Work Two Years and Die

 
 

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Yes, the middle class is dying. We in the Keys are helping to kill it. Even those in the middle class themselves. How? Herr Dr. International Business Professor Boettger is going to teach you what “outsourcing” and “globalization” mean to us in Paradise.

The death of the middle class began with the gutting of labor laws in the 1970’s and culminated in the passage of NAFTA in 1994. At the time I was all for it, International Business being a prime MBA class that I taught at the time.  I, old Bush, Clinton, and a majority of both Democrat and Republican legislators all cheered.

The key selling point of union busting and having the Chinese do all the manufacturing is “Hey! You can get everything cheaper at Walmart now. Yay hooray!” Most academic economists today and think tankers on the right still maintain the middle class is better off because their shirts, bedroom sets, and TVs are much cheaper when the people who make them get paid squat.

What these pinhead economists, presidents, legislators on both the left and right, and, yes, one-time pinheaded IB Professors all missed is the effect on the people who formerly did these jobs for a living wage. Before I bring this down to the local level, the jobs of the custodians and maintenance workers for the school district and our hospitality workers, I’ll give the more vivid example of what happened to furniture making in the U.S. just ten years ago.

In the late 1990’s, almost all furniture bought in the U.S was made here, most of it in North Carolina. They had stolen the industry from northern states which had used up their hardwoods and had unions. North Carolina was shipping its excellent walnut and oak up north when they realized they could copy the designs and make the furniture themselves. No wood shipping costs, and as a “right to work” state, no pesky unions to worry about, so wages and benefits could be much less.  So bye-bye Michigan, hello North Carolina.

Then NAFTA came along. Designed to ease tariffs with Canada and Mexico, it ended up letting the Chinese in. One patriarch of a dominant southern furniture dynasty saw for himself what they were up against when he visited a Chinese competitor’s factory:

[He] was incredulous at the lack of safety measures in the Dongguan finishing rooms–no fans, no masks, nothing.  [He] actually had a fondness for the smell of finishing material, but these fumes were so strong he had trouble catching his breath. “How do they stand it?” he asked the manager, choking as he spoke.”Spray two years and die,” the manager said. At which point there would be twenty more lined up to take the fallen worker’s place.

When that’s your opponent, you have no chance. For years, the American factories did everything they could to fight a losing battle, closing plant after plant, actually shipping their prized hardwoods to China, buying the furniture the Chinese made with it, and selling it to retailers as they had done in the past with their own creations. But soon enough Walmart and the other major retailers realized they could buy direct from the Chinese themselves, and sayonara to a few hundred thousand good jobs in the South.

Yes, the furniture is just as well-made and cheaper. But the loss to America goes much further than the obvious harm done to our workers. They went on average from $15/hour with health benefits and a pension to $9/hour with neither, if they could even get a job. Worse for us all, the money they used to get paid gets shipped overseas. American workers spend their wages in their own communities. Every furniture dollar got spent on average seven times before ending up in someone’s investment portfolio. Dollars spent on paupers’ wages in Dongguan stay in Dongguan.

So now we come to the terrible error of outsourcing our custodial and maintenance workers’ jobs in the Monroe school district. I am going to use rough numbers to make my point understandable, but they are pretty close to reality. We used to pay our custodians $2,000,000/year in wages. The Board got the bright idea to save money by paying a northern company $ 1,500,000/year for the same work–$ 1 million in slave wages, and $ 500,000 to the MBAs who sweet-talked us into the deal.  But who cares? Bingo! It means a cool half million in my, the downtrodden Monroe taxpayer’s wallet, yes?

No, no, a thousand times no. What that means is that we have just shipped around $ 1,000,000 of my Monroe tax money out of the county and into the hands of Northerners who will never spend a cent of it down here. Under the old system, the custodians actually made enough to live here, with their spouses working, of course. Now the workers themselves get half of what they used to get. That means they spend only half as much here as they used to. Those closer to Homestead bus down, so all their money gets spent out of county

And shame on us, we downgraded a (lower) middle class job to a minimum wage poverty job. Aren’t we proud of our green-eye-shade leaders.  Remember, my tax dollars spent as wages to locals results in their contributing to our sales taxes, paying enough rent to cover their landlord’s property taxes, and eventually someone else’s buying a home and sharing the property tax burden with me.

Class dismissed. But for extra credit, let me show you another form of private sector globalization in the Keys that is screwing our own Monroe high school graduates. Our biggest industry is hospitality. One outrageous practice that suppresses wages below the poverty line is the large chains using foreign labor cheaply under the guise of giving their hotel workers “training” under the “student” J-1 visa program.

The way it works is that some desperate northeastern European hotel worker gets a J-1 visa to “study” hotels in key West. He gets here and works his butt off 50-60 hours/week for minimum wage for a year and goes home. Neither he nor the hotel pay Social Security tax. By starting and ending mid-year, he gets to deduct his personal exemption twice, as well as travel expenses in most cases.

Remember when the Pier House was sold a couple of years ago? They fired everyone making over $ 10/hour, and got rid of the community’s beloved Piano Bar, once Bobby Nesbitt’s home base and for years the local’s favorite, Larry Smith’s, various showcases. Cynthia and I boycotted it until we won a free meal.  Sure enough, our busboy spoke no English, and our server had a thick eastern European accent. Ah, the brilliant coups of corporate life.

