The Providence Journal steals some bases in its stem-cell–related editorial today:
But amniotic stem cells, though plentiful, may not be able to develop into the full range of cell types that embryonic stem cells provide. Because they are only a few days old, embryonic cells are extremely flexible in terms of what they might become. Adult stem cells, championed as a good-enough alternative by foes of embryonic-stem-cell research, hold promising but probably limited uses (for instance, helping repair bone fractures). Difficult to extract, they are taken from living people, and considered unlikely to help with complex ailments. Amniotic cells look better, but may still fall short of what embryonic stem cells can do. …
Anthony Atala, the author of the study on amniotic fluid, has said it is “essential” that the National Institutes of Health make research dollars available for embryonic stem-cell research. He sees the amniotic-fluid approach as complementary to it, not as a replacement. For one thing, embryonic-stem-cell research is further along, and closer to being tested in humans. In moving toward possible cures, time is of the essence.
Firstly, it is imprecise to talk about “what embryonic stem cells can do.” Embryonic stem cells are not doing anything, yet. They may be “closer to being tested in humans” than once they were, but they aren’t there. Which leads to: Secondly, adult stem cells are being tested, even used, and have been for years.
I could be incorrect, but as I understand the biology, the adult stem cells are limited mainly in their ability to become only a handful of cell types, not in the practical applications that they could fill once they’ve been repurposed. But stem cells taken from different parts of the adult’s body have different ranges, so they aren’t, as a group, limited to the capabilities of any particular type.
OK, I don’t get it. Supposedly the Democrats want to safeguard you and me from violations of our civil liberties perpetrated in the name of the “War on Terror”. But now it seems they’re more than happy to restrict free speech. Earlier this week, it was revealed that they are pondering a return of the misnamed “Fairness Doctrine”;
The Fairness Doctrine did not require broadcasters to present issues in a “fair and honest manner”; it required them to turn their stations into ping-ponging punditry if they allowed opinion to appear on the air at all. It created such a complicated formula that most broadcasters simply refused to air any political programming, as it created a liability for station owners for being held hostage to all manner of complaints about lack of balance.
Congress and the Reagan administration repealed the Fairness Doctrine in the mid-1980s, and it allowed a market for political opinion to flourish. It also revitalized the AM band…Radio stations could air local and syndicated talk shows without having to worry about metering time between differing viewpoints, allowing the station owners to reflect the market and their own personal preferences for politcal viewpoints.
Why would [Dennis] Kucinich want to reimpose the Fairness Doctrine and kill off the AM band and talk radio? Because his allies have proven less successful than conservatives at building a market for their broadcasts….Democrats aren’t wasting much time in rolling back free speech now that they have the majority. Putting Kucinich in charge of domestic policy reform was no mistake on their part. They want to kill talk radio, and if they manage to hold their majority and win the White House in 2008, they just might do it. [More here].
Now we find out that they are actively trying to push through a law requiring the “registration” of bloggers (via Instapundit).
S.1 has been introduced in the Senate as “lobbying reform” — which in this case means “First Amendment infringements.” An amendment has been attached, which requires registration of bloggers with more than 500 readers, and who comment on policy issues. Violation would be a criminal offense.
I looked it up on the Library of Congress webpage (which is essentially unlinkable) and have attached section 220 in extended remarks, below. As the bill is reported, it appears to cover any “paid” grassroots lobbying, that reaches more than 500 people. But a blogger who receives contributions might be classed as a “paid” grassroots type. It looks like Congress wants to keep an eye on annoying people like Porkbusters. It may be significant that S.1 was introduced by Harry Reid, one of the Kings of Pork.
I wonder if the watchdogs on the Left are going to be up in arms over these “quashing of dissent” actions? Or is it OK so long as the Democrats are doing the quashing? What’s next? Applying the “Fairness Doctrine” to bloggers? Maybe, just maybe.
