terms, so the situation in Dubai was far from a pure labor market interaction. And business and government are so intertwined in the UAE that it may not have occurred to them to ask for it.

In fact, the strikers were mostly demanding that existing government decrees on worker welfare be enforced. Last fall, United Arab Emirates prime minister and the emir of Dubai Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum issued requirements for improving the lot of foreign workers, which resulted in the shutting down of about 100 businesses that failed to comply in the last year.

But yesterday the chief of police in Dubai promised to do better. "The bosses of construction firms which fail to provide appropriate working conditions to their staff will be taken to court," General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim said in a statement.

"Dubai police will carry out inspection tours of workplaces to check whether businesses are respecting the instructions of Prime Minister and Vice President Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum."

This is just one in a series of recent stories about Dubai’s bumpy road toward Westerization and/or modernization. The United Arab Emirates boasts “the most modern legal system among the Arab countries,” which is a little like being the most talented Spice Girl (they’re back on tour soon, by the by). And you have to give them some credit for not killing the strikers, even if unionizing remains illegal for now.

It’s been a while since unions in the U.S. undertook anything so brave or impressive.

At the same time that workers in Dubai were striking, U.S. television writers were gearing up to strike over rights to DVDs and Internet downloads. This leaves the American people facing the tragic prospect of a season of 24 with only 9 hours.

In Ireland this week, teaching assistants for special ed classes struck, with special needs kids stuck at home while pay and the terms of teacher evaluations were squabbled over.

In celebration of November, the French planned a month of strikes to defend the right of people in certain professions to retire with a pension at 50 years old.

Meanwhile, 11,000 employees of the Kroger grocery store chain are teetering on the edge of a strike because of proposed pay increases—an increase of 10 cents and hour for baggers and 95 cents an hour for department heads—are too low. The union also said it was worried about the funding of pension plans. Kroger points out that it is experiencing intense competition from Wal-Mart, whose workers are not unionized.

Kroger advertised for scabs at $10 to $15 an hour, but it was reported that the striking workers expected solidarity from other unions, who wouldn’t cross the picket line to make deliveries, work, or shop.

If workers really wanted to show solidarity with their beleaguered brother and sister laborers, rather than hitting the Wal-Mart for their 6-pack tonight instead of the Kroger, they might look to the workers in Dubai, who are carrying on the tradition of the original union organizers rather more impressively than they are. Workers of the world unite, indeed.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor for reason.

Travis Shrugged

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:04:00 EDT

New York's cabbies go on strike to protest new city regulations:

Since Oct. 1, all yellow cabs have been required to carry an onboard GPS and credit-card machine, as well as a television on the back of the driver's seat that plays advertisements and short programs. The devices were required as part of a 2004 deal that increased fares by 25%.

According to [Taxi Workers Alliance chief Bhairavi] Desai, there are glitches with the GPS devices, which she said slow the meters and take minutes to load. The TVs heat up the driver's seat, and credit cards lead to a 5% surcharge for cabbies - problems she said the city has ignored.

[Via Roderick Long.]

Living Wages for Thee...

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 10:47:00 EDT

The workers who clean Baltimore's Camden Yards baseball stadium are planning a hunger strike to protest their $7 per hour wages. The stadium is the largest employer of the city's homeless day laborers. The kicker, though, is that the Maryland legislature recently passed a "living wage" bill, setting the minimum at $11.30 per hour. But while the bill covers any business with state contracts in the Baltimore area, the state government is exempt, and Camden is owned by the state of Maryland.

Such double standards aren't new to the living wage debate. The labor activist group ACORN is largely credited with jump-starting the national living wage movement. But ACORN itself has a notoriously shabby record when it comes to paying its own workers. In fact, not only did the group once sue the state of California to exempt itself from the very living wage it helped the state to pass, ACORN actually used free market critiques of the minimum wage in its brief (ACORN argued that if it had to pay existing workers more, it wouldn't be able to hire more workers).

As for Maryland, this would be the same state that attempted to pass legislation directed solely at Wal-Mart because of the allegedly low wages and benefits Wal-Mart pays its workers. Average starting wage at Wal-Mart: Just under $10 per hour. Average Camden clean-up worker pay: $7 per hour.

