I wanted to write a little bit more about my position on immigration, because I think it’s an issue that doesn’t receive enough attention.
One commenter on my post wrote:
But I have been surprised that many of the people that are vehemently against corporations outsourcing jobs to India and China have no problem with domestic outsourcing to illegal immigrants driving down wages for many Americans.
This sort of rhetoric on immigration is really dangerous, because it drives a wedge between those with work permits and illegal immigrants, and it’s wrong. The reason illegal immigration can drive down wages and conditions has nothing to do with the fact that people come from some country with browner skin, in fact it has nothing to do with the immigrants at all, it’s because the employers use the power they have over illegal immigrants. If all illegal immigrants were allowed to work legally then their wages and conditions would go up, because they could utilise labour legislation, and it would be easier to organise.
I don’t actually care about American jobs any more than New Zealand jobs, or Chinese jobs and Indian jobs. No borders isn’t just rhetoric about immigration – it has to be a commitment not to privilege one group of workers above another.
I also oppose tarriff reduction regimes for different reasons than this commenters. While the arguments about relationships between tarriff changes in the first world and job losses (and not just in the first world, but that’s a longer post) are important. The real reason I oppose tarriff reductions is that they give companies more power. The more free companies are to move around, the more they can leverage from different localities to move where they are. Improved transport has meant that manufacturing can reasonably easily be moved from one location to another. This has given manufacturers the power to leverage zones where no labour legislation, or most other forms of legislation, apply to them. It’s this power, not the job losses, that I object to.
I don’t actually believe that ‘no borders’ could be achieved under capitalism, neither could women’s liberation, but steps in that direction are worth fighting for.
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Maia, the reason why employers employ illegal workers is because they can exploit them. If we have legal guestworkers there is no doubt in my mind that many employers will hire illegal “guestworkers” or workers who don’t adhere to whatever process would be established. This isn’t true for all industries, of course, but it’s true for a lot of sectors. I will say, frankly, that I don’t know where this fact leads but I’ve had several thoughts about reframing this debate:
First, we shouldn’t worry about “immigrant labor” versus other labor, we should focus first on working conditions for all labor, and especially the distribution of health care. One big issue for communities with immigrant labor, whether legal or otherwise, is that costs for health care are almost always offloaded onto local government and private health care providers. It bothers me that there is more concern about enabling guestworkers than there is about inadequate working conditions. It’s basically ceding that it’s more important for employers to have cheap labor than it is for labor to have decent working conditions and access to a minimum safety net.
Second, none of this matters if there is never any enforcement against employers who ignore immigration and labor laws (labor laws apply to immigrants — FLSA, etc., but immigrant employees who are not legal are too scared to fight back). So far, every politician you hear screaming about immigrants out of one side of his mouth is only too happy to feed out of the other side at the trough of employers who hire them illegally. Yes, there are forged documents, but most employers know very well what’s going on.
I suggest you follow ECO 101 at your local college. Everyone is a free agent who choose his best available opportunity. Ask any illegals if they would prefer to go back. The answer is no. That’s because they are not exploited. Obviously there are cases of exploitation, but overall illegals are freelancer in a freemarket. The free market wage as nothing to do with the cushy living standard american are used to. If you let illegals in, the equilibrium wage is going to slide closer to the world wage market. Free flow of people equals one world wage market. There is no escaping this fact.
So you cant logically be for free flow of people and against lower wages.
So, Hakim, presumably, you have already asked EVERY “illegal” and have determined that NONE would choose to go back. Look forward to reading the actual study.
Improved transport has meant that manufacturing can reasonably easily be moved from one location to another. This has given manufacturers the power to leverage zones where no labour legislation, or most other forms of legislation, apply to them. It’s this power, not the job losses, that I object to.
Object away.
What practical alternative do you propose?
Hakim writes:
Oh Christ, yet another economics fundamentalist who took the assumption (“people are rational actors”) as fact and gospel, instead of as what it is, a simplifying assumption. Thankfully, departures from so-called “rationality” are something that many economists do study (under names such as “behavioral economics”).
This argument works no more than saying that because a victim of domestic violence refuses to classify themselves as so, they are therefore not a victim of domestic violence.
