June 22, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

A STEP TOWARD ECONOMIC SECURITY

Congress is debating the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow employees more freedom to unionize. It's desperately needed legislation. We hear the pundits talk about market "corrections" when there is a downturn in the stock market. We need a correction in the imbalance that exists between salaries and the perks and bonuses that go to high rollers. While CEO salaries have exploded, the wages of average workers have flatlined. Unionization gives working people more power to get economic security for themselves and their families. As this author points out, this is a far better approach than blaming illegal immigrants and building a wall between the United States and Mexico. The article by Harold Meyerson is at www.prospect.org:

This week, just before it turns again to immigration, the Senate takes up the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would restore to America's workers the right to join unions. Depending on how you look at it, the Senate's timing -- moving to bolster middle- and working-class incomes before it alters our immigration policy -- is either impeccable or 30 years too late.

For those adamantly against the efforts to legalize the 12 million or so undocumented immigrants among us, opposition has become the vehicle to express a range of anxieties that go far beyond the question at hand. Some of those anxieties are racial and cultural. Others are economic -- the fear that immigrants take jobs from native-born Americans, the fear that they drag wages down.

There is, as those of us who support the legalization of the undocumented must admit, some -- though by no means universal -- validity to these fears. Immigrants are not employed solely as farmworkers, gardeners, and nannies. One look at construction crews or the women who clean hotel rooms makes clear that there has been, in many regions, a vast shift in the composition of sectoral workforces. During the Depression, the government shipped Mexican migrant workers -- and American citizens of Mexican descent -- back to Mexico. Conversely, when Congress acted in 1965 to allow considerably more immigrants into the United States, it was a time of widely shared prosperity and mass job security of the sort that has vanished from America today.