Immigration Reform
The US Senate is putting immigration law on its front burner this week. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has passed legislation significantly increasing criminal penalties for immigration law violations. In response, thousands of immigrant supporters have taken to the streets in protest.
Immigration, like a coin, has two sides, political and economic. Politicians, being shrewd by nature, can make anything into a political issue. Economics is the engine that necessarily drives society. Both politics and economics ebb and flow naturally. That natural process is subject to further manipulation by politicians.
Current US immigration concern overwhelmingly involves Mexicans. The Library of Congress has an interesting short history of US-Mexico involvement. After Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, it took the US only 25 years to provoke a war with Mexico, quickly secure a military victory and then, with the gun still to the head, negotiate a land steal as part of a peace treaty, paying a token $15 million for what is now California, Texas, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Nevada. With the land came lots of Mexican residents, who acquired US citizenship in the process, and then almost as promptly lost their land to non-Mexican Americans.
How a politician plays the immigration cards depends on whose vote is being sought. The current Republican base includes voters with conflicting attitudes on Mexican immigration. The traditional business base wants to have cheap immigrant labor to drive down costs and undermine unions. The righteous law and order voters want strict enforcement of the laws and harsh treatment for violators, including employers. Bush has tried to walk a line between these two with the guest worker proposal, encouraging illegal immigrants to make themselves legal so they can work the jobs “Americans are not willing to do”. The Bush proposal is satisfactory to employers, but criticized by law and order types as amnesty. With Republicans in control of the government, Democrats are somewhat content to lay back and watch Republicans flounder over immigration. Senator Kennedy has joined with John McCain to propose their version of a guest worker law.
At least since the Newt Gingrich Republicans slithered into Congress in 1994, the GOP has managed to keep the political side of the coin facing up. Better late than never, the coin needs to be flipped to its economic side. The Mexican immigration issue can be much more honestly resolved based on economics than on politics. Start with the phoney Bush framing of the issue as about “jobs Americans are not willing to do”. That misrepresentation and slander of American workers needs to be corrected. I suggest framing it as “jobs Americans cannot make a living doing”, or “ jobs American employers are not willing to pay a fair American wage to have done”.
Workers can obtain decent wages, hours and working conditions by two methods: negotiation with employers; and protection by legally required minimums. More than 30 years ago, Cesar Chavez led a heroic struggle to successfully negotiate on behalf of migrant farm workers. Republicans, starting with Reagan, have unfortunately been able to undermine unionism to the point where negotiation on behalf of workers is hardly viable. In the absence of negotiating power, the law needs to step in to bring the minimum wage, hours and working conditions up to date, to make all jobs ones which “Americans can make a decent living doing”. Such updates can be combined with a program to register alien workers through Social Security, putting the burden of document verification on the government, only requiring employers to report the alien social security number to the government.
There may be around nine million Mexicans illegally in the US. Many are here because employers and the government encouraged them and turned a blind eye to immigration violations. They should not be punished for American duplicity. Some sort of amnesty seems the only sensible way to resolve the conflicts of their presence. With decent wage payments being required, enough willing Americans and amnesty registered Mexicans should be available to fill the needs of employers. To prevent the flow of jobs across the border and to raise the standards for workers in Mexico, trade agreement between the US and Mexico should be re-negotiated. A Mexican who stays in Mexico should be able to achieve a standard of living comparable to a Mexican worker in the US. Prices of similar goods produced in the US and Mexico should also be comparable.
As I started writing this, I wondered what the current quota was for legal Mexican immigration to the US. I quickly learned immigration quotas based on country of origin were abolished in 1965. I also wondered about the origin of the law that says anyone born in the US is a US citizen, even if their parents were aliens. I found that the 14th amendment to the US Constitution is the source, having been adopted at the end of the War of the Rebellion [aka Civil War] to guarantee citizenship to the newly freed slaves. Their ancestors had been brought to America as “involuntary guest workers” to also do "jobs Americans were not willing to do” - work for life as an enslaved human, whose very humanity was denied by the enslaver and by the American government that enabled such inhumanity.
posted by Tom Blake | 11:48 AM
13 Comments:
Tom,
Another great article. But I would like to add my perspective, living in Phoenix Arizona where, I would guess, more immigrants from Mexico and Central America live than in Renton Washington.
