Why Unions Are Not Screaming About Illegals...

[Annie]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12132529/#060413

A third party possibility


• April 13, 2006 | 12:53 PM ET

Picking up on some comments by by Harold Ford, Jr., Mickey Kaus notes: "It's not that hard to get to Bush's right on immigration and still sound like a Democrat."

He's right. Heck, even Republicans are doing it. Republican strategist Frank Cagle writes:

Much has been made of the work ethic of illegal aliens and the fact that they will do jobs Americans won't do. That is true. If someone has the gumption to leave a home in Mexico, wade the Rio Grande and find their way to Iowa or East Tennessee to work, it demonstrates ambition. However, I recall that both my grandfathers and their friends were known for their work ethic. They hit the fields at dawn and worked until dark. They did jobs no American today would want to do. Sharecropping cotton was as close to slavery as any system that has existed since the Civil War. Their good work ethic was reinforced by the fact that if they didn't do it, their families would starve. They didn't have food stamps, welfare and TennCare.
...
The Mexican workers in this country are in the position of average American working people 50 years ago. We have 21st-century labor standards for Americans and 19th-century standards for illegals. In fact, the situation of illegal Mexican workers today is more like the condition of African Americans in the South before the Civil Rights era.

Grainger County farmers, construction companies and landscapers don't pay bad wages. One of the reasons they employ Mexican labor (like meat packers in Iowa) is that those workers have few choices. They show up for work on time, and they work while they are there.

It is true that the American economy benefits from illegal alien labor. Employers have a pool of people who do not talk back, are afraid to be late to work and have no other options. It's an employer's dream.
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See? The big question I have is why more Democrats aren't doing this. Part of the reason may be labor unions not doing what you'd expect, and trying to keep out workers who have no other options. That's because the unions see opportunity:

There were lots of signs for the Service Employees International Union, the Laborers Union, UNITE Here, and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The various coalitions listed as organizers of the event, like the National Capital Immigration Coalition, appeared to have a lot of union involvement. At the rally, I ran into Harold Meyerson, the liberal, pro-union writer and columnist, and asked him why organized labor was so active in this cause, given many American workers' fear that the presence of illegal immigrants drives down wages. "During the mid- and late 1990s, the unions that were actually still organizing people were realizing that increasingly they were organizing immigrants, many of them illegal, many of them undocumented," Meyerson told me.
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Maybe they want union members without any other options as much as the employers want employees without other options.

But though labor unions have a lot of influence within the Democratic Party, they don't have the votes anymore. Just as Republicans are caught between their business-oriented constituencies (who want cheap labor that doesn't talk back) and their grassroots constituencies (who don't like illegal immigration), so too are the Democrats caught between two constituencies of their own.

The more I think about it, the more this looks like fertile ground for a third party to emerge. Who will it hurt more? The Republicans, or the Democrats? I'm not sure. Perhaps it will shake things up in general.

 

[dilloduck]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12132529/#060413

Ya think it's be called the Workers Party or will they dare go straight to the communists ?