In 1992, Ross Perot famously said that “giant sucking sound” you hear is American jobs going south. Today, the sound you hear may be the bursting of the giant cheap-labor bubble.
Neil Munro of Breitbart News yesterday addressed the bursting bubble in an article inspired by a Washington Post item titled “In Liberty County, workers who quit feel liberated, but the community discovers a powerful downside.”
The community in question is Liberty County, Georgia, a still-largely-rural county 40-odd miles southwest of Savannah, which the Post dubs “Quit Town, USA.” Liberty County has become something of the poster child of the Great Resignation phenomenon that has swept America since the advent of the coronavirus last year, as large numbers of workers–initially furloughed during the pandemic–have either never returned to their old jobs or left them soon after returning.
Munro quotes Rob Law of the Center for Immigration Studies who explains the one glaring reason for the Great Resignation:
The reason that so many of these companies are unable to find workers now is because they rely on a flawed business model that only succeeds when the payroll is artificially held low [by an inflow of] foreign workers.
Law adds that President Donald Trump’s popular migration curbs and the coronavirus disease together burst the cheap-labor bubble.
A case in point described by the Post is that of Hasit Patel, an Indian immigrant who runs a budget hotel in Liberty County. Patel, who had until recently been able to attract employees at bargain-basement wages of $8.50 an hour, is now losing them to employers like the nearby Target warehouse, which pays $15.
“I can’t compete with the warehouses for wages,” Patel complained to the Post. “The government should let us get people from India, even just for six months. The government has to realize there are certain job categories that American people don’t want to do anymore.”
Post writer Marc Fisher comments: “[Patel’s] struggle to find [replacement] labor felt like a blow to his whole notion of what made America great. An immigrant from India, he believed that the health of the U.S. economy was protected by a constant refreshing of the workforce, an injection of striving immigrants willing to take on some of the unpleasant jobs that many Americans are loath to do — like cleaning [his] hotel rooms.”
That in a nutshell is the globalist view of America: a land of discounted labor performed by discounted workers in discounted hotels, factories, restaurants, farm fields, etc. The reason for the Great Resignation is simple: people are tired of being discounted.
Munro goes on to review the effects of the phenomenon in other areas of the economy, such as meatpacking, trucking, home construction, agriculture, retail, and food services. He quotes Bret Thorn, the senior food and beverage editor for Nation’s Restaurant News, who told a national industry meeting in October:
We don’t like to say this much, but it has long been the practice of many restaurants to hire staff as inexpensively as possible and provide them with the fewest benefits that they can, often by restricting their hours so they don’t qualify as full-time employees. I guess that can be a good business plan when the labor pool is deep, which it’s not now and I doubt will be for the foreseeable future, but it’s also cruel, and a growing number of people who have worked in restaurants now see that they can do better, and that they deserve better.
That no-longer-deep labor pool was filled continually for decades by the steady importation of foreign labor. Munro notes that the supply began to be shut off after the 2008 crash and that it “came to a sudden halt in 2020 when President Donald Trump closed the borders to slow the spread of the coronavirus.” From 2010 to 2020, five million fewer foreign workers were imported compared with previous decades. In just the three years from 2017 to 2020, three million fewer were imported.
Biden, Munro notes, is doing his best to re-inflate the bubble, bringing in roughly 1.5 million foreigners, legal and illegal, so far this year.
That’s not yet helped Mr. Patel, however. Without more discounted workers from his home country, he has “reluctantly” raised wages from $8.50 an hour to almost $11.
For more see the Washington Post and Breitbart News.