[Open full post]I’ve seen a few blogospheric comments touting the reform of the Veteran’s Administration hospital system as an example of how strong government involvement in healthcare, maybe as strong as single payer, works well. The example doesn’t work for a very simple reason, illustrated below.
An article from the July 17 issue of Business Week does provide several metrics proving pretty conclusively that (high) quality patient care is available from the VA hospital system…
According to a Rand Corp. study, the VA system provides two-thirds of the care recommended by such standards bodies as the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality. Far from perfect, granted — but the nation’s private-sector hospitals provide only 50%. And while studies show that 3% to 8% of the nation’s prescriptions are filled erroneously, the VA’s prescription accuracy rate is greater than 99.997%, a level most hospitals only dream about. That’s largely because the VA has by far the most advanced computerized medical-records system in the U.S. And for the past six years the VA has outranked private-sector hospitals on patient satisfaction in an annual consumer survey conducted by the National Quality Research Center at the University of Michigan. This keeps happening despite the fact that the VA spends an average of $5,000 per patient, vs. the national average of $6,300.Of course it wasn’t always this way. As Business Week reminds us…
To much of the public… the VA’s image is hobbled by its inglorious past. For decades the VA was the health-care system of last resort. The movies Coming Home (1978), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Article 99 (1992) immortalized VA hospitals as festering sinkholes of substandard care. The filmmakers didn’t exaggerate. In an infamous incident in 1992, the bodies of two patients were found on the grounds of a VA hospital in Virginia months after they had gone missing. The huge system had deteriorated so badly by the early ’90s that Congress considered disbanding it.So how was the system turned around? In the mid-1990s, a VA administrator by the name of Kenneth Kizer (a Clinton appointee, for those keeping score) implemented a broad-based series of reforms…
The VA was reinvented in every way possible. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer, then the VA’s Health Under Secretary, installed the most extensive electronic medical-records system in the U.S. Kizer also decentralized decision-making, closed underused hospitals, reallocated resources, and most critically, instituted a culture of accountability and quality measurements. “Our whole motivation was to make the system work for the patient,” says Kizer, now director of the National Quality Forum, a nonprofit dedicated to improving health care. “We did a top-to-bottom makeover with that goal always in mind.”And what is Dr. Kizer doing now, to continue make the system even better and build on his successes? The answer is nothing. After fixing the VA system, Dr. Kenneth Kizer was fired by Congress for not doling out enough pork projects to key legislators…
Kizer, the turnaround’s architect, was forced out in 1999 when Congress refused to reconfirm him after he closed hospitals in key districts.Government Executive Online has more detail on Dr. Kizer’s firing (technically, the Senate’s decision not to renew his appointment; those who want to blame Republican Senators for opposing a Clinton nominee, get ready for a big disappointment)…
VHA also reflected another change in veteran demographics: the shift in population from North and East to South and West. Kizer’s response was a resource redistribution plan called the Veteran’s Equitable Resource Allocation (VERA) system. The system distributes operating funds among the agency’s networks based on the number of veterans served. In its first year, VERA caused nine VISNs to lose some 1998 funding, while 13 gained. For example, VISN 3, in New York, lost $124 million, while VISN 18, in Phoenix, gained nearly $60 million.There wasn’t anything magical about “single-payer” that made the VA system work. Dr Kizer’s reforms could be implemented in the existing hospital/insurance system (with an important exception or two, one of which is noted below), if there was a will to do so. The magic was that, for a little while, the top-priority — the only priority — in allocating resources in the VA system was quality of care. Unfortunately, as the VA is a government system, a systemic focus on regular people couldn’t last. In fact, a focus on reform of patient care, instead of on the politically motivated redistribution of resources, could cost a successful administrator his job.
VHA’s shifts in focus and resources brought results. Staffing fell 11 percent between December 1994 and September 1998, while the number of patients treated per year rose 18 percent. Surgeries performed on an outpatient basis – increasing productivity and reducing deaths – rose from 35 percent of all surgeries to 75 percent from September 1995 to March 1998….
