Wednesday, November 30, 2005

The myth of the choosy unemployed bloke

Greg Saunders, also writing at This Modern World, takes on the "jobs Americans won't do" tagline, pointing out that the missing words are "for this little pay."
What people like the George W. Bush don’t understand is that capitalism is not a one-way street. When the demand for workers is high and the supply of laborers is low, the rational solution would be for employers to raise wages, increase benefits, or both to ensure that supply catches up to demand. But that would mean actually spending more money, and we can’t have that.
We don't need to make it easier for immigrants to get such jobs (although there's plenty of room for handling immigrant issues much better), but make it harder for businesses to run on a model that depends on sub-subsistance wages. I'd like to see some conservative pundit run with that angle.

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