I have hired immigrants to do yard work and housework. They are not all Mexicans. They come from all areas of what we call Central America. Even the men and women from Mexico are not necessarily Mexican. Many are Indians from Chiapas (Mexican deep South). They invest their money and risk their lives to get here. Why? To get a job. In the good old days when the "righteous law and order types" were not tuned in to the illegal immigration, the immigrants would come and work for a while and then go back home for R&R returning when they needed more money. Tightening the border has resulted in their staying and bringing their families with them thereby increasing illegal immigration.
I believe your picture of American firms exploiting the illegals is simplistic. From my experience as a property manager, it is the Mexicans in this country legally who are exploiting the illegals. (I don't care to document my experience on the WEB.) American firms have good legal counsel (I'm sure you understand this, Tom), too good to be found guilty of exploitation. They contract with small businesses run by legal immigrants that hire the illegals. And far too often the legal immigrants exploit the illegals. The going wage for illegals is $30 per day. A day lasts for 10 hours. Often the legal immigrant employer stiffs the illegal. I pay between $8 and $10 per hour for their services when they are not working for their exploiters.
That's another concept we need to discuss. Tom talks about unions. Unions negotiate hourly wages. The immigrants don't think that way. They want to know how much they are going to make in a day. When I hire them, I tell them what I pay per hour. They couldn't care less. They want to know how much I'll pay them today; i.e., how much for how long. They would probably refuse a job from me to work 3 hours at $10 per hour to take a job from someone else to work 8 hours for $40.
I also don't agree with your dismissing the concept that the illegals do jobs that Americans don't want to do. The immigrants I hire work harder than any "American" I could possibly find. I cannot find an "American" landscape company that would pull weeds.
Bottom line: I don't see a conspiracy among American companies to exploit illegal immigrants. I see them contracting with small businesses that do hire illegals and often exploit them.
I don't agree with your referring to non-immigrants as "Americans", putting aside the conumdrum that we refer to "Americans" as citizens of the United States. Canadians, Central & South American peoples are also "Americans" by defintion of the continents on which they reside.
The immigrants are here only to find work. That is not a national security threat. And it will only make this country stronger as people compete for jobs. The real threat is the American companies exporting jobs to other countries.
I believe that everyone not born in this country who has adopted this country as his or her own home is an American. I'll leave it up to the lawyers to determine how to make that concept legal.
John from Phoenix
John, here are some responses to your comments:
There are more Mexicans in Renton than you might expect. Many are employed in gardening and stone and tile work. One just tiled a shower for me.
Interesting point about lax border enforcement enabling workers to come and go as sort of guest workers, whereas tighter borders has led to them bringing their whole family here. I wonder how many that stay here now would prefer to be a guest worker instead.
The use of middle men contractors to supply illegal labor ultimately should not shield the American employer from liability, as Wal-Mart found out.
A Mexican thinking in terms of a day's pay rather than an hourly rate is not inconsistent with the classic union motto: a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.
American weed pullers do exist. I know, because I am one of them. The problem is that a legitimate American weed pulling business cannot compete with one that pays Mexicans illegally low wages. For competition to make America stronger, it must be fair competition.
As for who should be called Americans, no one should. An egocentric Italian map-maker had the gall to name the new land after himself, and we are still letting him get away with it. However, the reality is that “America” used alone is understood around the world as meaning the USA, as distinguished from “North America”, “Central America” and “South America”. I do agree that anyone not born in this country, who chooses to live here and consider it as home, as my Italian born grandparents did, should be called an American.
Tom,
I think you made a good point that was missed when I first read it. Maybe if we enforced the minimum wage requirement, the undocumented immigrants would be paid a fair wage, not an illegal one, one that "Americans" would compete with illegals to obtain. Probably not, unless the minimum wage were raised to a subsistence level, i.e., a subsistence level for someone born in this country. Enforcing an increased minimum wage might cause employers to hire more "Americans" instead of immigrants unless the work ethic of the immigrant were higher. If that happened there would be less incentive for the Mexicans to risk their lives to cross the border. I like this idea better than building a fence along the Mexican border and staffing border guards to stop breaches.