So Kizer is a hero, and VHA has been rewarded, right? Not in Washington.
In fact, after failing to win renomination in September 1998, at the end of his four-year term, and again in June 1999, at the end of a nine-month extension granted by Congress, Kizer withdrew from contention. By June, Kizer’s VHA reforms had so angered legislators that they were lining up to threaten to place holds on his nomination if it ever escaped from committee.
Many legislators apparently couldn’t stomach the process Kizer used to transform VHA into a patient-centered, effective and efficient health care system. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., repeatedly took Kizer to task for considering closure of the nursing home and outpatient clinic at Fort Lyon, Colo., a location so remote that the VA facilities there must run their own sewer system and fire department….
Meanwhile, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., threatened to hold up Kizer’s nomination because of hospital cutbacks in his state, which has seen reductions in veterans, and consequently in VA hospital beds and funding.
To be successful, hospitals need to be run by people who want to build successful hospitals, not by politicians who view the world as a giant jobs program and whose concern for the quality of care is secondary to their concern that some fat budget numbers exist that can be pointed to on election day, whether or not the money is being spent on quality healthcare. Healthcare in America will only become economical, rational, and just when people are free to choose the best doctors and hospitals available to them, free from undue interference from either the government, or from private insurance industry bureaucrats who have figured out how to manipulate the government.
One other note. The Business Week article also notes that one factor in the VA turnaround an immunity from some lawsuits tied to the VA’s status as a government agency…
[VA] doctors don’t have to worry as much about malpractice lawsuits, since government agencies are somewhat protected. That made it easier for the VA to go out on a limb in 2005 and institute a systemwide policy of apologizing to patients for medical errors — an act of contrition rarely done in the private sector.Are those who look towards the VA as model of healthcare reform willing to explore extending the tort immunity enjoyed by the VA to non-government hospitals? [Open full post]
It’s been a few months since I’ve written about it…
Yet it’s back in the news…
And it’s important, with impact on a major policy debate…
So humor me, and pretend that it’s an exciting topic…
With this introduction…
Loyal Anchor Rising readers will know…
That it can only be…
[Dramatic pause]…
[Unorthodoxly long dramatic pause now bordering on campy]….
ERISA — The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974!!!!
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a July lower court ruling striking down Maryland’s “fair share” health coverage law as illegal under the aforementioned Federal ERISA law. Fair share laws are state mandates requiring large companies either to provide health insurance to their employees or pay an additional payroll tax used to fund a state-managed healthcare plan. The courts agreed (as they always have) that the ERISA statute prevents states from regulating employer-provided benefits – any benefits, healthcare included — any more stringently than the Federal government does.
The strikedown of the Maryland law may have immediate consequences beyond Maryland, potentially ripping the heart out of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s universal healthcare proposal for California. Without the tax on employers, the additional tax-increases on doctors and hospitals proposed in the California plan probably won’t be enough to pay for it. (By the way, I haven’t yet seen a satisfactory explanation of why ERISA doesn’t also doom Mitt Romney’s universal coverage plan for Massachusetts.)
In its coverage of the ruling, the New York Times mentions an interesting alternative to “fair share” laws that may have some cross-ideological appeal, because (at least in theory) it helps separate health care choices from employment…
Maryland lawmakers may also choose to rewrite the law, using an approach upheld in several other states that requires companies with uninsured workers to pay them higher wages that can be used for health care premiums, said Paul Sonn, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law and an expert on fair share health care legislation.I’d be interested to know if the law in these other states requires employers to pay their employees only what would have been spent on health insurance, of if it requires the pay increase to be enough to pay for an individual health insurance policy, which would be substantially larger. If the second case is true, then this is less a reform proposal than it is a backdoor attempt to force everyone into (and thus continue) America’s strange system of employment based health coverage. That would be a bad thing, as it would retard the building momentum for decoupling health insurance from the workplace. [Open full post]
I don’t know whether it was something that he’d recently read or a memory sparked by something that I said, but during a telephone conversation with my Jersey Boy father last night, he said (paraphrasing), “Rhode Island is essentially a playground for the rich, and the rich don’t need a middle class.” The point being, I suppose, that circumstances in this state will have to go beyond intolerable — beyond the point at which any rational citizenry would insist on change — before change will even be conceivable.
