Country of Exiles by William R. Leach Read Free Book Online Page A

May 31, 1997, 21–23. This magazine argued that if global companies persisted in eluding the taxpayer, the burden of taxation would fall more and more on labor: “In a world of mobile capital, labour is likely to bear a growing share of the tax burden—especially unskilled workers who are least mobile.”
    20. Quoted in Karen Curnow McCluskey, ed.,
Notes from a Traveling Childhood: Readings for Internationally Mobile Parents and Children
(Washington, D.C.: Foreign Service Youth Foundation, 1994), p. 48.
    21. On American unionization in the post–WWII period, see Edward Patterson,
Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–74
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 40–60, 739–40; and Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh,
Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), pp. 310–13; and Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt,
The State of Working America 1998–99
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), prepared by the Economic Policy Institute, Washington, D.C., pp. 183–89.
    22. The chicken and meatpacking businesses now produce atunheard-of volumes for the world market, herding countless millions of animals and birds in pens for assembly-line slaughter and packaging; no work has become more ugly or demeaning, which explains why these companies have resorted so completely to immigrant labor (much of it illegal). On the demeaning side of it, see Tony Horwitz for his account of “blues on the chicken line,” in “9 to Nowhere,”
WSJ
, December 1, 1994, 1. The poultry-processing industry, he writes, “[has been] the second fastest growing factory job in America since 1980,” and it “has consigned a large class of workers to a Dickensian time warp, laboring not just for meager wages but also under dehumanized and often dangerous conditions.” In late 1998, conditions were unchanged; see Laurie P. Cohen, “With Help from INS, U.S. Meatpacker Taps Mexican Work Force,”
WSJ
, October 15, 1998, A1, A8.
    The literature on every facet of these new brigades is enormous, and countless articles on the “return of sweatshops” have been written in this decade, but see Peter Kwong,
The New Chinatown
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1992); “Despite Tough Laws, Sweatshops Flourish,”
NYT
, February 6, 1995, 1; William Branigin, “Sweatshops Are Back,”
Washington Post National Weekly Edition
, February 24, 1997, 6–7; “Government Links Retailers to Sweatshops,”
WSJ
, December 15, 1997, B5A; “Garment Shops Found to Break Wage Laws,”
NYT
, October 17, 1997, B1–3; and Roy Beck,
The Case Against Immigration
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).
    23. Quoted in Alexander Keyssar,
Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 62.
    24. Keyssar,
Out of Work
, pp. 74–75, 89–90. See also Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “International Migration, 1850–1939: An Economic Survey,” in Hatton and Williamson, eds.,
Migration and the International Labor Market, 1850–1939
(New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 17, 20, 23.
    25. They were also “structured” in different ways—numbering “men and women who were idle during slow seasons, employees who worked on short time, floaters who migrated from one place to another, casuals, and substitute spinners and printers who werecalled up only when regular workers were absent or when the demand for labor was unusually great”
(ibid.
, p. 7).
    26. The literature on temps has grown over the years, but see Kevin D. Henson,
Just a Temp
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); Robert E. Parker,
Flesh Peddlers and Warm Bodies: The Temporary Help Industry and Its Workers
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
    27. Lawrence Mishel et al.,
The State of Working America 1998–99
, pp. 8, 46–7, 242–52.
    28. See “A Semi-Tough Policy on Illegal Workers,”
Washington Post
, July 13, 1998, 22. And for increased