Labortarian Link

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 14:29:00 EDT

Herbert Spencer was a laissez-faire libertarian best known for coining the term "survival of the fittest"; he is frequently caricatured as a social Darwinist who despised the disadvantaged. In honor of Labor Day -- or just to see how far off a caricature can be -- read his surprisingly supportive statements about trade unions and worker-owned cooperatives.

Starbucks Baristas Take a Stand, the Stand

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 09:30:00 EDT

Starbucks baristas have been trying to unionize for a while now, with organizers tossing out stats like "only 42% of Starbucks workers use its health-care plan." Last week's National Labor Relations Board hearing regarding Starbucks' alleged intimidation of pro-union employees featured some real gems:

By the review dated Aug. 5, 2006, the day he was fired, his manager wrote that he "failed to create a positive work experience for his fellow partners." The day he was fired, [Daniel] Gross [a former barista involved in the NLRB case] told managers "the workers united will never be defeated," he said in a near-monotone on the witness stand.

But nothing is better than this sassy quote from one Starbucks lawyer:

"Starbucks is a multibillion-dollar corporation. So I guess that must mean we're bad," said Starbucks attorney Daniel Nash in his opening statement July 9. "I know that the IWW, apparently in their zeal against capitalism or corporations, they don't like that. They don't like any big companies."

Via Romenesko's Starbucks Gossip site.

No Free Server Space, No Peace

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 11:32:00 EDT

I guess I can sorta' see the left-wing appeal of a "Unionize the Bloggers!" cry. It's got that "let's carry this important leftist institution into the 21st Century" kind of vibe.

I guess the question is, against whom would they be unionizing? Moveable Type? Google? Right-wing blogs? The article suggests they'd be agitating for health insurance (paid for by whom?), better ad rates (bloggers set their own rates!), and press credentials. The latter is especially odd. If I only give press credentials to traditional media for my event, left-wing blogs are going to protest by, what, not attending an event they couldn't have attended anyway?

"Collective bargaining power" sounds all righteous and stuff, but again, who would be at the other end of the bargaining table? There is no corporate overlord from whom to demand better wages and benefits. Yes, many bloggers toil away at their keyboards for long hours and little pay. But um...it's a hobby, folks. If you're working too hard at your blog, stop working at your blog. Want a longer vacation? Take one!

Perhaps this passage clears things up:

Sitting at a panel titled "A Union for Bloggers: It's Time to Organize" at this week's YearlyKos Convention for bloggers in Chicago, Burgard said she'd welcome a chance to join a unionized blogging community.
"I sure would like to have that union bug on my Web site," said Burgard, a blogger who uses the moniker Bendy Girl.
Madrak hopes that regardless the form, the labor movement ultimately will help bloggers pay for medical bills. It's important, she said, because some bloggers can spend hours a day tethered to computers as they update their Web sites.
"Blogging is very intense -- physically, mentally," she said. "You're constantly scanning for news. You're constantly trying to come up with information that you think will mobilize your readers. In the meantime, you're sitting at a computer and your ass is getting wider and your arm and neck and shoulder are wearing out because you're constantly using a mouse."

In other words, she wants someone to pay her for her hobby. Me too!

I'm also puzzled as to what sort of bargaining power a lefty bloggers' union would actually have. Will they wage de-linking campaigns? Boycotts? Strikes? If all the left-wing bloggers went on strike tomorrow, I'm fairly sure the Internets would survive. Factories would still churn out widgets. The subways would still run. Hell, a strike might marginally speed up load times. Also, where would they picket?

The UAW's Health-Care Dreams

info@reason.com (Shikha Dalmia) — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 12:09:00 EDT

It is not within the power of United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger to save GM, Ford and Chrysler. But it is certainly within his power to kill them. Whether he chooses to do so will soon become clear. What are arguably the most critical contract negotiations in the history of Motown's auto industry began this week.

America's former Big Three auto makers are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy—Ford's second-quarter profit notwithstanding. And one big reason for their dire state, apart from collective amnesia over how to make hit cars, is their ever-escalating health-care expenses. Every car they produce, they plaintively assert, contains $1,500 in health costs that their Japanese competitors don't face.

But Mr. Gettelfinger has already declared that he is not in a "concessionary mood." UAW workers at Ford and GM agreed to a health-care cost-sharing deal during an unusual round of mid-contract negotiations in 2005. Closing the competition gap with Japanese auto makers now, Mr. Gettelfinger insists, requires not more concessions by auto workers—but a Japanese-style government health-care system for all workers.