The frightening thing is that the few native Rhode Islanders with whom I was able to share the commentary today replied, “Sounds about right.”
Not surprisingly, the context for my father’s explication was my continued interest in staying in this state. My reply, when whittled down to its essence, was that I find a certain attraction to contributing to the thorn, the buzz, the hiss, the whiff of truth that this playground comes at an unacceptable cost.
In remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., take some time to read his “I Have a Dream” speech. Also, there are quite a few pieces extolling the inherent conservatism (and Republicanism) of Dr. King. For instance, the Heritage Foundation held a lecture in 1993 concerning “The Conservative Virtues of Dr. Martin Luther King” and posted a piece about “Martin Luther King’s Conservative Legacy” last year. Then there is a new piece by Francis Rice explaining “Why Martin Luther King Was Republican.” Finally, Andrew Busch responds to some criticism he received on an earlier piece he had written on Dr. King and Conservatism.
I suppose it could appear as if I’m overly-politicizing here. Yet, my intention is to present the conservative viewpoint on Dr. King in hopes of showing that he did indeed speak to–and for–all Americans. [Open full post]
Although I can’t recall any particular instances of his using it, except when helping me with my homework, I associate the phrase “think it through” with my father. It has always seemed, I suppose, to summarize a particular approach to the world — almost a philosophy — that he emphasizes.
Not to leap too quickly from general philosophy to economic specificity, but the phrase comes to mind now because I wish people would apply the principle to the issue of the minimum wage, which is in the news of late. The most recent example in the media is the accusation of Nancy Pelosi’s hypocrisy, upon the House of Representatives’ voting to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour (or about 41%). Not to single him out, but in a comment to Marc’s post on that story, Scott Bill Hirst writes:
I support an increase in the minimum wage. … I do not believe the GOP needs to be a puppet of organized labor but it needs to reach out to working class Americans more. Serious issues of affordable health care and affordable housing are issues that put great financial pressures on Rhode Island households and need to be adequately addressed in our state.
I am still a Republican and Republicans need to facilitate addressing their positions on these issues. We need to look at imports and the respective policies of those countries on how they treat labor.
“Thinking through” the minimum wage brings to the fore the superficial, cynical, and injurious nature of this sort of “reaching out.” As I noted in the comments, conservatives and Republicans ought to concentrate on explaining to working families that market forces confound efforts to force-raise wages, often to the detriment of those ostensibly intended to benefit.
Businesses Will Do as Business Requires
First consider the issue from employers’ perspective: a business that suddenly finds itself having to pay 41% more for low-end, unskilled labor will have to find that money somewhere else in the budget. In the fantasy land of progressives, perhaps companies would shift resources from the higher ends of their payrolls, but in the real world, isolated excesses aside, those jobs pay better for a reason. More likely, companies will decrease their low-end employment, shifting their tasks either up the pay scale or to technology.
They will also increase their prices. Doing so may push smaller companies past the threshold of being able to compete, ceding the field to category killers (such as Home Depot) that bring economy of scale to their business models. In industries with captive customer bases (e.g., retail), these companies can pass increased costs on to consumers almost as a matter of course. In other words, the cost of goods — often essentials — will go up for everybody, including those at the minimum wage, as well as those who were just barely getting by before. In industries that aren’t as tied to particular locations (e.g., high tech), companies that raise their prices too high will lose their ability to compete with firms elsewhere or will have to move elsewhere, themselves.
