What Killed the Teen Summer Job? Big Labor

American Compass, the think tank funded by liberal Big Philanthropy to tell conservatives that the hard left was right about economics all along, recently started publishing a periodic online magazine titled Commonplace. This week, Commonplace published an article that will make people familiar with American Compass’s Euro-socialist labor policy demands do a double take.

Helen Andrews, features editor of the left-funded ostensible conservatives’ magazine, writes that “summer employment for teenagers is a tradition worth preserving.” Andrews is correct in that thesis. But amid interviewing assorted conservative figures about their summer jobs, Andrews—unsurprisingly, given American Compass’s ideological commitments—fails to identify a special interest, if not the principal special interest, responsible for the decline of teen paid summer work. The culprit is, of course, Big Labor.

Sectoral Bargaining Kills Teen Summer Jobs

California adopted a form of sectoral bargaining, the European socialist labor system American Compass has advocated, for its fast-food industry at the urging of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). As a condition of its new scheme, the state mandated a $20 hourly minimum wage for fast-food restaurants, a common source of teen summer jobs, including one of American Compass’s interlocutors, an American Compass staffer polled by Andrews, and your humble correspondent.

By a convenient coincidence, new research testing the employment effects of California’s SEIU-backed high fast-food wage and sectoral bargaining scheme was released by the National Bureau of Economic Research’s working paper series this week. The researchers estimated that California’s SEIU-backed regulations reduced employment in the fast-food sector by 18,000 jobs relative to a control condition based on national trends. Other research has shown substantial hours reductions (and accompanying pay loss) for fast-food workers in the state since the sectoral bargaining law passed.

That minimum wage hikes, which function as essentially a sectoral bargaining kludge for the lowest-paid workers (and are often pushed by labor unions), crush teen employment is well established. If American Compass believes, as I do, that “Having a job as a teenager makes people happier … puts money in their pockets, gives them funny stories they’ll always remember, and teaches them valuable lessons about the real world that they will never learn in the cloistered environment of school,” the think tankers must consider the well-proven consequences to those jobs that their policy proposals would inflict.

Big Labor Supports de Facto Open Borders

The one right-of-center policy proposal Andrews could affirm as a path to increasing teen employment is immigration restriction of the sort the second Trump administration has pursued. And that’s fair enough as far as it goes, but I offer no prizes for guessing which special interest class advocates strongly for near-as-makes-no-difference open borders: Big Labor.

Since 2000, the AFL-CIO and other labor unions have aligned with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to support “comprehensive immigration reform” (usually expected to include a major amnesty for classes of illegal immigrants) and have opposed immigration enforcement. For political reasons (Emerging Democratic Majority–style theories of demographic-powered electoral change), ideological reasons (the rise of Everything Leftism/social-justice unionism over Cold War liberalism), and ostensibly public-spirited reasons (concerns about the fairness of work-site enforcement actions under the Simpson-Mazzoli Act), labor unions have swung to the liberal-expansionist side on immigration matters. Even a decade ago The New Republic wrote that “No group in America, aside from Latino activists, is a more steadfast champion of generous immigration reform than organized labor.”

Recent headlines have illustrated the role organized labor plays in opposition to the Trump administration’s efforts to enforce immigration laws and remove unlawfully present workers from the country. The triggering event for the anti–Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) riots that rocked Los Angeles in June was the arrest of the California state-level president of the SEIU (that union again) on allegations he was blocking the passage of law enforcement vehicles. California state officials rallied to the union leader’s defense, unsurprising in Big Labor’s Golden State.

So why does SEIU side with illegal immigration and oppose opening more jobs to American teenagers? The answer is simple: Illegal immigrants make more loyal union dues–payers than curious kids who ask about “FICA” and other deductions from their first paychecks. Will Swaim of the California Policy Center argues, “SEIU recruits, even coerces, those illegal immigrants to pay SEIU membership dues in exchange for the promise of higher wages, of course, but also legal protection in the face of immigration enforcement.”

Comparing the loyalty of a full-time, non-student illegal immigrant worker who needs the SEIU to protect him from la migra with the disloyalty of an American teenager who asks uncomfortable questions about all his payroll deductions for the nine weeks of a summer job makes Big Labor’s choice simple.

Big Labor Is Not Your Friend

I don’t mean to pick on Andrews. Her thesis, that it is important for younger Americans to work real jobs and gain an appreciation for work performed other than with a keyboard, is one I share. But those who want to see teenagers and college kids on break return to the lifeguard towers, drive-thrus, grocery aisles, and seasonal shops of the American summer need to know that organized labor is a major force standing in the way of restoring the summer work custom.

Before public officials take up American Compass’s proposals to strengthen organized labor in the name of American workers, they should reconsider whether organized labor speaks for American workers. The SEIU has shown conclusively that it speaks for illegal immigrant workers. Likewise, organized labor has shown that it does not care if there are fewer jobs for American workers if union power is at stake. The teen summer job teaches lessons, if one has ears to hear them.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/what-killed-the-teen-summer-job-big-labor/