However, I think I know better. As a software development manager in the 70's, I hired many Chinese immigrants. I was an innovator among my peers for doing this. I could not fill the positions I had without doing something different. The immigrants were as smart as any "Americans" and they were hard working loyal employees. I got to know some of them very well. I understood their frustration about learning a knew language. I understood their disgrace when younger Chinese learned English faster and moved ahead of thier elders. One old man of 46 had a PhD in Mathematics (my major), and several years of teaching experience in Taiwan. He decided to improve his life by taking a MS in Computer Science in this country. He was recommended to me by a much younger Chinese employee. I interviewed him and he could barely speak English, but, even though I was used to this, I had a hard time understanding him because of his accent. I hired him solely on his friend's recommendation. I assigned him to some of the most difficult kernel operating systems software. His lack of English would be less important there. With apprehension I watched him do nothing for the first month except read program listings and make notes. Then he accepted change requests and bug reports. He did great. He really took charge of the software and was happy to do that for long after I left the company.
The best of the immigrants "raise the bar", and the rest of us had better keep up. Forget about fair wage. The best should be rewarded. However, a just society should provide a decent living for everyone who contributes to that society.
John from Phoenix
The older Chinese man you hired to work with software had excellent academic training, but he needed time to adjust to a new language and new technology, and you wisely allowed him that time on the job. The immigrants currently of concern have little academic background. Because the jobs they obtain are entry level blue collar, these immigrants are not seriously challenged in the workplace by language and technology deficiencies.
If we truly value families and honestly aspire to have mothers stay at home with pre-school children, then the minimum wage should be set high enough to allow a wage earner to support a family of four. Opponents of any increase argue that higher minimums will adversely impact small businesses and working teens. If a small business has to fold because it pays a decent wage, then it is either not being smartly run or it operates in a marginal niche. Teens from poor families would not have to work if Papa was paid a decent wage. Teens from other families who want money to blow on frivolities should not be taking jobs away from poor Papas.
Raising the bar to hire better people and to train them to become the best should be a natural consequence of having to pay people higher wages. The only training low end employees receive now is bare bones on the job, because the low pay leads to high turnover and employers don’t want to waste training resources on someone who may leave soon after being trained. I would like to see a program of training for candidates for entry level jobs, such as immigrants, teens and the poor, perhaps funded through a public/private partnership maybe with tax credits for participating employers. Such a program should be high caliber, so graduates would be proud of completion rather than stigmatized for needing the training.
Looking at the jobs we now consider entry level and that some argue cannot justify a higher wage can reveal underlying problems that need to be addressed:
• The American agricultural industry depends too much on hand labor, and is overdue for upgrading its technology.
• Intense utilization of immigrants in the landscaping business, particularly in more arid regions, ignores the need to move toward more sensible landscapes.
• Low paid immigrants in hospitals and nursing homes confirms the underlying fact that our health care system needs to be replaced with a universal, government paid program of decent health care for all with decent pay for those who provide it (meaning fairer pay for those at the low end and less obscene pay for those at the top).
• Underlying the megalith nature of the American meat and poultry processing business, based on ill treatment both of the animals and of the workers, is our excessive consumption of these foods and the need for moderation and replacement with healthier choices.
That's quite a jump to say that the fact that low paid immigrants work in our hospitals indicates we need to replace the health care system in the US. You propose that we pay doctors less and those who empty bedpans more. How do we do that? One way is with centralized control of the economy as tried by the USSR for 75 years. We know how that ended. Another approach would be to really close the borders so that immigrants could not take those jobs. Then what? The jobs would go unfilled unless they paid a lot more than they do now. But that would mean the workers would be stolen from some other industry, and that industry would have to raise wages. I've seen this kind of wage inflation in action in the technology field. Wages rise to the point of being non-competitive in the global economy and then everyone loses. It's like what happens to deer populations when there are no natural predators left and regulations are passed to reduce human hunting. You might think it cannot happen in the health care industry. After all, how can the local hospital be sent offshore where wages are less? But it can happen. In the early 20th century, the rich sent their sick people to Europe for the higher quality care available there.
The bottom line: it is far better to welcome hard working immigrants into this country than to export jobs to other countries.
John from Phoenix
Well, John, you packed a lot into that first paragraph. Here is my feedback on what you wrote.
I do see low paid hospital and nursing home workers as confirmation we need a better system of health care. You seem to denigrate those who change bedpans, but if you were lying in a hospital bed with a piss filled container under your butt, you might be happier to see the aide come to empty it than you would be to see the doctor swing by to pop a ten second gaze at your chart and say you are doing fine, for which he charges $100 for a hospital follow up exam. To use a football team analogy, an overpaid quarterback, however good, cannot win games with a grossly underpaid and inferior offensive line.
