Thursday, January 06, 2011

It's Not The Number of Jobs, Stupid!

I hear a lot of talk from Repuglycans about fostering a business environment that will result in millions of jobs being created, and I find it insulting: The type of jobs Republican policies lead to creating is minimum wage jobs, or only marginally better.

When your philosophy, like the Republican Party's, is that unions are evil, that any type of market regulation is noxious for business, that you should cave in to big business--scratch that: that you should pave the way for business to exploit workers in America in exchange for jobs not being shipped to India, then the jobs you are seeking to create are not living wage jobs: they are modern-day slave jobs. Hence, when you say that you are trying to create millions of jobs for American workers you are not being square with the American people.

The Repuglycan philosophy about jobs is summarized in the headline of the latest post over at the Daily Kos: Low-wage jobs lead in new hiring. In other words, get ready to work more, for less money and with slimmer benefits than you had before. And since the money you make now determines your social security benefits in the future, prepare to work for a very, very long time, since retiring is out of the question. Oh, and try to stay healthy, or--as former Representative Alan Grayson said last year--if you get sick the Repuglycan health care plan for you is this: die quickly (i.e., keep the costs for your employer to a minimum.)

You want proof that Repuglycans see you as modern slaves? They just renamed the Education and Labor Committee as Education and Workforce Committee. What's in a word? Says the WSJ: "Workforce is a term employers are likely to use, while labor is more evocative of the union movement—after all, they call it the American Federation of Labor." A minor shift in words, but a major shift in attitude.

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