May 31, 2001

+== TIME OUT PROJECT ==+

In this morning’s issue of the ProjectUSA ezine, we made the following statement: "In the early 1960s, a job on the kill floor of Union Pack, a stockyard in Omaha, Nebraska, paid about $14.00 per hour…"

The actual base hourly salary employers had to pay American kill floor workers in the early 60s was about $6.00 per hour.

We regret the error.

Nevertheless, the point stands. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Consumer Price Index since 1963 has multiplied by a factor of about 5.8, which means $6 per hour then is like more than $30 per hour now.

Meanwhile, the actual wages for these jobs — thanks to heavy reliance on illegal immigration — has risen by a factor of only about 1.3 times.

No wonder these are "jobs Americans won’t do." It is our guess that if these jobs were paying $30 per hour today, Americans would be lining up to do them. Indeed, when meatpacking in the Midwest was still unionized just a few decades ago, those physically unpleasant jobs were much desired because they provided blue-collar workers with a middle class salary. Now those nonunion jobs pay a fraction of the former wage scale to a largely immigrant workforce and working conditions are more hazardous.

A nation should do its own work, and a principled American labor movement should vigorously oppose illegal immigration — this includes amnesties, since, according to an INS study released last year, amnesties encourage (unsurprisingly) even more illegal immigration.

feedback@aflcio.org

Thanks to all those who wrote questioning the stat.

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt

Tags:   Bureau of Labor Statistics · meatpacking · Omaha · Union Pack · unionized · wageNo Comments