"We pay more, but get less," he thundered to roaring applause at a recent NAACP luncheon.

Doubtless, some of Mr. Gettelfinger's tough talk is posturing, calculated to extract the best possible deal from auto companies. Yet his perennial calls for a national health-care system -- echoed by leading Democratic presidential candidates -- affect the dynamics at the bargaining table: By feeding the notion that Japanese workers are getting a better health-care deal than UAW workers, they make it harder for Mr. Gettelfinger to make reasonable compromises and sell them to his rank-and-file.

But do Japanese workers really live in some single-payer, health-care heaven where all their medical needs are covered by general taxpayers with no cost to them? Hardly.

The Japanese system comprises three basic insurance plans: one for the self-employed and the unemployed, including retirees under 70; one for the elderly over 70; and one for all private- and public-sector employees. The employee plan is not just completely self-financed, with no taxpayer support. It actually subsidizes the other two, an arrangement that is becoming increasingly unsustainable as Japan's population ages. (Both Toyota and Honda declined to give an estimate of their current or future health-care premium burden.)

The employee plan requires a premium equal to 9.5% of a worker's annual income. Employees themselves pay about 45% of the premiums from their paychecks, their employers the rest. This works out to $1,557 for an employee with an annual income of $36,500—average wages for a blue-collar Japanese auto worker—according to figures provided by the Japanese Ministry of Health and Labor Welfare.

But that's not all Japanese workers are on the hook for. Working families also face a 30% co-pay—capped at $677 per month for a mid-income family—for medical expenses such as in-patient and out-patient hospital charges, drugs, doctor's visits and diagnostic tests. Because these services are exceedingly cheap, thanks to massive price controls, in practice the average Japanese family pays only about $720 a year in co-pays. This adds up to total out-of-pocket annual expenses of about $2,300 for every Japanese household, which is comparable to what active UAW workers pay after the 2005 deal in absolute dollars. But relative to their income, Japanese workers bear a far bigger burden than UAW workers.

Even that isn't the full story. In the event of a catastrophic or chronic illness requiring prolonged hospitalization, a UAW worker faces no further expenses. A Japanese worker who hits his co-pay cap each month would be out of pocket up to $10,000 a year—about 25% of his annual pay-check and five times more than a UAW worker under similar circumstances. This puts a huge strain on some Japanese families, forcing them to default on their hospital bills. Asahi Shimbun, Japan's respected national daily, reported that Japanese hospitals lost $180 million in unpaid patient bills in 2004.

UAW workers get a better deal not only than Japanese workers, but other American workers as well.

Before the 2005 "givebacks," the Detroit Three companies picked up the entire health-care tab for all their hourly workers—active, retired, dependents and, incredibly, even laid-off workers till they found other jobs. Workers were not required to pay any premiums, deductibles or co-pays-except for routine physical exams and prescription drugs. The 2005 deal left these benefits virtually untouched for retirees with pension incomes below $8,000. But for the first time ever it began requiring more well-off retirees to cough up $252 in annual premiums for family coverage and another $500 in total annual deductibles. In short, for a grand total of $752 in out-of-pocket annual costs, UAW retirees and their spouses get full medical coverage for life. Given the huge retiree population that the Big Three support—GM has three times more retirees than active workers—this has saddled them with a combined unfunded health-care liability exceeding $100 billion.

By contrast, 90% of retirees in other American companies don't get any employer-provided coverage after 65, when they become Medicare-eligible. Such couples, according to an analysis by Fidelity Investments last year, are typically on the hook for $10,000 in out-of-pocket annual costs for Medicare co-pays and other expenses not covered by the program, or 10 times more than UAW couples.

Meanwhile, the only concession that active UAW workers made in 2005 was to defer $1 an hour of their 2006 pay raise toward a UAW-controlled Voluntary Employees' Beneficiary Association (VEBA) fund. On average, this translates into roughly $2,000 in VEBA contributions per UAW worker per year. Some of the returns from the fund's investments subsidize the coverage of current retirees. But the rest are tucked away for the workers' own retirement coverage. In other words, by setting aside about 4% of their current wages annually, UAW workers secure not just all their medical needs now, but for life. In comparison, salaried workers with families contribute more than twice as much as UAW workers—$2,500 in premiums and another $1,600 in deductibles and co-pays—for just their current health care needs, according to two separate surveys conducted by Kaiser Foundation and Hewitt Associates last year.

