My late father was a union man nearly his entire life of selling newspapers on a downtown Los Angeles street corner.
It was the union that in the 1940s won him a one-penny increase in the amount he retained of the price of a paper. When papers cost five cents, this was a significant increase.
The union was still paying him benefits in 1972, when my father retired while on strike against the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.
My father's long workweek earned him about $25-30 in 1938 when he and my
mother married and perhaps $65-70 in the postwar era. On this he and my
mother were able to buy into the American dream. They could afford the $58 monthly payments on a three-bedroom stucco bungalow house. Sundays we enjoyed drives to near-by San Gabriel Valley farms and orchards or a day
at an uncrowded, unpolluted beach. My mother used to say, thanking God, "Where else can working folk live like this?"
I wish today's union's leaders cared to investigate why this halcyon world has vanished for all of us, not just working folk. I wish they were committed to restoring it for future generations.
Instead, the AFL-CIO leadership has just displayed both demographic naiveté and the crassest opportunism. Its call for another round of amnesties for millions of law-breaking illegal aliens is fueled by a vision of millions of potential new union recruits. (It also is tantamount to renouncing national sovereignty, an act that ought better to originate within the electorate.)
It is not motivated out of concern for the best interests of common working folk, this nation's future (edited out: or, paradoxically, the sending nations). Its call will lay the heaviest costs on the workers in the states that attract the greatest number of entrants, legal and illegal.
The low cost of living, the unparalleled beauty of the natural setting my father's generation enjoyed were benefits conferred by a sustainable population base. In 1940 the country had 132 million people; California, 7 million people. By 1950 the nation's 150 million and California's 10 million people were both butting up against ecological limits.
Yet land for postwar housing tracts was "cheap"(quotation marks edited out in printed version): one merely had to convert near-by farmland. Long Island and San Gabriel Valley farms alike vanished.
Rank-and-file workers simultaneously benefited from a tight labor market
reflecting low 1930s' birth rates and small numbers of post-1920 immigrants.
Lesser-skilled workers gained bargaining power; unfavored women and blacks saw employment barriers crumble. The 1964 Civil Rights Act's passage and Cesar Chavez's near-success in unionizing farm workers were no accidents. Chavez's movement grew out of a tight farm labor market, which also prompted growers to invest in raising worker productivity while economizing on now more-expensive labor.
Beginning in 1965 an expansionary-minded Congress threw wide open our borders oblivious to a changed demographic context both domestically and globally. In 1972 it rejected the call by the President's Commission on Population
Growth and the American Future for immediate population stabilization.
Tacitly buying into the employer-created argument that America needs cheap labor Congress has acquiesced to a flood of illegal workers, imposing high local social costs. The AFL-CIO is the logical party to rebut this fallacious contention.
In California this influx of largely-illegal low-skilled newcomers short-circuited the process of rationalizing the use of farm and lower-skilled urban labor. A 1997 Rand Corporation study showed that in
contrast to other states, productivity and wages of California farm workers declined post-1970.
Low-wage workers equal poor people. People who earn below a "living wage" necessarily depend upon subsidies from the public sector (thus enabling employers to pay "below the living wage"). They cannot generate the wealth and tax revenues essential to supporting an industrialized society's high-quality public services.
Fewer, better-paid, better-treated workers are the keystone of post-industrial society.
In a mere fifty years U.S. population has nearly doubled to a destructive 275 million. California's population has grown 3 ½ times; Los Angeles' population, five-fold. Hyper-inflated housing costs, two-hour commute times, cities of a size unthinkable in 1950: we would see none of these with an
optimum population of 150 million.
Union leaders should revisit the lessons imparted on Earth Day, 1970. ALL countries as well as the globe itself are finite. Wise governance starts with this reality, then debates and implements an optimum population policy. The U.S. might have served as an international model in shaping policies
to safeguard our environment for posterity while reducing our plundering of
other nations' resources. Open borders frustrate both these goals.
I want for the average working family the affordable housing, the manageable-sized cities, the accessible open space that a U.S. with a sustainable population could guarantee in perpetuity.
Why should our union leaders wish to subvert this?
The author, a manpower consultant in Africa and the Caribbean, is population policy advisor to the Ecology Center of Southern California (and Sr. Fellow, Negative Population Growth, Inc., of D.C., and of Californians for Population Stabilization, of Los Angeles).
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