An increase in the supply of labor, absent government intervention into the labor market, must indeed result in a decrease of the cost of labor. But do notice that what Maia is arguing for is in fact government intervention into the labor market, that if enforced fully, would (a) constitute a barrier for entry into the market, (b) involve price controls that would set a minimum bar for the cost of labor (through minimum wage laws and required benefits). Once the market in question is less than totally free, then the outcome is not as cut-and-dried as you make it be. (I do believe wages would still go down, because the programs in question will not be enforced effectively at all; rather, they will be systematically unenforced to keep the costs of labor down, just as current immigration laws are…)
Here’s the test I use to determine whether the word “exploited” actually has a meaning in any particular situation:
Undo the economic transaction made. Compare the resulting situation, where the parties involved default back to the economic choices they had made previously. If a party to the transaction is better off without the transaction, then he/she/it was being exploited. Otherwise, not.
Hmmn. Slave who gets to work all day without being beaten, and who is fed.
At the start of the day, what would have happened if she had instead refused to work? She would have been beaten, and she would not have been fed.
So she’s better off having made the transaction. Therefore, she hasn’t been exploited.
Robert says:
And, of course, people are going to disagree with you about that standard. For one thing, all you’re really saying is that someone is less exploited than they were before, not that they’re not exploited at all. Yes, I know, an immigrant may have been subsistence farming before, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t part of an economic system that did exploit them (by buying their produce at extortionist rates, etc.)
A similar argument has been made about large multinationals that run plants in developing countries for the low wages. “But if not for this company, these people would all have nothing!” some cry. Well, this is disengenuous for two reasons:
1) It’s the practice of many companies to drive competition for labor out of business, at which point workers have no choice but to work for the multinational. This might happen by just buying smaller entities out or buying land.
2) The question is not whether employers are exploiting workers as badly as they possibly could, but whether they are treating them in exploitative ways.
No, she’s totally exploited, because she’s property. The test only works for people who are able to choose or not choose transactions.
Perhaps I should have hedged my statement with thirty paragraphs detailing the requirements of agency, free will, economic substructures, and so forth.
Matan, that may all be true.
But crusaders for economic justice run into a problem when they start using “exploit” as short-hand for “doing things in a way that I don’t fully approve of”.
When you say to people “we;re going to stop them from exploiting you!” they are generally happy. But if they find out that “exploiting you” means “providing opportunities you didn’t have before” – not so much.
Personally I find “exploit” to be a word that has very little value anymore.
Labor is “exploited” when an employer either (a) does not adhere to legal protections that the worker is entitled to (OSHA, FLSA, etc.) or (b) ignores other pertinent laws that govern the establishment of an employment relationship. It’s possible that an employer would treat an individual who is not entitled to work in the U.S. very well — but it’s hardly typical, and if the employer changes his mind, well, he knows the employee won’t complain. This doesn’t mean I like all of the laws that apply, or that I don’t think workers should have greater rights, and so on, but when employers arbitrage a worker’s immigration status in order to take advantage of direct or indirect cost advantages of employing that individual, that worker is being exploited — and perhaps other workers who were not hired because they have expectations of being treated legally are also being exploited.
Barbara, that approach ties “exploitation” to a legal framework. While that may work very well in a case like the US, where labor laws are generally reasonable, it creates an equivalence between morality and law that I’m not comfortable with. Where laws are unjust or foolish, “exploitation” then means being just or intelligent.
For example, in Cuba you can’t employ someone for dollars, even though paying them dollars would be an extreme bonus to the employee that would increase their standard of living. That’s not exploitation, but in your paradigm, it is. Which is of course silly. Or in the other direction, if we live in fascist capital hell and the labor laws are basically “beatings are limited to 30 per day per employee, and any deaths from work discipline must be reported within ten years to the Ministry of Indifference”, then abject slavery wouldn’t be exploitation, since the law is being followed.
Perhaps (like my test) you have some unstated parameters within which the rule holds true.
Robert and Hakim are using the argument that Kevin Carson of the Mutualist blog has labled “Vulger Libertarianism”. (http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/01/vulgar-libertarianism-watch-part-1.html) The idea is that any “non-coersive” exchange is just because otherwise both parties would not have agreed to the exchange. The flaw is that it assumes that the pre-exchange conditions were just and non-coersive. In addition to Kevin’s takedown of this argument, I have also tackled it in the case of the (in)justice of a minimum wage in the absence of an at least subsistence level basic income. (http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/000988.html) My point was that the free exchange of labor and capital is a positive sume game that does make everyone better off than without the exchange, but in the absence of a subsistence level basic income, capital will always be able to leverage getting the largest slice of that positive sum. In the case of illegal immigrant workers, of course they are better off than without the work, but the laws that make them illegal allow their employers to grab the by far largest slice of the surplus value of the labor-capital exchange. So the workers, while better off, are still exploited because the laws under which the exchange was made allow capital to enter freely into the exchange, but force labor into the exchange. Robert and Hakim would be right only if the pre-exchange laws and conditions were just.