What all of this shows is that the so-called competition gap that Motown auto makers and the UAW complain about is created by the lavish health-care and pension deals they wrote themselves—not by Japan's nationalized health care system. Indeed, it is often overlooked that Japanese auto makers import less than 45% of the cars they sell in the U.S., and the percentage will likely drop further, as Toyota plans to expand its share of U.S.-made cars to two-thirds of all vehicles sold in America in the next three years.

Active hourly workers at Japanese "transplants" face out-of-pocket costs not much higher than their UAW counterparts. The big difference, however, is that upon retirement they don't get limitless medical coverage. Instead, they get a fixed amount of money to buy supplemental Medicare coverage.

American auto makers too are hoping to cap their health-care liability to retirees by convincing Mr. Gettelfinger to accept a deal under which they would put a lump sum of money into a fund that the UAW would use to buy coverage for its members. Mr. Gettelfinger signed off on a similar arrangement with Dana, a large auto supplier, when it went into bankruptcy last year, but is reportedly not convinced that this would be advantageous for Big Three retirees.

UAW workers still enjoy a health-care deal that no one else in America or Japan—or quite possibly the planet—does. Yet Mr. Gettelfinger said last week that the 2005 health-care givebacks were the toughest decision he ever made in his entire career. This is a startling admission that reflects the depth of the UAW's entitlement mentality, and its detachment from the world that its fellow Americans inhabit. But such lavish expectations are unsustainable under any system—American or Japanese. This is a reality that Mr. Gettelfinger must accept. Otherwise, he may well push U.S. auto makers over the cliff—and his comrades with them.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at the Reason Foundation. This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

"Hired Feet" Protest Low Wages--For Low Wages

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 12:46:00 EDT

Unions hire homeless to do their picketing for them--for 8 bucks and hour with no benefits:

The picketers marching in a circle in front of a downtown Washington office building chanting about low wages do not seem fully focused on their message.
Many have arrived with large suitcases or bags holding their belongings, which they keep in sight. Several are smoking cigarettes. One works a crossword puzzle. Another bangs a tambourine, while several drum on large white buckets. Some of the men walking the line call out to passing women, "Hey, baby." A few picketers gyrate and dance while chanting: "What do we want? Fair wages. When do we want them? Now."
Although their placards identify the picketers as being with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters, they are not union members.
They're hired feet, or, as the union calls them, temporary workers, paid $8 an hour to picket. Many were recruited from homeless shelters or transitional houses. Several have recently been released from prison. Others are between jobs.
"It's about the cash," said Tina Shaw, 44, who lives in a House of Ruth women's shelter and has walked the line at various sites. "We're against low wages, but I'm here for the cash."

But don't worry. The union helped at least one person get a decent job:

William R. Strange, 41, said he started working as a for-hire picket two years ago when he lived in a homeless shelter on New York Avenue. He is now paid $12 an hour because he plays the buckets during the demonstrations.
A few months ago, after a day's picketing across from the National Geographic Society at 17th and M streets NW, Strange went inside and filled out a job application. He now loads trucks for National Geographic's warehouse at night. He still pickets during the day.

Germans have been renting protesters for a while now.

Via Marginal Revolution 's Markets in Everything series.

Obama, "The Salesman"

jblanks@reason.com (Jonathan Blanks) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:16:00 EDT

Like "The Salesman" in Frank Miller's Sin City, Barack Obama speaks to the NEA playing to their weaknesses:

Barack Obama has the teachers cheering. The National Education Association is meeting here, and Obama—like the Democratic candidates who have spoken before him—is telling the crowd everything it wants to hear.

He's "committed to fixing and improving our public schools instead of abandoning them and passing out vouchers." Washington "left common sense behind when they passed No Child Left Behind." Teacher pay must be raised "across the board."

And then he shoots them in the heart:

But then Obama tiptoes into the minefield of merit pay for teachers, so delicately that he does not actually utter the words "merit pay" until the question and answer session.
"If you excel at helping your students achieve success, your success will be valued and rewarded as well," he says -- but he hastens to add that this must be done "with teachers, not imposed on them, and not based on some arbitrary test score."
This is whispering truth to power. But for the teachers, Obama's words are fingernails on a chalkboard. They fall silent, except for scattered boos, as he mentions a modest new program in Minnesota.

