[lbo-talk] Slinging California mud onto Wetbacks? - Union complicity? Decent compromise?

boddhisatva boddhisatva at netzero.net
Thu Oct 16 08:38:29 PDT 2003

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Michael Pugliese sent me this excellent article. Do we think the AGJOBS bill is union complicity or a decent compromise policy? I think I still prefer the minimum wage. Screw the growers.

Navarette DLC, I think.

AGJOBS bill offers a little for all, not much for country

12:02 AM CDT on Wednesday, October 15, 2003

By RUBEN NAVARRETTE / The Dallas Morning News

Congress has produced a bumper crop of bills promising to import guest workers. The latest proposal – dubbed the Agricultural Jobs, Opportunity, Benefits and Security Act of 2003, or AGJOBS – offers a little something for everybody, but not much for the country as a whole.

There already are at least two other proposals being bandied about. One promises guest workers for employers and legalization for the workers. Another promises the workers but not the legalization. The AGJOBS bill – sponsored in the House by Chris Cannon, R-Utah, and Howard Berman, D- Calif., and in the Senate by Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and Edward Kennedy, D- Mass. – promises more still. It came about after three years of negotiation by the United Farm Workers and a coalition of growers.

Farmers, ranchers and other types of agricultural employers would find it easier to import guest workers because paperwork requirements would be streamlined and government oversight reduced. The union, meanwhile, will find a ready pool of potential dues-paying members, thanks to a provision in the bill allowing as many as 500,000 illegal immigrants to earn legal residency if they worked in agriculture for 100 work days leading up to August 2003.

Employers would receive the benefit of a three-year freeze of wages – which, when guest workers are concerned, would be dictated by the federal government. Workers would receive the benefit of being able to travel back and forth between their home countries and not have to worry about the deportation of members of their immediate family.

Under the AGJOBS bill, guest workers would also have – for the first time – the right to sue employers in federal court if they are cheated, abused or mistreated. But employers would have the satisfaction of knowing that, in just six years, there would be less government oversight. That's when a requirement to submit annual written employment records to the government and to workers would expire, or "sunset." The end product is a mature and thoughtful plan whose only drawback may be that it is – by design – limited to agriculture. Of course, if the hotel and restaurant industry was willing to start similar negotiations, it's conceivable that it could help produce a bill like this.

And a bill like this is light-years away from the sort of offensive debate that took place a few years ago in the Arizona Legislature. At issue then was a measure advancing the simple proposition that people who work deserve to be paid, even if they are here illegally. The remarkable thing is that there were legislators willing to take the other side, insisting that guaranteeing fairness somehow legitimized illegal immigration.

Listening to that debate, I had to wonder: Wasn't this whole issue of trying to get people to work without paying them settled about 150 years ago by President Lincoln?

The AGJOBS bill is a more honest approach. A coalition of growers wanted cheap labor, so much that they went along with language that opens them up to lawsuits if they take advantage of workers. The United Farm Workers wanted a shot at signing up hundreds of thousands of new members, and it was willing to give into a wage freeze to get it.

So why don't I feel better about the bill? Maybe it's because while methodical in achieving its goals, the goals in question aren't what's best for the country.

There is some good here. Farm labor is backbreaking work – or so my parents and grandparents tell me from having done it – and it wouldn't break my heart for some of the people who do it now to get legal residency. And given my constant worry that guest workers are tailor-made for exploitation, I take some comfort in the idea that potential exploiters could be hauled into court.

Yet there were certain things that were true at the beginning of this debate that are still true now. First, government shouldn't be in the labor procurement business – not for any industry. And second, amnesty is an affront to personal responsibility. Those who are living in the United States illegally must take steps to become legal, and government shouldn't, with the stroke of a pen, magically make it happen for them.

There is one more true thing. Illegal immigration has its roots in the eagerness of American employers to get ahead by hiring illegal immigrants. That practice is wrong. And we shouldn't do anything to encourage it.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is an editorial writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. His e-mail address is rnavarrette at dallasnews.com.

Ruben Navarrette is an editorial columnist for The Dallas Morning News.