The Wrongologist

There are
about 3.6
million available jobs in the US today. See this chart:  

So we have 15 million people needing a job,
and about 3.6 million jobs available.

If we are
to add jobs,we need a radically different
approach: An
industrial policy designed to create jobs in America.

There are
serious problems trying to implement a national jobs policy.

• Ideology
  causes some to reject an industrial policy as “socialism”, because they say:
  “government is the problem, not the solution”.

• Multinationals
  (MNC’s) and their lobbyists will spend millions to drive the policy in the
  direction most favorable to them. Think: Affordable Health
  Care Act and Dodd-Frank.

MNC’s only
want an industrial policy to the extent it allows them to import foreign
workers.

Strange
isn’t it: more immigrants from Mexico steal jobs from Americans but more immigrants from India are
necessary for our economy.

How
do the MNC’s influence “industrial policy”? First, they claim there is a talent
shortage. The reality is there isn’t a 6-7
million US talent shortage if only 3.6 million jobs are available.

Let’s talk about STEM jobs (Science,
Technology, Engineering and Math), which are touted by both Republicans and Democrats
as the holy grail of high wage jobs.

The MNC’s are
looking to force a national policy on STEM, allowing an unlimited number of
foreign students to compete for these jobs. Here
is the MNC lobbyists’ agenda:

• Granting
  automatic green cards or provisional visas to all foreign students after they
  earn a STEM degree from a U.S. university.

• Fully
  implementing within two years the August 2011 immigration initiatives regarding
  EB-2, H-1B, EB-5 and E13 categories, primarily around speeding up the process
  for making visa decisions.

• Increasing,
  by a factor of at least four, the number of entrepreneurs from other countries
  allowed entry into the United States, mainly though expansion of the EB–5
  program.

Here is some history on immigrant
work visas:

• The L-1 visa program was started in the 1970s and was originally
  for intracompany transfers only.

• The H-1B guest worker visa program was started in 1990 with an
  annual cap of 65,000 visas.

• In late 1998 and early 2000, the
  H-1B visa caps were raised from 65,000 a year to 115,000 per year and
  195,000 per year, respectively.

• As a result of the 1998 & 2000 increases, 1.1 million foreign guest workers came
  into the U.S. from October 1998 to October 2003.

• The number of L-1s who came in from 1998-2003 was at
  least 1 million. There is no yearly cap on L-1 visas.

• The <-1Ba hrt.novacredit.com/resources/h1b-visa">h1b Visa cap reverted to 65,000 per year in Oct. 2003.

• There is no legal requirement in the H-1B law that requires an employer to look for and try
  to hire an American worker instead of a foreign worker.

Consider this:

• The 1.8 Million unemployed STEM workers
  represent 65% of the 2.75 million US STEM jobs, according to the USDOL.

• If you count the L1 and H1 Visa
  totals for the last 20 years, it is around 2.1 Million Visas.

The displacement of US STEM workers by
immigrants is obvious.

A year
ago, at a hearing by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees
and Border Security titled, The
Economic Imperative for Enacting Immigration Reform, Ron Hira, associate professor
of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and an engineer, testified
as
the token U.S. STEM professional representative. Hira actually used real live
government statistics:

• According
  an analysis of BLS data by IEEE-USA more than 300,000 American engineers and computer
  professionals are unemployed.

The claim
that corporations cannot
find these STEM workers is fiction. It’s an excuse to age
discriminate, labor arbitrage, outsource, and control the labor supply. The real
issue is that the US has not produced
enough high quality engineers willing to work for cheap, because that’s what
American
MNC’s want.

It is
worth remembering that the United States has third
largest population of the world. Clearly we have more than enough people
to spawn all the STEM workers we need,
if we make it a national priority.

Leaving
the STEM issue aside, we need to do more for America’s unemployed and working poor:

• Improve
  the amount and available interest rates on student loans.

• Refinance
  their mortgages at today’s low interest rates.

• Increase
  the Earned Income Tax Credit – a wage subsidy for lower-paying jobs.

• Provide
  a higher minimum wage that’s automatically adjusted for inflation.

• Exempt
  the Social Security payroll tax on the first $25,000 of income and pay for it by eliminating
  the ceiling (now $110,100) on income subject to it.

• Establish
  a new Works Projects Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps designed to
  put the long-term unemployed back to work.

• Mandate
  that our large corporate firms hire some portion of the long-term unemployed
  for each job opening they have until unemployment reaches 6%.

On
Wednesday, some economists said that the new iPhone 5 might add as much as 0.5%
to GDP. Would that create jobs?

Consider this:

China
can’t hire enough people to meet America’s demand for iPhone5’s. On Sept. 6th,
The Shanghai Post reported that Foxconn, Apple’s manufacturer
of iPhones and iPads, made deals with
local colleges to suspend classes so that the students could work the
assembly line making iPhone5’s:

“THOUSANDS of students in an east China city are being forced to
work at a Foxconn plant after classes were suspended at the beginning of the
new semester… Students from Huai’an in Jiangsu Province were driven to a
factory in the city run by Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Company after the plant
couldn’t find sufficient workers for the production of Apple’s much-anticipated
iPhone 5, they said in online posts…They started work on the production line
last Thursday and were being paid 1,550 yuan (US$243.97) a month for working
six days a week.”

So,
even when the American consumer DOES create demand for a hot product, the majority of the jobs created
are temporary, low paying and in a foreign country.

This is no different than
what we see during the Christmas season, except that those jobs are in the US.

Three years into a
recovery, when GDP is well above pre-recession levels, we are at a modern historical low for working-age adults who are
actually working, or trying to find work. We have a growing population in which
our young are becoming chronically unemployed, maybe even unemployable.

We need to scrap ideology and failed
ideas and move in new directions.

What is stopping us?