Obama appears to be the only Democrat who is willing to really take on education reform, treating the NEA like a one-night stand political bedfellow instead of committing fully like his counterparts:

Of all the Democratic candidates who came [to Philadelphia] to pay homage to the NEA—the sole Republican was former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee—Obama was the only one to deviate significantly from the union line.
Not Hillary Clinton, who tangled with the Arkansas teachers union when she oversaw education reforms that included mandatory testing for new teachers.
Not John Edwards, who bemoans the "two public school systems in America—one for the wealthy, one for everybody else," but isn't willing to acknowledge how No Child could help bridge that gap.

Not Chris Dodd, who issued a press release zinging merit pay.

While Obama's educational goals will not be very palatable to a libertarian, it is refreshing to see a Democratic candidate who understands that the NEA is part of the problem with American education.

"To Extort And Serve"

jblanks@reason.com (Jonathan Blanks) — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 10:28:00 EDT

The NYPD, thousands of officers short, is having trouble finding and retaining new recruits. One possible reason :

[Police Commissioner Ray] Kelly speculates that the just-graduated class should have been almost double the size it was, and he calls the academy's near-record 16 percent dropout rate "high."...

What happened?

During the last round of contract negotiations, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association promoted the rookie-cop salary cut in exchange for raises for senior serving cops....

Whereupon the PBA took to accusing City Hall of being responsible for the crisis the union itself essentially had created - in the expectation of keeping the higher pay for senior cops as public pressure forced big raises for rookies.

It must be great comfort to the newest members of the 'Thin Blue Line' to know their salaries were cut--by their own colleagues --to make them politically useful.

Certifiably Just Hamburgers

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 21 May 2007 16:18:00 EDT

The Rabbinical Assembly, which represents Conservative rabbis, has endorsed the idea of a hechsher tzedek ("certificate of justice"), a Jewish seal of approval that would go beyond the usual dietary rules to include the compensation and working conditions of people who produce kosher food. It's the brainchild of Minnesota rabbi Morris Allen, who was upset by reports that immigrant workers at a kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa are poorly paid, receive meager health benefits, and get inadequate safety training. Not surprisingly, Orthodox rabbis, who have long dominated the business of certifying food as kosher, are not pleased with Morris' idea.

Although some of Morris' critics may have a vested interest in resisting competition, they do have a point: The question of whether food was "justly produced," unlike the question of whether it's kosher, is not a uniquely Jewish issue, and it is open to a lot more interpretation and argument. I doubt that imponderables such as what constitutes a "just" wage, "just" fringe benefits, and "just" hours can be resolved even by the most conscientious application of Jewish law.

I assume the hechsher tzedek would not be arbitrarily limited to meat, that it would apply to all kosher food, including processed foods, in which case the certifying authority presumably would have to investigate not just one factory for any given product but all the factories that make the ingredients used in that product. For that matter, why limit the hechsher tzedek to food? Shouldn't Jews also be concerned about how their sneakers and T-shirts are produced, for instance? No doubt some Jews also would demand that the criteria for a just product include factors such as environmental sensitivity and local production. Then the hechsher tezedek would start to poach on "organic" territory.

To convince manufacturers that the hechsher tzedek is worth paying for, I think its advocates would have to demonstrate a market wider than the subset of observant Jews who make purchase decisions based on how well a manufacturer treats its workers. I'm sure there are a lot of non-Jews who are interested in the subject. But that raises the question of what makes this a specifically Jewish project to begin with.

Lawns and Borders

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 08:42:00 EDT

If there is one thing that the pundits at National Review want for the American people, it is self-sufficiency in lawn care.

“Mow Your Own Lawn,” reads the header of an immigration-focused blog post by John Derbyshire. In a published diary of his travels in Alabama, he titles a section, “Alabamians Mow Their Lawns.” In a 2003 column , Rich Lowry comments, “It's time to tell middle-class families across the country, from California to the suburbs of New York: Mow your own damn lawns.” As the debate about immigration continues, the cri ducoeur from our conservative press is unwavering: Get out the grass trimmer, and do it for America.

