The Cost Shifting of Negative Externalities Lands Mostly on Those Least Able to Afford It

Photo from the LA Times

From a heart-wrenching LA Times story on Mexican farm laborers, here's the rest of the price of the cheap food--the part you're not paying:

• Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply. 
• Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods. 
• Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It’s common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest. 
• Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors. 
• Major U.S. companies have done little to enforce social responsibility guidelines that call for basic worker protections such as clean housing and fair pay practices.

Erik Loomis has an answer:

If wages are stolen, workers threatened, bathing facilities not provided, etc., then workers should have the right to sue for recompense in American courts. Subway, Safeway, McDonald’s, etc., must be held legally responsible for the conditions of work when people labor in growing food for them to sell.

If the food is cheap, someone paid something along the way--a subsidy paid by someone--that made it cheap. Either someone got underpaid, or had to work in horrible conditions, or some pollution went into the environment that causes someone illness or death. If we don't allow that to happen in this country, then why do we allow it to happen in some other country if that other country is shipping the product to us?

Next time someone tries to sell you one of these so-called free trade pacts, ask them about the cost shifting. If you're not paying, someone is.

The "Both Parties Suck" Mentality is Really Bad for Workers

Those who say both parties suck should note that only one US Political Party supports the right of workers to organize into unions. In fact, the other, i.e. the Republican Party, is actively taking away the right of people to collectively bargain for a good wage, easing child labor laws, and even ranting about the evils of a minimum wage.

Remember the Battle of Blair Mountain and all the other struggles workers went through in this country when you go to the ballot box.

The Battle of Blair Mountain was one of the biggest civil uprisings in the United States history and the largest armed insurrection since the American Civil War.[1] For five days in late August and early September 1921, in Logan County, West Virginia, between 10,000 and 15,000 coal miners confronted an army of police and strikebreakers backed by coal operators during a struggle by the miners to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields. Their struggle ended only after approximately one million rounds were fired,[2] and the United States Army intervened by presidential order.

People fought and died for American Workers to have rights like 8 hour days, weekends, minimum wages, and unions. The least any of us can do, but especially union members, is to remember those people who fought for our rights against powerful corporations, and to vote for the people most likely to make sure we retain those rights.

Of course, there are a lot of other reasons to vote for Democrats, not the least of which is that we tend to have at least a basic understanding and respect for science. But most of all, just look at what George Bush did. Seriously. The Republicans had their chance, they ran things the way they wanted, and it was a disaster of epic proportions. GW Bush is the modern Hoover, and here we are in a Great Recession started by GOP ideology. It doesn't work. Tax cuts for the rich don't create jobs (in fact, George Bush had the worst job creation record since Hoover). Deregulation and privatization create corruption and legalized theft. Pollution increases health care costs.

Democrats, for all their faults, did not cause our current troubles. Republicans did.