Robert,
If two parties enter into a transaction with a significant imbalance in power and need, and the more powerful, less needy party takes advantage of that to extract concessions from the other side, then the less powerful party has been exploited.
While the standard dictionary definition may support your version if the sense of exploitation is that a person is exploited. However, my sense, and the sense in which it is used in a political context, is related to the weak bargaining position of one party being exploited. See also exploitation.
Your description makes sense as the point at which you care about exploitation, but it is a total failure to understand the political usage of the term to insist that it is the proper definition of the term. I don’t believe you are dumb enough to make that mistake honestly, so I suspect disingenuousness.
My equally arbitrary standard for evaluating exploitation:
Would the person still do the work at the price and conditions offered if they had a guaranteed income of the level required to meet all basic needs (the level at which happiness and income become delinked, roughly $15,000 in the US according to some studies)? If not, then their exploitation is wrong.
Charles, your first paragraph makes sense, at least theoretically. But I caution purely on empirical grounds that assessing power and need are very tricky, and often depend on the quantities of information that each party possess. (“If I had known during the negotiations that they had to get a web developer on line by Monday or they would be fired for delaying the project, I would have been a lot more assertive in my salary demand!”)
I don’t really care about the “proper definition of the term”, particularly in this context. Just about the level where it becomes interesting or objectionable. (I don’t care that the web developer signed on for $17.50 an hour, even if they could have gotten $50.)
Your final proposed standard seems reasonable for people in higher income brackets, but would seem to make it impossible to hire many poor folk without being a harmful exploiter. There are a lot of people who will not work to support themself for $7.50 an hour, if they’d get the money whether they worked or not, and the marginal economic product of many of those people is worth around what they’d get paid. Heck, if my marginal economic product was worth $7.50 an hour but I had a guaranteed minimum income higher than that, damned if I’d do a lick of work. I’d blog all day. (Shut up. I write in the interstices of my workload.)
Certainly, the assessment of exploitation of advantage is tricky, but in some cases it is relatively clear: if you pay your illegal workers less than minimum wage because you know that they can’t complain to the authorities without being deported, you are fairly obvioulsy exploiting their lack of legal recourse to pay them below what is legal considered an acceptable wage. Also, it is generally the exploitation of structural inequalities that raise the most objections, and the objection is usually raised when it is the weakness of the hiree , rather than the weakness of the employer, that is being exploited. Both of these seem limiting factors to raising much of a hulabaloo. If the web designer is hired at $17.50 instead of $50.00 because no one is willing to hire black web designers at the going rate for white web designers (obviously, this example is taking place some time in the mid-90’s when web designers weren’t a dime a dozen), then obviously that is a problem of exploitation. However, if the web desinger simply fails to exploit the weakness of the employer’s bargaining position then obviously no one is going to consider that a case of exploitation.
I’m not convinced that my standard fails simply because most lower income people are paid less than what you would have to pay them to do the same work if their other option wasn’t destitution. In fact, I think that is pretty much the confirmation of my standard. On the other hand, if you can find some trust fund kids with a $15,000+ per annum who are also working at $7.50 an hour, then you have probably found a job where $7.50 an hour is not an exploitative wage for that person. There are probably jobs like that, but not very many. How much would it take to hire me to wash dishes in a restuarant if I had a $15,000 per annum stipend? Certainly a lot more than $7.50.
How much would it take to hire me to wash dishes in a restuarant if I had a $15,000 per annum stipend? Certainly a lot more than $7.50.
Perhaps going far afield, but if you don’t want to wash dishes to earn a living, I don’t want to pay you a stipend to live. ;P
Oh, neglected to say – your first paragraph is quite right, and those types of exploitation are indeed pretty straightforward to observe.
No, she’s totally exploited, because she’s property. The test only works for people who are able to choose or not choose transactions.
Perhaps I should have hedged my statement with thirty paragraphs detailing the requirements of agency, free will, economic substructures, and so forth.
Perhaps you should. The weakness of most theories (and especially classical economic theories) are the unstated assumption.