So, to sum up the effects of aggressive minimum wage hikes from the employers’ point of view:
- Fewer employees at the low end of the pay scale
- Additional work for those higher up the pay scale
- Higher prices
- Fewer small companies
- Fewer big companies operating locally
Workers Will Go Where the Money Is
To consider the issue from the perspective of employees, I’ll draw from my own experience of jobs that required roughly the same level of prior experience (i.e., very little), estimating current pay ranges:
- Music store clerk: very simple, low stress, few discomforts, no danger, not strenuous, $5.30–6.50
- Laborer in seafood retail: very simple, low stress, moderate discomforts, low danger, strenuous, $7.00–9.00
- Laborer in construction: very simple, moderate stress, significant discomforts, high danger, strenuous, $10.00–12.00
(Note that these pay ranges are purely for argument’s sake; they don’t have to be but so accurate.)
Although I’m simplifying the dynamic involved, there are direct and clear reasons that each form of low-end work has to, or can get away with, paying employees at the relevant rate. Jobs that are more difficult, dangerous, and strenuous have to pay better to attract employees from jobs that are more comfortable. If the music store must now pay employees $7.25 to hang out and watch the register, then the seafood store is going to have to up the ante to find laborers. If the seafood store breaks the $10.00 mark, the construction company is going to have to maintain the margin of remuneration. If laborers approach the wages of carpenter’s helpers, then they aren’t going to want to begin investing in tools and attention unless that rung moves higher, too, and if carpenter’s helpers begin earning at a rate similar to carpenters, then the latter aren’t going to take on more responsibility. And so on and so forth, throughout the economy.
Thus, costs rise for companies throughout the pay scale, and prices inflate to cover them. Plainly put, the pay scale just shifts, without an increase in the buying power of anybody involved. And in a globalized economy — with technology always threatening to replace human workers, if there’s sufficient incentive for companies to invest in it — it shifts toward a ledge of layoffs and bankruptcies.
A Wage to Die By
In New England, government-types have been toying with the more insidious idea of a “living wage,” which, in Norwalk, CT, means “115% of the poverty threshold for a family of four,” currently $11.05 (via RIFuture). In Providence, the heated debate is over $11.97 per hour (or $10.19 with healthcare). I use the word “insidious” for four reasons:
- The idea that salaries should be determined starting with the worker, rather than the work to be done, while sounding like a compassionate approach, takes no account of the market forces that have made capitalism such a powerful system — and a force for good. We might as well just divvy up the nation’s capital and allow people to do whatever work they want (except jobs that nobody wants, and we’ll, I don’t know, take turns at those), which everybody except deluded socialists understands to be an unworkable fantasy. The first indication that this is true is that any sort of “living wage” proposal is necessarily so unrealistically above the current minimum wage.
- The formula for determining a “living wage” carries implicit social engineering. Just the idea that a single 40 hour per week should be forced to be sufficient for a “family of four” brushes away layers of social and cultural input and creates incentives that are deleterious to social and cultural well-being. The incentives emphasize the single person. If a single person can, working even the lowest-level job, earn at the rate that a family of four needs, then there will be fewer families of four. There will be less motivation to form marital unions, and the motivation for advancement that a family naturally provides will begin to seep from our society. Alternately or simultaneously, the policy will create a perpetual inflation machine, as the prices of goods and services increase in response to what families will initially see as disposable income.
- These proposals (being unrealistic for a realm in which market forces apply) tend to focus on employees of the government or organizations that do business with the government. And when the government has to come up with more money, it doesn’t raise prices in the hope that customers will still find its deals attractive; governments raise taxes, taking the money they need by force of the law, taking from those who make the minimum wage in the private sphere as well as those who were just barely getting by before. As far as organizations that do business with the government are concerned, mandating pay rates that simply won’t work in the private sphere creates bifurcated industries, in which the majority of companies are locked out of government work, while the smaller playing field and limitless revenue flow keep the prices that the taxpayers dish out absurdly high.
