Michael Dwyer/AP Photo
Workers apply sheathing to the exterior of a new multifamily residential building, November 3, 2023, in the East Boston neighborhood of Boston.
NEWS ITEM: The Labour government recently toughened Britain’s immigration rules. The far-right Reform party made significant gains in recent local elections largely because of resentment against immigrants, so Prime Minister Keir Starmer felt he had to respond.
Despite the support of the previous Tory government for exit from the EU, which was substantially driven by a backlash against the EU’s liberal immigration rules, the annual number of migrants who entered Britain actually increased under the Tories. The top sending countries were India and Nigeria; relatively few came from EU nations.
Why the increase? A large number are care workers, willing to work for the dismal pay offered to home care and nursing care workers. Immigrant care workers, allowed in under a special visa category, represent some 32 percent of all British care workers. Despite the public National Health Service, most of the caregiving sector is privatized and run by for-profit companies even though British taxpayers ultimately pay the costs.
When Starmer announced the immigration crackdown last week, making it harder for immigrants to gain legal status, companies that depend on immigrant care workers expressed alarm that worker shortages would worsen.
But there is a very simple solution. Pay them better. Raise the prevailing wage to, say, £20 an hour (about $27), and plenty of locals would take these jobs.
NEWS ITEM: Manufacturing companies say they can’t find enough qualified workers to take factory jobs. According to a recent Wall Street Journal piece, America has nearly half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs. The work is often hot and dirty. Employers say they have trouble recruiting and retaining workers. “If we hire 20 people, two to three will decide to stay for a career while others will quit after a few weeks or months,” Joseph Korff, owner of Quaker City Castings, told the Journal.
Here is a radical idea: Pay them better.
Back in the day, auto factories had no trouble recruiting and retaining workers. The work was just as hot and repetitive, but it paid enough to support a blue-collar middle class. Thanks to the UAW, autoworkers made enough money to support a family on one income, to become homeowners, and some even had vacation homes.
NEWS ITEM: Construction workers are in short supply. The industry projects a need for almost half a million more workers this year. Trump’s deportation plans will increase the scarcity. According to a report from the Urban Institute, immigrants made up more than 23 percent of the construction workforce in 2023, and about half are undocumented.
In many cities, construction workers are casual labor. They show up early in the morning for street corner shape-ups, and contractors hire those they need, at low wages.
But—funny thing—there is no shortage of workers for well-paid union construction jobs. So if there are labor shortages in construction, the remedy is … wait for it … to offer decent pay. And yes, it would also be good to suspend the Gestapo-style raids on migrants and revive the bipartisan path-to-citizenship legislation that was near passage when Trump killed it.
But hold on, wouldn’t paying workers better be inflationary? Perhaps in some sectors, though it would reduce turnover costs and increase worker professionalism.
But this is really about income distribution. The richest people in the economy, such as hedge fund and private equity and tech multibillionaires, capture far too much of the total product. In the ’50s and ’60s, when unions were strong, wage workers received regular raises in line with the economy’s productivity gains, and inflation was well-behaved.
Pay workers decently and shortages disappear.
