Tag Archives: Secretary of Labor

About That Longshoreman’s Strike

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On Friday, Hot Air posted an article about the Longshoreman’s strike that is currently on hold. The hold will end, and the strike may resume on January 15th. One of the reasons the strike has not been settled is the debate over the automation of American ports. Oddly enough, President Trump has come out against automation.

Hot Air reports:

…The Biden administration was completely hands-off until the union physically shut the ports down. Even then, their participation only went as far as the Secretary of Labor finally flying in to meet with both parties to “urge” them to work through their differences and for the USMX to give a little to the union. That’s classic Scranton Joe for you there.

Public pressure and outrage, election upheaval, not to mention a looming economic disaster all probably served to cool some heated jets enough for a bit of progress to be made in a short period of time. The USMX agreed to something on the order of a 62% wage hike over 6 years. Then everybody agreed to get the docks reopened under the terms of the old contract while they hammered out other, thornier issues, but only until 15 January 2025.

The article notes:

This contract agreement is set to end five days before the inauguration – the 15th. Trump owes much of his support for winning to disaffected union workers who bucked their bosses and union tradition to vote for him. Trump IS the ‘workers’ president,’ and he knows it. Don’t forget, he even had a good meeting with curmudgeonly ILA head Harold Daggett before the election. He knows what their issues are, and he’s also an international businessman. Trump’s dealt with shipping companies, etc.

Trump also knows all about these guys – this is the foreign face of the USMX, the “alliance” that controls the ports. 

The article points out that the jobs that would be automated would not help with the bottlenecks that occur at our ports.

The bottleneck is caused by the rail capacity going in and out of the ports.

The article concludes:

So it makes you wonder if the foreign operators of these ports are simply looking to dump the dozen or so biggest salaries under the guise of efficiency when, in reality, nothing is going out of the gate any faster than it already is. It physically can’t.

One more angle Bingley thought of, and I thought it was brilliant.

The optics of a strike or a lockout.

These longshoremen want to work. Ostensibly, they are fighting not to be out of work.

If the ports shut down and Trump invokes Taft-Hartley, as Bingley said to me, 1) sending the National Guard in to force people to work (an ILA strike) versus 2) sending them in to unlock the gates to ALLOW people to work (a USMX lockout)?

The first is greedy union and zero sympathy.

In the second scenario, Trump becomes the America First president, acting on his promise of protecting American workers against powerful foreign interests. The same ones who, for too long, have taken advantage of liberal business policies and conditions here, destroying American jobs.

It’s BOX OFFICE GOLD.

So that’s our wild-eyed take on it. We could be way wrong, but then again…

I mean, crazier things have happened. 

Like…Trump’s gonna be president again, isn’t he?

Stay tuned.

The Real Cost Of Importing Lots Of Foreign Workers

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On Friday, Breitbart posted an article about the views of President Biden’s choice for Secretary of Labor on increasing the number of foreign workers being brought into America.

The article reports:

The Democrat party’s pick for Secretary of Labor says CEOs are being victimized by a shortage of immigrant workers.

Companies want to hire another 11 million people, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh told Fox News on September 2, adding:

If those 11 million jobs had to be filled tomorrow, we certainly don’t have enough people in the United States to fill those jobs … the issue of workers has to be addressed and the only way [emphasis added] you can do it is through immigration.

The article includes an opposing opinion:

But Walsh “doesn’t seem to know what’s going on in the U.S. labor market in terms of real wages for the less-educated, or the labor force participation,” responded Steve Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

“There are two main things that you could do [to get Americans into those jobs] — make it more attractive to work and make it less attractive to sit on your ass,” he said:

Could you ever get teenagers to work like they did in the 70s? No, but could you get a million more teenagers to work? Yeah. Could you ever get men to have the labor force participation rate of 96 percent — say non-college men 25 to 54 — that we had in 1964? No, but could you get it up to 88 percent instead of 84 percent or 83 percent? Yes.

The government should try to fill jobs with some of the roughly 60 million adults not working by allowing wages to rise, he said.

The 60 million number includes 5.5 million people who said they want a job but are not part of the unemployment numbers because they have not looked for jobs in the last four weeks.

So who benefits by increasing the number of foreign workers?

The article notes:

The government’s policy of pumping foreign labor into the U.S. economy has distorted the incentives for the nation’s CEOs, investors, and political leaders Camarota said.

Immigration “allows them to both be empathetic and indifferent at the same time,” he said.

The article concludes:

This economic strategy (extraction migration) is enthusiastically pushed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into an economic empire of jealous identity groups overseen by progressive hall monitors. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement. … We will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.

But the progressives’ colonialism-like economic strategy kills many migrants. It exploits the poverty of migrants and splits foreign families as it extracts human resources from poor home countries to serve wealthy U.S. investors.

Progressives hide this extraction migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding narratives and theatrical border security programs. Progressives claim the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that migration helps migrants, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.

Similarly, establishment Republicans, media businesses, and major GOP donors hide the skew towards investors by ignoring the pocketbook impact and by touting border chaos, welfare spending, migrant crime, and drug smuggling.

Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration. But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs needed by young U.S. graduates.

This “Third Rail” opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. The uni-party supports open borders, and Americans need to withdraw their support from the uni-party.