This is a populist, protectionist demand, and hardly confined to The Corner. Any blog post that mentions illegal immigration will be followed by a virulent comment thread, chiefly populated by directives to “mow your own lawn,” “take care of your own kids,” and “do your own housework.” A recent cover story in The American Conservative plays into this romanticized, tribal self-sufficiency, conjuring a white-washed vision of family farms, streetcars, modest dress, and a generally Amish-leaning populace. One thing we know: Mexicans are not Amish.

The implication is that rich Americans, like the stuff of Yukio Mishima’s nightmares, have become lazy, decadent, and precious, too busy perfecting their down dogs, perhaps, to realize that they are poisoning their culture. But self-sufficiency comes at a huge cost, and that cost is not borne equally across genders.

Self-sufficient households, quite simply, are homes that embrace separate spheres. Where there is an unpaid laborer to do the cooking, the cleaning, the babysitting, domestic services needn't be outsourced. The keep-‘em-out, mow-your-own-lawn ideology falls hardest not on the traditional purveyors of lawn care, but on the traditional purveyors of childcare—mothers.

Women have done much to free themselves from the burdens of domestic labor, but as study after study makes clear, it isn't because men are picking up the slack. Instead, women have been fantastically successful at seeking solutions in the market, from center-based daycare to increasingly affordable cleaning services. We send out our laundry and order takeout for dinner. It’s not that we’ve equalized such burdens, but that we’ve commodified them.

This is where the populist view—the one where free labor markets only benefit obese cigar-smoking Republican business owners—starts to fall apart. As any proponent of universal daycare will inform you, affordable child care is not a rich woman’s issue; the Zoe Bairds and Caitlin Flannigans of the world are not representative. According to a recent report (pdf) by the Department of Human Development at Cornell University, over sixty percent of children under 5 are in some form of non-parental care on a regular basis. Single mothers are more likely than most to seek informal, unregulated child care arrangements, where stay-at-home mothers charge a fee to watch other people’s children during the day.

Women’s labor force participation is widely acknowledged to be sensitive to the price of child care in the United States, where a thriving private market helps stem the call for universal taxpayer-subsidized preschool and daycare. Child care prices are obviously sensitive to the supply of child care providers. And while the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not keep a tally on the number of immigrants involved in child care, it is precisely the kind of low-skill domestic labor—much of it taking place within unregulated, informal relationships in women’s homes—immigrant populations traditionally seek.

A March study (pdf) by the Urban Institute noted a pronounced decline in the low-wage native workforce, and the decline was more pronounced in women than men. Between 2000 and 2005, the number and share of low-wage women in the native labor force declined by 1.5 million, both because women are becoming better educated and moving onto higher paying jobs, and because they are dropping out of the workforce. Immigrants, legal and illegal, are helping to offset the change. These findings, and others, conclude the researchers “highlight the growing importance of immigrant workers in the lower-skilled U.S. labor force."

The terms of the immigration debate have largely turned against undocumented workers, and "comprehensive" immigration reform is likely to be heavy on penalties. This should worry anyone who frets about the wage gap, which has long had more to do with motherhood than womanhood. The gap between mothers and non-mothers is wider than that between men and women, suggesting that the real income-sapping factor is kids. It is possible that if day care prices increase, that gap will widen.

Having children is a choice, of course; some motherhood gap is unavoidable, and the humanitarian reasons to support a liberalized immigration policy should be far more compelling than the strictly feminist ones. There is no development policy, no feasible amount of foreign aid, no poundage of fair trade coffee that will help someone from a developing country to a better life more than opening the door to a better economy, instantly doubling or tripling the value of their labor. But as American women look to solidify the gains they’ve made, through the Equal Rights Amendment and other measures, they might ask where their most tangible gains have been.

We could mow our own lawns. We could also make our own candlesticks and churn our own butter. The question to ask isn’t why we don’t live in a more self-sufficient America, but why Americans—and especially women—would ever want to.

Kerry Howley is an associate editor of Reason.

Discuss this article here.

Union Sundown[*]

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 10:31:00 EST

Via the ~~pro-labor union~~ [*] site EmployerReport.com comes the slow-moving news that the heirs to the Wobblies continue to go wobbly in the workplace: Union membership drops to record low!...(7.4% private sector, 12% overall).