WG: Immigrants fill labor void - NY Times/CISNEWS

enclosed an interesting article from yesterday's NY Times

Arno Tausch

> ----------
> Von:  center@cis.org[SMTP:center@cis.org]
> Gesendet:     Montag, 20. Dezember 1999 20:35
> An:   CISNEWS@cis.org
> Betreff:      Immigrants fill labor void
> 
> 
> [For CISNEWS subscribers. -- Mark Krikorian]
> 
> 
> As Labor Pool Shrinks, A New Supply Is Tapped
> Women and Immigrants are Filling the Void
> By Louis Uchitelle
> The New York Times, December 20, 1999
> 
> Five years into a booming economy, America is "depleting its pool of
> available workers" -- a warning often heard from Alan Greenspan. But
> beyond
> the pool of known recruits lies another mass of untapped labor that can
> supply an expanding work force -- and sustain a robust economy -- into the
> new decade.
> 
> This labor in reserve consists mainly of women and potential immigrants.
> The women are not so noticeable in the statistics; many hold jobs and are
> counted as employed. But nearly half the women working in the United
> States
> today do so only part-time, and millions are gradually stepping up to
> full-time schedules -- making themselves available eight hours a day
> instead of five, or five days a week instead of three, or working through
> July and August instead of dropping out during their children's school
> vacation. Nearly a million women a year since 1994 have upgraded their
> status to full-time from part-time work.
> 
> The immigrants in question are not so much the uncounted people here
> illegally, but the men and women still in Canada or Mexico who move across
> the border when jobs beckon. "You have a construction contract and the
> work
> doubles," said Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of
> California at Berkeley. "One of your workers makes a call back home, to
> his
> village in Mexico or Guatemala, and within a week a cousin shows up, or a
> cousin and the cousin's friend."
> 
> Tens of millions of people abroad are quickly available for jobs in the
> United States. The Immigration and Naturalization Service says that
> slipping into America and then working illegally for a year or two is not
> all that hard.
> 
> And suddenly a straitjacket that threatened to strangle a robust economy
> is
> not so binding after all. The work force has grown lately by 200,000 jobs
> a
> month, but rather than being depleted the pool of people available to fill
> still more jobs may be growing, or at least holding its own. Few issues in
> economics are more important than pinning down the size of this pool. A
> wrong answer could prompt the Federal Reserve to cut off the economic
> expansion, which started in 1991, gained steam four years ago and in
> February will become the longest in American history.
> 
> "The labor market gets tight, and these people flow in from across the
> borders, which helps to explain why wages are not rising that much at the
> low end," said Daniel Hamermesh, a labor economist at the University of
> Texas at Austin. "The women, quantitatively, are not a big matter. But
> they
> represent a different segment of the population. These are skilled people
> in many cases, and going full-time leads to" less wage pressure in the
> middle.
> 
> Mr. Greenspan, the Fed chairman, and others at the Fed hold in their
> public
> pronouncements to a traditional view on the labor supply -- one that
> suggests the economic expansion must soon be slowed for lack of available
> workers. When Mr. Greenspan refers, in his speeches and Congressional
> testimony, to a "depleting pool," he means two groups: those who are
> unemployed and seeking work and those who are not seeking work but would
> accept it if jobs they liked came their way. That pool has shrunk to 9.6
> million lately from 11.2 million two years ago, Mr. Greenspan notes.
> 
> The significance of this calculation is clear. When workers are in short
> supply, employers tend to raise compensation to get enough people, and
> then
> raise prices to cover the higher labor costs. Neither trend has shown up
> yet. The inflation rate, a big concern at the Fed, is particularly mild.
> Even so, the Fed's response to a shrinking labor pool has been to raise
> interest rates, thus slowing the economy and reducing the demand for new
> workers. The Fed made that point with its last interest-rate increase, in
> mid-November. "The pool of available workers willing to take jobs has been
> drawn down further in recent months, a trend that must eventually be
> contained," the Fed said, in justifying the increase.
> 
> There are, of course, already many illegal immigrants working in America
> or
> available for work. The Census Bureau puts the number at 5 million or so.
> The Labor Department -- along with Mr. Greenspan -- includes this
> calculation in its estimates of how many people are working or available
> for work. The Census Bureau's estimate undoubtedly falls short of the
> actual number of illegal immigrants, but the shortfall is not considered
> big enough at the Fed or the Labor Department to make a difference.
> 
> The Immigration Service, though, counts many more heads. "What that 5
> million does not include is the significant number of people on our
> northern and southern borders who come to the United States and work for a
> year, and return home and then come back," said Robert Bach, the
> Immigration Service's executive associate commissioner for policy and
> planning. Crossing the border is not easy, he said, "but there are
> certainly ample ways to enter the United States without documents or with
> fraudulent documents or by abusing documents, such as a tourist's visa."
> 
> The results are evident even in the official statistics -- the
> foreign-born
> hold nearly 12 percent of all jobs, up from about 10 percent in 1995 --
> and
> certainly their numbers are growing in a number of American cities.
> 
> Consider Atlanta, Cincinnati, Louisville, Ky., or Indianapolis, where
