TexasMaam
Posts: 1467
Joined: 6/22/2005
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You're young, ArtCatDom, and you're showing your inexperience with real life issues, so I'm going to cut you a lot of slack.
Raising minimum wage solves nothing with regard to the immigration issues facing us today. Even our minimum wage is so much higher than third world wages that companies cannot compete on a global scale because their costs of doing business in the US are so much higher than competitors overseas.
Those of us with ongoing business concerns have the right to pay what we think a job is worth.
If, for example, it costs me $80 bucks in fuel costs to run a bobcat front end loader to clean out a barn, I might offer $50 to someone to clean out the barn by hand. If a worker who cannot find other work is happy to clean out My barn in 10 hours for $5 bucks an hour, that's our business, not yours.
By the same token, if a company like Coca Cola has to raise their minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $9.25 per hour (still not a living wage), their costs of production go up, and they have to compete with other bottlers in other countries who are paying only $3 per day to their laborers, and who are producing their product so cheaply that they can afford to bottle and import the product here and still make money.
Under your theory, I'd be paying that same barn cleaner $92.50 per day (instead of the $50 I used to be able to pay him) in order to comply with the law, and the end result would be that I'd do it myself wiht the bobcat front end loader for $80 and save the $12.50 for My company. End result: the barn cleaner is now out of a job.
Migrant workers who harvest tomatoes are paid by the bushel or box, not by the hour, to motivate productivity. Most green card workers are paid by the piece, or by the job, not by the hour.
Here's why: Let's say I own a vegtable farm; I cannot afford to pay one guy $8.00 per hour to pick 10 tomatoes per hour and pay another guy the same $8.00 per hour to pick 300 tomatoes an hour, now, can I? If the worker picks 300 tomatoes, packed 30 tomatoes to a box, he gets paid by the number of boxes he pics in a day. After a 10 hour day, he's picked 3000 tomatoes, or 300 boxes, to the other worker's 100 tomatoes, or 10 boxes. In agricultural employment it would spell financial disaster to have to pay both workers the same minimum wage regardless of their output.
As for fining companies for hiring undocumented workers: I very carefully examine the documents that are presented to Me when I hire a worker on the ranch. Yet, it is against the law for Me to challenge those documents or to ask about the worker's validity of the documents in any way. There is absolutely no way for me to validate their documents and stay within the bounds of the law. To punish Me financially for accepting copies of Identification documents in accordance with the law is going to put the other 50 employees working for me out of a job, and those other 50 employees are making $100 to $150 per day and are supporting their families right in our hometown, white, black, hispanic, US citizens all. Punishing any employer or corporation who has to accept the identification as provided, by law as the laws are now, will wreck the economy even further than beyond today's sluggish downturn.
Neither I, nor many of the companies whose destruction you so vehemently propose, 'intentionally undermine our border patrol'. We're trying to make a living like everybody else. That means we have to run our operations at a profit, something we (at our ranch) have not been able to do for almost a decade now.
While it is true that some companies knowingly hire undocumented workers, and while it is true that some companies may take advantage of undocumented workers, by and large,the small businesses, small manufacturers, agricultural concerns and large corporations alike are just as busy trying to comply with the law as I am here on the ranch.
As I stated above, you're young, ArtCatDom, and you have a lot to learn about life.
TexasMaam
< Message edited by TexasMaam -- 6/4/2006 2:28:05 PM >
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