Centralized control of the economy is a matter of degree. The US has the Fed as a central bank to control the monetary system. Republicans claim to use tax cuts for the rich to stimulate the economy, while creating a record setting national debt on all taxpayers. There are more US Governmental economic interventions in the form of corporate “tax relief”, pork barrel spending and incentives for the rich and businesses that there are regulations to protect consumers. Health care is a universal necessity which is by its nature best met by significant governmental involvement, as most of the more economically developed nations of the world have decided.
You are concerned about wage inflation. What about executive compensation inflation, corporate profit inflation and dividend inflation? As I have written in other pieces, wage imbalances between nations should be addressed in trade agreement between those nations, to remove incentives for off shoring jobs. Capitalists try to play workers in different nations against themselves, as if competition for jobs should be the only concern of workers. But there is also a competition for distribution of the business revenue between capital and labor. Capital is increasingly multinational, and the labor movement is way behind in organizing workers along international lines. Multinational corporations and international labor unions should be negotiating the fair distribution of multinational business revenue between capital and labor.
Your deer analogy, a sort of Darwinian economics, is hard to resist. The natural predator and prey balance was upset by man’s intervention, with man first killing the predators and then out of guilt not killing the prey and instead letting them overpopulate, resulting in death by starvation or by highway Hummer hits. In the workplace, management is the predator and labor the prey, with government playing the role of intervener. As labor began to organize, the management predator tried to violently destroy the organization, getting the government to intervene on behalf of management. The resulting imbalance was the Depression, during which labor obtained government intervention in the form of worker protection laws. With the Depression experience not understood by many young workers, management has been engaging in psych op warfare, getting young workers to identify more with management than with labor. Management control of government has led to roll back of worker protections.
Like the deer, workers are being slowly starved to death. But unlike the deer, workers are entitled to vote for the government. If young workers become educated about labor relations history, throw off the management psych op offensive and vote for labor friendly government, labor can begin to reclaim its natural role in the process, leading to a healthier economic balance.
Tom,
1. Nothing I wrote and nothing I believe should lead you to think I denigrate people who empty bedpans. I believe they should be paid more, but there are the market forces, and that was what my comment was about.
2. I agree that the government must involve itself in the problem of health care. And, of course, it has. Medicare and medicade are examples. I think much more has to be done by the government. Just expanding COBRA beyond 18 months would help older displaced workers. But expecting government to set health care workers minimum and maximum salaries in this capitalist country is a waste of time and any action along those lines would only hurt improvement of health care in this country. That concept is way out on the fringe.
3. Yes, corporate executives are paid too much. And that might be true with corporate dividends, but I really don't know. What I do know is that if company A can do a job of equal quality for less money, people will flock to company A. Who cares if the president of company A makes more or less money than the average for that industry? Who cares if company A's headquarters is in France, Japan, China or Pakistan? Today it is very easy to shift our business to that country. We should not spend time worrying that somebody in the business we are buying from is getting more than he or she deserves. We should be worrying about how efficient that business is and can US companies compete. In fact most of us don't care if US companies can compete. We care if the company is hiring US workers at a decent wage. Toyota is an example.
4. Your model of labor - mangement relations in archaic. To view management as the predator and workers as the prey, would lead most people to think you have been asleep for the last 40 years. (How long did Rip Van Winkle sleep?) My experience has been mostly in the technology field as a worker and then as a manager. I was a technology manager from 1978 - 2001. The model there, for the most part, is of equality of roles. Both management and workers have roles to fill. Managers are often frustrated because the workers cannot design the competitive product; they cannot deliver a product on time for the market; they deliver products of inferior quality; they have no respect for managment. But the managers cannot survive without the workers, and they are very aware of this. The workers are frustrated by the excessive demands placed on them for time and ideas. (Most highly placed engineers work 55 - 90 hours per week). I grant you that the technology field is probably one end of the spectrum, but I think this has rubbed off to other industries to some degree.
5. Your call to action to young workers is about 100 years old. "Workers of the world, unite!" National governments do not control labor anymore. We are in a global economy. We need a new way to influence the policies of global corporations.