So, Keys graduates aspiring to live and work where you grew up: white collar, The Pier House and their corporate ilk would rather hire people desperate for a Key West hard-working vacation who don’t pay social security or federal taxes into our pot. Blue collar Keys graduates, our school district would rather hire minimum wage workers from Homestead than pay you a living wage.

There you are: do any of you give a damn? Or is your main dream a Walmart on Rockland Key?

Furniture story and quote from “Factory Man” by Beth Macy, 2014.

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Rick Boettger

Rick Boettger

  No Responses to “Work Two Years and Die”

  1. The foreign worker visas are a subject I wish got more attention as so many are issued ( contractors arrange all this you know- kind of like “coyotes” ) and these poor folks live in crowded rooms sometimes and have no rights while displacing local workers so that CERTAIN HOTELS can make more money. Miami and Tampa both have a Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union and we should have one here. I am not xenophobic , I know a lot of these nice kids and wish them well, but this has been going on for 25 years and no one is doing a damn thing about it. Does the Chamber of Commerce have a position on the subject- yeah I bet they do.

  2. To answer Rick’s second to last question, No Rick, no one gives a damn! The Prevalent attitude in Key West is “I’ve got mine, screw you, get your own”

  3. Love it Rick, anyone who thinks Walmart is doing any of us a favor with what it has done with the world is unable to see between the cracks and find the truth. I’ve written an essay called “Saving at Walmart” that I will submit to this publication one of these days. I’m sure you will understand it.

  4. I just have two points of contention with this article. the first is that the legislators, executive branch, and others supposedly erudite in this area “missed” the cause and effect of the economic/financial policies that they championed and wrapped around the American flag. Not only is that assertion incorrect and ill informed, it is so dangerously naïve as to be part of the problem of the evisceration and emasculation of the American middle class and the public itself.
    America, even to the most superficial observer, has been a full blown fascist state for some years now; any attempt to shield that fact has long been abandoned by our owners. The systematic de-industrialization of the country, the “bubbles” of tech stocks, mortgages, and soon student loans, and the financial shenanigans of the banks, have all been planned, orchestrated events to redistribute wealth and reconstruct society into the “haves,” and the “dependents.” But make no mistake, depressions, recessions, boom, busts, the business cycle, are all man made events having nothing to do with orthodox economic theory, or financial modeling. The economy as we experience it is the direct result of the size of the money supply, which is of course, controlled by those who create it.

    This brings me the second point of contention, assigning blame, even in the slightest, to the average person just trying to get by. If the school board changes contracts to minimize expenditures in reaction to a shrinking budget not of their doing, they are merely reacting as rational economic actors. The same can be said for the hotels, the restaurants, and yes, even a Walmart. They are victims to the circumstance brought on by the money creators as much as anyone. If they were to react in any other way other than to maximize self interest, they would be doing a disservice to all involved. Sometimes those behaviors don’t follow a paradigm of civility or morality, and lack in ethics, but that is the system that they exist in.

    Blaming them is akin to blaming someone’s nose for getting in the way of the punchers fist.

    Money we can agree runs the world. Put the blame on those who create it, and control it.

  5. Excellent Presentation….An extraordinary illumination of issues and conduct impacting our Nation…

    Rick, you’re a natural born ‘Teacher’. An enlightened electorate is less apt to be duped into acquiescing with the ‘herd mentality’.

    The Monroe County School District shall be required to conduct classes, which instructs all Seniors, Staff and Board Members, to the wisdom contained in your article.

    Keysbum is an extremely valuable resource. His knowledge and well thought out positions, are provocative and stimulating. Familiarity with his counter-points and expertise will be necessary in order to graduate.

    Just think of the magnificent instruction that our students would receive, if they had the privilege of learning under the tutelage of Rick Boettger and Keysbum.

    While delivering a world-class education, they would change the world, one student at a time…

  6. Zobop, KeysWood, and my old friend Jerome, your points are all well taken, sadly in KeysWood’s case. Thank you for taking the time to add to the discussion.

    John and Keysbum, let’s get together to talk some things out. Please email me at [email protected] to arrange a time and place.

  7. keysbum
    some attribute this to thomas jefferson and some do not but whoever stated the below was right on the beam!

    .”I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”

    “fascist state” is an understatement as in monty pythons holy grail’s black knight…’its only a flesh wound’!
    and unfortunately and sadly the sheeple sleep on. welcome to the ‘new world order’.

  8. “Here, let me help you with those chains…”. said the slave to the master. Welcome to the new world order. Pathocracy, where the criminally insane and corporate sociopaths make the rules and the people allow it.
    Wonderful essay, concise and accurate.

  9. Back in 1993 I was watching C-Span and the U S Senate was voting on NAFTA. I hollered to my wife to come see what was happening. We agreed that our childrens’ future was being sold down the river. The highlight was when Democrat Sen Moynihan and Republican Sen Damato gave each other a hug in the center aisle in the U S Senate. Ever since that disgusting moment I have watched our country go down the tubes and exist somewhere under a trash pile. May God let us rot above the ground for allowing our government since then to bury our unborn babies in debt that the world has never known before. What kind of people are we???