> Hispanic immigrants are now well represented in construction work, holding
> jobs as electricians, plumbers and carpenters. Or visit Malden Mills, a
> textile maker in Lawrence, Mass., whose best-known brand is Polartec. The
> company is adding 230 workers by March at wages of about $11 an hour. Most
> of the existing 2,000 employees are Hispanic immigrants, mainly from the
> Dominican Republic, already settled in Lawrence, whose population is
> heavily Hispanic.
> 
> "For the first time, we are facing a situation where we might not have as
> many people already in the Lawrence area as we might need," said Jeff
> Bowman, the company's marketing director.
> 
> Some new applicants are relatives of Malden's Hispanic employees, or
> immigrants recommended by parish priests. Indeed, immigrants settling in
> America over the past two decades have created informal networks that
> facilitate the arrival of new people who, once in the country, have a
> relative or a friend who gives them lodging and helps them find work. "It
> is how you get to jobs in Oregon or Minneapolis or New England that makes
> these networks pivotal," Mr. Shaiken said.
> 
> Malden Mills insists on proof that an immigrant is here legally, but even
> so has had some problems. An applicant must present a Social Security card
> and a photo I.D., both easily purchased on the street. And catching any
> falsehood can take the Immigration Service at least a year, often longer,
> because the Social Security Administration reviews Social Security numbers
> for accuracy only once a year.
> 
> "I have seen Immigration go one or two years before we are notified," said
> Alan Kraunelis, the company's director of industrial relations. "A lot of
> times by then, the employee has a lawyer and is trying to get a green
> card.
> In some cases you can keep the worker on and in others you cannot. You say
> this guy is a very good worker, he has excellent attendance, we have
> trained him in a skill, and for the most part, unless the worker has a
> problem back in his homeland, Immigration is pretty reasonable."
> 
> Or consider Unite, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile
> Employees, representing 300,000 low-wage workers in the United States.
> "Nationally, 20,000 are probably undocumented workers," said Bruce Raynor,
> Unite's secretary-treasurer. In Chicago, the proportion is higher,
> probably
> one-third, among the 1,500 laundry workers represented by the union, he
> said.
> 
> And the union, in its latest contract, tries to protect them. In addition
> to specifying wages of $7 to $9 an hour, the contract obligates the
> employers to bar immigration agents from their plants without search
> warrants. Just going to court for a warrant alerts undocumented workers,
> who then can disappear, returning home for a while or reappearing, with
> fresh documents, at another job.
> 
> "I think of what is happening as a floating labor pool that kind of floats
> back and forth across the border," said Jeffrey Passell, a demographer at
> the Urban Institute in Washington. "Right now, there is some indication
> that this floating pool that tends to go back and forth is actually here."
> 
> Others are also contributing to the pool of potential workers, postponing
> the pool's depletion. Older people, for example, are working more years,
> either postponing retirement or coming back to part-time jobs.
> Supermarkets
> and telephone call centers, set up by so many companies to handle orders
> and customer queries, are recruiting more high school and college students
> and arranging schedules around their schooling. Blacks are taking jobs in
> greater numbers, and their unemployment rate has fallen sharply. And the
> number of people holding two or more jobs has risen by 800,000 since 1994,
> to 8.1 million.
> 
> But apart from immigrants, no group has made a greater contribution than
> women. The shift from welfare to work plays a role. Many new workers are
> unmarried mothers with at least one child younger than 3 years old. The
> percentage of these women now in the labor force -- holding jobs or
> seeking
> them -- rose to 65.8 percent last year from only 54.3 percent in 1995.
> 
> And across the job spectrum -- from high-skilled work to low-skilled --
> the
> percentage of women shifting to full-time work from part-time rose to 56.4
> percent last year from 52.8 percent in 1994. These women are adding
> millions of hours without changing the number of people employed or the
> nation's unemployment rate, now 4.1 percent.
> 
> The chance to increase family income draws some of the women. So does the
> aging of the work force; the oldest baby boomers have more time now that
> their children are young adults. And companies like Manpower, the huge
> temporary help agency, nudge women into working more hours.
> 
> Manpower supplies 25,000 people a day, on average, most of them women, as
> operators at corporate call centers. The percentage of those women working
> full time rather than part time is rising, mainly for two reasons, says
> Jeffrey Joerres, Manpower's chief executive. Some are drawn into longer
> hours by flexible scheduling, which allows them to work while their
> children are in school or in the evening when a husband is home. But
> higher
> pay is also a lure.
> 
> "I don't know where the inflection point is," Mr. Joerres said, "but $1 an
> hour can make a very big difference at this pay level, and pay for
> call-center operators has gone up by $1 an hour since the beginning of the
> year, to $10 an hour."
> 
> Does that mean wage pressures have arrived, as Mr. Greenspan fears?
> 
> Apparently not, judging by the very mild movement in the Consumer Price
> Index. Wages might be rising for call-center operators and others, but not
> by enough to force prices up. The pool of untapped labor is still
> sufficiently untapped.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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