The Big Lie

            Back when I was a teenager, my uncle, Tom Buckley, said that if I wanted to be rich, then I should do something no one else wants to do.  “Look at Ben Nickerson or Joe Dubis,” he said. “Garbage and septic tanks.  Lenny Fougere, too.”  It was true.  They were all locals who had done very well for themselves doing things most of us have a natural inclination to avoid.  Smart choice.
            The supply of the service is inherently low, the demand is high.  So there’s money to be made. These days, however, there’s a big lie floating around, and it is being believed by many because it plays to our own sense of elitism.
            That lie is: We don’t have enough workers on Cape Cod.
            This is an outgrowth of the original idea that Americans won’t do these jobs.
            Economists working for the state and federal government clearly acknowledge that an influx of workers from outside the system depress wages.  But larger media outlets add a dismissive caveat that this is only at the lower end of the scale, mostly for those who have a high school diploma or less.
            I recall something that state police colonel and candidate for Lt. Governor Reed Hillman said in 2006.  There’s no better crime prevention measure than a job.
            By importing cheap labor into our system, you are telling the poorest in our society that they are overpaid.  People who cut your grass.  People who pick up your trash.  People who clean your toilet.  It is an affront to their dignity, and yet too many in the business community say it, and the media, by and large, repeats it without question.
            Those who do question it, by and large, are attacked as keeping white hoods and nooses in the trunks of their cars.  These charges typically come from comfortable whites who have the most to gain from large and cheaper labor pools.
            Isn’t it strange, though, 1964 saw both the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Immigration Act that greatly loosened our borders?  This was pointed out to me by a master’s–educated middle-class black American woman.  It stacked the deck against hardworking black Americans who wanted something better than a cycle of poverty.  Sure, you could vote, but you can’t find a job.  Defending the current system—one that effectively keeps black Americans down and denies them their dignity—is racism.  Not the other way around.
            Recently, the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce showed true self-interest in opposing a casino in Southeastern Massachusetts.  Chairman and fellow Republican Dick Neitz has said, “Our biggest concern focuses on the effect (casinos) would have on the work force of Cape Cod." He described the shortage of workers here reaching "almost crisis proportions in some businesses."
            Meaning, the city of New Bedford and Plymouth County should not create better jobs, with health benefits and child care, because that could lure workers from the Cape.  By that reasoning, no more businesses at all should open up on or near the Cape, either, because that would rob existing businesses of their employee pool.
            That reduces all of us here to serfdom.  My only value on Cape Cod, then, is to work for a member of the tourist-heavy Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce.  But if I am not content with minimum wage, working overtime with no benefits, being laid off for the winter but unable to collect unemployment, and paying exorbitant rent back to my boss for crowded housing, then there’s someone from overseas who will.

            State, regional and local governments on Cape Cod all acknowledge that young adults are leaving in droves.  They also admit that while the cost of living is equal to that of Boston, the pay scale is 40 percent lower.  The problem is not that we don’t have enough workers, it is that we don’t retain them and attract more from a labor pool of 300 million through a natural economic law: pay people what they are willing to accept to do the job.

            Why should the government support a business whose model requires it to hire a white man from Bulgaria instead of a black man from Louisiana?  What has local government done to plan for our economic future here on Cape Cod?  The course we are on now takes us to a “cruise ship economy,” a few regular managers in between a transient labor force and a transient tourist clientele.
            All because of an attitude with disdain for the true value of hard work.  It’s not work that Americans won’t do.  It’s pay Americans can’t afford to take.

1/10/08