So slaves are out of the equation. How ’bout members of lower castes in India? Not exactly slaves, but cultural mores restricted their employment prospects. How ’bout Western women throughout much of the 20 th century, and some non-Western women today? Wasn’t the subtext of Jane Austin novels, or Pygmalian, the idea that women of a certain social class had to sell themselves into a suitable marriage in order to eat?
How ’bout kids making Nike shoes in a factory in Pakistan? How ’bout kids working on a family farm in the US?
How ’bout you and me? How free do you feel to simply stop earning a living? You make the most agreeable decision among the options you perceive, but it is the rare person who makes no trade-offs in life.
As far as I know, we all make decisions within constraints. At some point we (society) make a decision about which constraints intrude on autonomy “too much,” violating assumptions about “agency, free will, economic substructures and so forth.” But that point can seem a little arbitrary to me.
States often require unemployment compensation for people who leave their jobs “against their will” and can’t find substitute employment. Seeing how such laws get implemented provides a study in the definition of what conditions are deemed “too much” to bear for the sake of employment. Could I get unemployment compensation if I quit my job to go join my spouse who got transferred to another city? To move with my lover to another city? To move with my homosexual lover to another city? Because my religion bar working on Sunday? On Saturday? On Saturday AND Sunday? Because my religion bars working on Sunday, and bars me leading other people to sin by filling in for me on Sundays? Because of a hostile work environment? Because wage are too low?
None of these conditions deprivation me of free will. Rather, they reflect trade-offs I might be called upon to make in order to keep a job. As a society, we say some trade-offs are too much to demand; some are not. But the distinction appears to be based on culture, not some kind of optimization process.
Labor is like any other product/service and follow market rules. If you raise the cost by imposing various laws, there will be less demand for it. This equals less job for illegals, less work done. Dont let your ideals and values blind you from the inescapable realities of the market. There is no free lunch.
The problem of illegals is a problem of lack of better opportunities in the country they left. By being against free market and outsourcing you are slowing down the development of third world countries. Thus encouraging illegals to come here to be “exploited” (Also know as earning 5 or 6 time their previous wage in their home country and being able to feed the whole extended family).
Do you think you know what’s better for immigrants than what they know? If you do, ask yourself what would you think of some rich saudi telling you that working for your current salary is exploitation. What if the saudi actively worked to make it harder to hire you? Would you like that?
Robert,
I’d be perfectly willing to wash dishes for a living. I’d also be perfectly willing to live on a $15,000 per annum. With the per annum, I wouldn’t be willing to wash dishes at $7.50 an hour for extra income. An hour of my time and the pleasure of not washing dishes are worth $7.50 to me, once I reach the livable income level. However, I’d certainly deliver pizza for $7.50 an hour on top of a per annum (although not full time). I’d probably wash dishes for about $12-15 an hour, and certainly for $20 an hour, as long as I wasn’t required to be full time. And yes, I recognize that the potential tendency of plenty of people to not feel a particular need to work much beyond a $15,000 guaranteed income is potentially a major problem with a $15,000 guaranteed income. Clearly, a gauranteed income would need to be set at a level where there was still sufficient incentive to work to have a sufficient number of people working to keep the society functioning. The EITC, which effectively increases the wages of low wage workers, is probably a better model than a pure guaranteed income, in that it decreases the degree of economic exploitation without removing the incentive to work, while also not eliminating those jobs that are only marginally beneficial to the employer at a low wage.
Actually, when I worked delivering pizza, I quickly gained enough seniority that I was able to trade m0pping the floors and cleaning the bathrooms for very rarely having to wash dishes, but this was mostly because I figured being household dishwasher was plenty of dishwashing.
Also, wasn’t the exploitation I described in that first paragraph that you say is quite right and easy to recognize exactly the sort that Barbara brought up in the first comment, and that presumably prompted your comment #6?
Charles, my #6 wasn’t a response to anyone in particular, just an observation. (He’s MY #6. If you want to torture a suave British agent by playing mind games, you’ll have to convince Barry to dress up.)
I like the EITC too, for the reason you specify. It’s a delicate balancing act; what the poor need most is the spur of their poverty. And yet humanity demands that we ameliorate the edges of that. One of the things I like about the increasing concentration of wealth in cultural pursuits, rather than in material goods, is that it moves us closer to a world where being “poor” means having to use the library for CDs instead of paying for the downloads.
And God bless the pizza delivery business, which kept my family fed during a pretty bad time.