- Giving government industry such an imbalanced edge in the job market drains the private sector — the home of entrepreneurship and innovation — of talent, often (I’d say) luring those who might make the greatest contributions, given the push of necessity, into a static complacency.
The Conservative’s Advice
Something is clearly wrong when we’ve reached the point of treating the government more as an employer than as a shared resource. There are activities that government structures are best positioned to undertake; driving the economy is not one of them. Neither is micromanaging employment relationships.
Well-intentioned people who want to help working families — as opposed to “reaching out” to them — should be able to discern, while considering the likely effects of forcing up the minimum wage, the place in which influence would best be applied: getting them past that low-end, clerk/laborer slot by opening up opportunities, not other people’s wallets. I’ve gone on too long to explore them, here, but two areas for action toward that end are education and entrepreneurship, with the emphasis on the latter.
One difficulty with education, as a means toward broad social advancement, is that it will tend to mean advancement across industries. The college-educated laborer will not be inclined to return to the construction site and will not generally recoup his investment of time and money if he does. In contrast, manipulating government policies in such a way as to encourage small businesses — making the leap from employee to business owner more plausible in a world of Big Box stores, category killers, and multinational corporations — would harness Americans’ natural drive to succeed and make every ground-floor job in every industry just a first step in each worker’s quest to increase his or her own minimum wage.
ADDENDUM:
For more on the living wage movement, see this May 2006 post by Don Hawthorne.
I know this kind of thing happens in James Bond movies, albeit usually involving more ambitious goals, but I didn’t think it could happen in real life (h/t Drudge)…
Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy its own nation in an attempt to circumvent international copyright laws.I hope this doesn’t give anyone in Rhode Island strange new ideas for siting a casino… [Open full post]
The group has set up a campaign to raise money to buy Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a ‘micronation’, and claims to be outside the jurisdiction of the UK or any other country….
The “island” of Sealand, seven miles off the coast of southern England, was settled in 1967 by an English major, Paddy Roy Bates. Bates proclaimed Sealand a state, issuing passports and gold and silver Sealand dollars and declaring himself Prince Roy.
When the British Royal Navy tried to evict Prince Roy in 1968, a judge ruled that the platform was outside British territorial waters and therefore beyond government control.
The British government subsequently extended its territorial waters from three to twelve nautical miles from the coast, which would include Sealand, but Prince Roy simultaneously extended Sealand’s waters, claimed that this guaranteed Sealand’s sovereignty.
Of course, as Linda Chavez points out, there was a time when they did have a plan for staying, too:
Democrats were early to recognize the threat of sectarian violence in Iraq and have consistently been skeptical of democracy taking hold in Iraq in an atmosphere of uncontrolled violence. For much of the war, prominent Democrats were in the forefront of arguing we needed more troops in Iraq, and the president was the one resisting, claiming that his generals assured him they had the resources they needed.
When he was the Democratic nominee for president in 2004, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., told USA Today, “If it requires more troops in order to create the stability that eliminates the chaos . . . that’s what we have to do.”
Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., went even further. “A number of us have been sounding this alarm. We have to face the fact we need a larger active-duty military,” she told the Fox News Channel in May 2004.
Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., began calling for more troops in 2003 — and he argued that we would need to stay in Iraq for several years. In April 2004, Sen. Biden told Jim Lehrer on PBS, “We don’t have enough troops there.” And he argued, “It’s going to take at least three years to train up an Iraqi police force, it’s going to take that long or longer to train an Iraqi army. The truth of the matter is there is no security but U.S. security, a few Brits, a few Spaniards and a few Poles. It is the United States of America.”
So why have the Democrats suddenly changed their tune?
So now that the President has asked for more troops, these same Democrats are opposed. Why? I think we know, don’t we?
