Word: wages
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...imports not just the gizmos and gadgets but also a way of life, thanks to a shadow labor force that lets Americans eat out once a week because restaurants can hire dishwashers for sub-minimum wage. The U.S. depends on the maids and gardeners and carpenters and home-health-care workers whose children will probably become teachers and technicians and surgeons and Senators. If they all put down their tools tomorrow, the U.S. wouldn't be arguing about whether it is in a recession...
...What's changing, of course, is India's demographic makeup as the nation's booming economy mints a critical mass of newly affluent consumers. Last year, the average Indian salary surged 14% (18% for IT professionals), the highest wage growth in Asia, according to a study by Hewitt Associates, a global human-resources company. There are now about 1.6 million Indian households that spend an average of $9,000 a year on luxury goods, according to The Knowledge Company, a management-consulting firm in New Delhi. "With multi-income families and increasing international exposure through travel and the Internet...
...impact of the below-market wage earners tends to fall hardest on unskilled workers at the bottom of the wage pyramid. "Any sizable increase in the number of immigrants will inevitably lower wages for some American workers," says George Borjas, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Borjas calculates that all immigration, by increasing the labor supply from 1980 to 2000, "reduced the average annual earnings of native-born men by an estimated $1,700, or roughly 4%." Borjas says African Americans and native-born Hispanics pay the steepest price because they are more often in direct...
...aftermath of 9/11, illegal immigration slowed dramatically for two years. Now it has turned up again. The chronic reason is a Mexican economy unable to provide jobs with a living wage to a growing population. But those who live and work along the border say there is another, more immediate cue for the rush. In a speech on immigration policy last January, George W. Bush proposed "a new temporary-worker program that will match willing foreign workers with willing American employers when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs." The President said his program would give three-year...
...First World markets. Moreover, free trade has also failed to generate enough U.S. and other foreign investment in new industries and small- and medium-size businesses-and, as a result, hasn't created enough new Mexican jobs. Even when new jobs do appear, the nation?s unforgiving low-wage business culture-the dark shame of Mexico's political and economic leaders, which NAFTA was also supposed to reform-makes sure that they still often pay in a day what similar work would pay in an hour in the U.S. Add the recent deluge of dirt-cheap Chinese imports into North...