This is my fifth of seven posts explaining why I support Jim Webb. I suggest reading the first four, too.And now...
Reason Five: Labor and Outsourcing
Down here in my part of the state, we've been hit hard by, at different times, dishonest coal companies, huge job loss, the influx of cheap labor, non-unionized labor, and jobs going out of the area.
A lot of this area's early economy focused on coal companies. The town of Dante, where my maternal grandpa was born, was created specifically as a coal company town, as were many others. At that time (1910's, 1920's), the coal companies were, at times, pretty unfair with the workers. They paid them not in money, but in credits to use at their own company stores. Nobody could get ahead in life. Until, that is, unions started forming. The UWMA, led by President John L. Lewis, fought in favor of collective barganing and of workers' rights. If not for labor unions fighting for the people in the past, I would be afraid to even guess what kind of situation mine workers would be in today.
My maternal grandpa was a sharecropper. He worked from the 1940's until the 1980's as a tobacco picker. In the beginning, he was paid $1.10 an hour. And, even at the end, he was paid $1.50 an hour. Why did he lose the job? The farmowner brought in immigrant workers from Mexico (illegaly, I might add). These workers worked for, and continue even today, to work for a ridiculously small amount of money (I understand it is now $3.50 an hour).
Our American workers can't compete with that on our own turf. Let alone on foreign soil, where the business wouldn't even have to pay $3.50 an hour.
Very recently, here in Bristol, companies like Dana, Bristol Compressors, and Snack Alliance, and others, have either discussed, or approved moving jobs out of the area, and, in some cases, to Mexico. This, my friends, is perhaps the worst thing that can happen to a working person. Their job goes out of the country because they can't work for $1.50 or $2.00 an hour.
James Webb is the candidate in this race who has been endorsed by the SMWIA, LIUNA, and other workers' rights groups because he is the only candidate in this race who will consistently protect American jobs, and will fight to keep those jobs in America. James Webb will be, as he himself has stated, the "anti-outsourcing" Senator. He will fight for a higher minimum wage, fight for better working conditions, and for more stringint safety standards. It is evident that, according to the AFL-CIO, James Webb is the only candidate who will be one of the "good guys" for labor and for the worker.
James Webb. Working for the working class.
-Neal
(Coming tomorrow: Part six, plus a 9th CD convention roundup)
Nice job, Neal.
Miller's lobbying on behalf of the "high tech industry" corporations represent the same callous indifference to American workers, American society and our country displayed by the CEOs and lobbyists for the industrial and manufacturing jobs sectors. (In fact non-tech companies use the same laws Miller has helped put in place to replace wide categories of white collar workers outside of just "tech jobs".)
Miller and the pro-offshore outsourcing lobby all try to use the "global economy" and "global competition" smokescreen to conceal the fact that their real objective is to get rid of American workers to cut labor costs and return to "sweatshop-style" exploitation of workers, and escape American health, environment and safety regulations to cut business costs.
For a long time, American white collar workers deluded themselves that they were not "workers" or "labor". Business interests and the Republican Party have exploited this misperception.
Today, the worker replacement policies advanced by Harris Miller as "point man" for the offshore outsourcing tech lobby proves that white collar workers are considered "replaceable labor" the same as everyone else.
For example, American software engineers in the present scheme are nothing more the "data janitors" in the view of the corporate world -- people who can be replaced with workers from the Third World whenever the corporate leaders choose. Business leaders even speak of programmers as a "commodity" further indicating how dehumanised they have become.
Ultimately, Harris Miller's vision of globalisation is the SAME as the CEOs and the Bush administrations. The shared Miller-Bush view of globalisation is pitiless, remorseless, driven entirely by financial profits for a narrow slice of society, anti-worker, anti-union, anti-middle class and anti-American.
It's no wonder that like George W. Bush, Harris Miller LIES incessantly about the benefits of offshore outsourcing, the need for skilled/educated foreign "guest workers" and the strength of the American economy.