Illegal Immgrants Unite!

Source: NYT

Our mildly retarded friends on the left are cheering a labor agreement in Houston for janitors who have been earning far less that janitors in other cities...

Houston’s major cleaning companies and the union representing 5,300 janitors there announced a tentative contract yesterday that ends a monthlong strike, raises the workers’ hourly wages by nearly 50 percent over two years and provides them health coverage.

Under the three-year deal, the first for the janitors since they unionized last year, their pay, which now averages $5.25 an hour, will increase to $6.25 on Jan. 1, 2007; to $7.25 on Jan. 1, 2008; and to $7.75 on Jan. 1, 2009.

Further, the employers agreed to increase a janitor’s typical shift to six hours a day, from four. Many of the janitors had said they were being given too few hours of work to support their families.

Now, I go back and forth with unions, I tend to end up saying while I disagree almost entirely with them I still think they're a necessary evil. You may wonder, why were these particular janitors so poorly paid?

Not only was it one of the biggest unionization successes ever in the South, it overcame several other significant hurdles as well: most of the janitors were part-time employees, worked for subcontractors and were immigrants who spoke little English, and many were also illegal immigrants.

And that's where my sympathy dries up, right there. They proper way to correct for the wage deflation caused by illegal immigrants in the market is to remove the illegal immigrant, not forcibly raise wages.

Unlike our free trade pirates these days I actually believe and have watched the invisible hand of the market work it's magic through scarcity, if we removed every illegal immigrant from this country wages and compensation would spring up. It would have to to attract workers. Those very workers were told don't exist, yet did exist not ten years ago.

This is not a win for labor, this is a blow against the American worker.

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