John from Phoenix
John, here are my responses to your five points:
1. I know you don’t personally denigrate bottom level workers, but I submit you may have succumbed to a subtle tactic that encourages demeaning lower paying workers by identifying them with one mundane task, such as a person who “changes bedpans”, rather than a “nurse’s aide” or “hospital care assistant” or whatever more encompassing name the position has been given to reflect the myriad tasks performed, including many that were traditionally handled by nurses.
2. The Federal Government already sets rates for medical provider compensation under Medicare and Medicaid, and preferred provider health plans set rates for medical service providers who accept the plan. There is no effective control on charges by non-preferred providers or charges to the 50 million Americans without health insurance; people in these groups are subject to a “what the market may bear” mentality and are subject to being overcharged to make up for the ones who can’t or won’t pay. A universal system would be able to set the same rates for all patients. Pay rates for employees of providers are not set by insurers, but are subject to negotiation between employer and employee, for which I espouse unionization and effective government mandated minimum standards.
3. You approach this point totally from the point of view of a consumer wearing blinders. Equal quality for less money is your consumer bottom line, which you expect was accomplished by efficient utilization of the global economy. Wal-Mart loves you. I am a life long subscriber to Consumer Reports and like a good deal as well as the next customer, but I also believe other factors should enter into my economic purchasing choices and my choices of which corporate stock to purchase with the money I save on my wise purchases. As a consumer, investor and citizen of the world, I care about the way corporations treat consumers, investors, workers and the environment worldwide. You say Americans care about whether a company is hiring US workers at a decent wage, but I submit that if they did, then instead of parading as customers into Wal-Mart , they would be picketing as protestors outside.
4. As you recognize, your experience in technology management is not the norm. Management may sometimes feign to treat workers as equals, in order to get them to buy into a highly motivated team mentality, working long hours like managers do, and then often being expected to illegally keep such hours “off the clock”, so that overtime laws will not apply. Making workers “management trainees” is another classic ruse to avoid paying overtime. Cutting back “slack” employees and putting more work on “motivated team players” is another exploitive trick. Someone falling asleep forty years ago would remember employers as predators with whom the employee prey had negotiated a mutual co-existence agreement. Waking up now, the observer would find no labor-worker agreement, just a bunch of employee sheep, including one whom an astute observer would detect as in fact an employer wolf intent on picking off any strays. (Rip only slept for 20 years, but life spans were shorter back then).
5. Marx deserves credit for foreseeing the global economy. Now that it has come into being, the call for workers of the world to unite is even more true. Whether any more of the Manifesto holds water awaits a re-reading, a low priority task given the current non-viability of the doctrine.
Tom,
We're not communicating. Your experience is with unions in the 60's. Since then you have been in business for yourself with at most one employee and no partners nor contractors, a condition many people respect and envy. I have been in the corporate world with major companies: Northern Pacific Railroad, Honeywell, and Motorola. For the last 5 years I have worked for a company of only about 150 people. I think our work experience makes it difficult for us to understand each other's points.
1. In everyday discourse I also use the terms "bean counters", "hackers", "techno-nerds", "yes-men", etc. I think your comment reflects the views of a PC policeman.
2. Agreed.
3. Walmart coudn't care less what you or I think. I was only stating the obvious. We live in a capitalist system and the market flows to the most efficient, not the most humane. We can either waste our energies attacking the windmill of capitalism, or invest them in finding a way to make capitalism serve the needs of mankind. The pressure you and others are placing on Walmart is part of the latter process.
4. You just cannot break away from the idea that management is special. That they are some kind of aristocracy born and bred to lord it over the rest of us. But managers come from all walks of life. Some of them are sons of blue collar workers and were poorly educated at a well known Seattle high school. At least one of them became a manager in a technology that was thriving for almost three decades before that technolgy became not quite obsolete, but no longer thriving. There was still a good business, but one that could not sustain a huge workforce. That manager had to work with other managers to make costs be in line with revenues. Guess what? Massive layoffs. Our company in Phoenix went from over 6000 employees in 1986 to 800 when I left in 1995. It is now around 200. When the employment was 6000, probably 600 were managers. I don't know for sure but I imagine about 10 managers are left for the 200 workers.
