The labor market

I am always a big fan of conspiracy theories in the sense that I love to review them and support them if they have any merit.

One thing that is not a conspiracy theory is that business and people who hire people to work for them like to pay as little as possible for someone to do the job correctly or at least sufficiently.

The conspiracy comes in with watching how the labor market is manipulated in this country by those with the power to do so. For example, you can remember back when Bill Clinton's first two nominees for attorney general were called out for hiring illegal immigrants as nannies and not even paying the requisite taxes for them? Do you think these are the only two wealthy people in the nation who are doing this? What does it say when someone nominated to the highest law enforcement position in the country is engaging in this sort of illegal behavior and treating it as a sort of de minimis problem?

The answer is, of course, that everybody who can do it doing this for the simple fact that they don't want to pay what a U.S. citizen would require for such a job. The complaints go that Americans won't do these types of jobs, but the real answer is that they go for the cheapest Americans willing to do the job and of course get poor quality. If they were willing to pay what the labor market demands, they could get the service and quality they expect. So their solution? Violate federal law and manipulate the labor market to their advantage because "they" deserve it.

This type of manipulation is why the U.S. is full of illegal immigrants and that many who import them want them to stay that way. It keeps their wages low and their employers can basically act like they don't exist for tax purposes. Health care providers are forced to take care of these workers even if they don't pay their bills and schools are required to educate their children even if they pay no school taxes.

On the high end of the labor market, off-shoring has permitted American companies to reduce their labor costs by letting non-Americans do the same jobs for less pay. That is perfectly above board and legal, but is a discussion for another day. The real conspiracy those, involves non-citizen workers who come here as essentially indentured servants of U.S. companies under the H-1B program. This is a direct attempt to manipulate the labor market by using a federal program for a purpose other than its original intent.

I will explore this all a little more soon.