[Open full post]Heh. Something fishy is going on:
House Republicans yesterday declared “something fishy” about the major tuna company in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district being exempted from the minimum-wage increase that Democrats approved this week.
“I am shocked,” said Rep. Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican and his party’s chief deputy whip, noting that Mrs. Pelosi campaigned heavily on promises of honest government. “Now we find out that she is exempting hometown companies from minimum wage. This is exactly the hypocrisy and double talk that we have come to expect from the Democrats.”
…The bill also extends for the first time the federal minimum wage to the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands. However, it exempts American Samoa, another Pacific island territory that would become the only U.S. territory not subject to federal minimum-wage laws.
One of the biggest opponents of the federal minimum wage in Samoa is StarKist Tuna, which owns one of the two packing plants that together employ more than 5,000 Samoans, or nearly 75 percent of the island’s work force. StarKist’s parent company, Del Monte Corp., has headquarters in San Francisco, which is represented by Mrs. Pelosi. The other plant belongs to California-based Chicken of the Sea.
“There’s something fishy going on here,” said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry, North Carolina Republican….A spokeswoman for Mrs. Pelosi said Wednesday that the speaker has not been lobbied in any way by StarKist or Del Monte.
Yes, it’s all just one big coincidence!!!
And golly gee, I was quite surprised to discover that this was missed by those who were going to be “holding the Dems accountable” and wouldn’t just “monitor” (cheerlead) them as new bills went through the House and Senate. (Well, maybe they’ll get around to it eventually). To help ’em along, perhaps they should also read this from the Saipan Tribune:
Democrats have long tried to pull the Northern Marianas under the umbrella of U.S. labor law, accusing the island’s government and its industry leaders of coddling sweatshops and turning a blind eye to forced abortions and indentured servitude.
Samoa has escaped such notoriety, and its low-wage canneries have a protector of a different political stripe, Democratic delegate Eni F.H. Faleomavaega, whose campaign coffers have been well stocked by the tuna industry that virtually runs his island’s economy.
Faleomavaega has long made it clear he did not believe his island’s economy could handle the federal minimum wage, issuing statements of sympathy for a Samoan tuna industry competing with South American and Asian canneries paying workers about 67 cents an hour.
The message got through to House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., the author of the minimum wage bill who included the Marianas but not Samoa, according to committee aides. The aides said the Samoan economy does not have the diversity and vibrance to handle the mainland’s minimum wage, nor does the island have anything like the labor rights abuses Miller claims of the Marianas…
…But in American Samoa the tuna industry rules the roost. Canneries employ nearly 5,000 workers on the island, or 40 percent of the work force, paying on average $3.60 an hour, compared to $7.99 an hour for Samoan government employees. Samoan minimum wage rates are set by federal industry committees, which visit the island every two years…
When StarKist lobbied in the past to prevent small minimum wage hikes, Faleomavaega denounced the efforts.
“StarKist is a billion dollar a year company,” he said after a 2003 meeting with StarKist and Del Monte executives. “It is not fair to pay a corporate executive $65 million a year while a cannery work only makes $3.60 per hour.”
But after the same meeting, Faleomavaega said he understood that the Samoan canneries were facing severe wage competition from South American and Asian competitors.
Department of Interior testimony last year before the Senate noted that canneries in Thailand and the Philippines were paying their workers about 67 cents an hour. If the canneries left American Samoa en masse, the impact would be devastating, leaving Samoans wards of the federal welfare state, warned David Cohen, deputy assistant secretary of the interior for insular affairs.{emphasis added)
Faleomavaega understands that it makes economic sense to pay a lower wage and keep all of those jobs on his island instead of forcing a higher wage on employers who may then move the jobs elsewhere. I guess “sweat shops” aren’t “sweat shops” when “market forces” are just too strong to impose a higher minimum wage in a Democrat’s district.
Yup, this looks exactly like the sort of hypocrisy they claimed they’d be on the lookout for. Can’t wait to see ’em in action!