In 1995 that manager found a high paid job at a technology firm that was the state's highest non-government employer. That company made unwise investments and was the loser in competition from Scandanavia to Japan. In 2001 massive layoffs began. I had 120 people reporting to me. I reduced that to 30 and then I was let go. In 2005, that employer dropped to the 88th highest non-government employer in Arizona.
Managers = workers for the most part. I did not exploit anyone, nor was I exploited. But I hurt people and I was hurt. Your economic view saddens me because you just don't understand what's going on in the world.
5. Marx lived in a time when class based on family and heritage was important. Today we live in a world where your birthrite does not bestow automatic privilege, except for a very few. Many jobs go to illegal immigrants and to the lucky recipients of job exportation by US companies. Marx is irrelevant. Even the Chinese understand that and as soon as Castro dies, so will Cuba.
John from Phoenix
Just wanted comment briefly on John's comment that "Marx lived in a time when class based on family and heritage was important. Today we live in a world where your birthrite does not bestow automatic privilege, except for a very few."
If we are living in a global economy, and I have seen that term tossed about frequently in these comments, then we need to analyze what is going on outside the US as well.
And what John says may be true in the US (although, one could argue that there is still a large money and power elite in the US that dates back generations -- they however, these days, own the companies and set the policies rather than simply work as middle managers), outside the US this is often still the case.
In huge tracts of the world, class systems and de facto class systems are still in place and your family name alone is still enough to bestow unimaginable privilege on the people.
Look to East Asia, South Asia and other parts of the developing world, and the power brokers, the corporate owners and politicians are all from the same ruling elite class and they are still making their money on the backs of the subservient underclass.
Marx’s ideas, while perhaps in need of an update, are still extremely relevant in the global economy.
Chris
Chris,
Your comments are well taken. My life experience and work experience is limited to the US, France, Scandinavia, Italy, Japan, and Taiwan. And then it is further limited to just two technology fields. There is a lot of the world outside of those countries and those industries.
John from Phoenix
You and I have dialogued elsewhere on this topic, John, and there do seem to be communication difficulties when we discuss it. Let me see what I can do to improve the communication, again referring to the numbering of your above comments. Granted you and I have had divergent careers, with yours much more involved in management for large companies, but recall that I do have some experience working in large organizations. I spent a couple years working for the US Postal Service, six years in the US Air Force, and I also worked for a Title Insurance Corporation for several years, becoming involved in efforts to unionize that company in the 1970s.
1. I realize my comment could be taken as that of a PC policeman, and I realize somewhat humorous names for categories of workers may not be intended as put downs, but the fact is that, while workers may laugh at such names among themselves, outsiders, especially management types, do need to be more careful about using them. It is like African-Americans using the "n" word among themselves, but resenting it when used by whites.
2. Agreed is agreeable.
3. True, Wal-Mart cares very little about what you or I think. Their bottom line is all that counts to them. Those who work to hold the Wal-Marts of the world more accountable must use means that, as you point out, are more effective than tilting at windmills.
4. This is where you express the most frustrated disagreement with me, based on your extensive management experience and my supposed naievete about what goes on in the real world. But just because I have never personally managed more than a few people, does not mean I am from another planet, incapable of understanding earthly labor-management dynamics. I know that many managers come up through the ranks, and that many people from families with no management background get managemnt degrees and enter the management field. I also know that some people from elite families enter management, with or without a degree and without coming up through the ranks. But regardless of how a person becomes a manager, regardles of the fact a manager can also engage in performing the same work as non-managers, and regardless of the fact the employer can screw over managers as well as non-management workers, managers are on the management side of the labor management dynamic while workers are on the labor side.
5. Chris points out the more extensive class systems that exist in other parts of the world. The wealthy power elite class operates on a global basis today, with elites from global powers such as the US having the greatest opportunity to capitalize globally. Probably the most unfortunate example in American history of birthright appearing to bestow privilege is the incompetent George W. Bush. Marx will always be relevant, because he addresses in a unique way the dynamics of capital and labor; however his ideas do not carry much weight in the world today. China does seem to be rapidly moving away from communist economics. If Cuba moves away from communism on the death of Castro, it will be because the US uses his death as a reason to negotiate normal economic relations with Cuba
Tom,
I think we have aligned on all but one of the points. I especially can agree with your comment about Bush on point 5. But your concept of the labor managment dynamic remains in my mind, if not obsolete, dated. Oh well, 4 out of 5 is not bad.
John from Phoenix
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