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Updated: January 17, 2023 @ 7:39 am
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayrokas delivers remarks July 2, 2021, during a naturalization ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C.
President Joe Biden on Thursday announced a new immigration program that will allow 30,000 immigrants a month to come into the United States legally.
ATLANTA — Undocumented workers caught up in exploitative labor arrangements will have access to a streamlined process to request protection from deportation, according to guidance unveiled by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Under the policy outlined last week, the Biden administration hopes to encourage migrant workers who experience or witness labor abuses to come forward and report their employers.
“Unscrupulous employers who prey on the vulnerability of noncitizen workers harm all workers and disadvantage businesses who play by the rules,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said. “We will hold these predatory actors accountable by encouraging all workers to assert their rights.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayrokas delivers remarks July 2, 2021, during a naturalization ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C.
Immigrant advocates say lack of legal status historically prevented many workers from cooperating with law enforcement investigations into labor abuses. The latest move from DHS would diffuse the chilling prospect of “immigration-related retaliation,” the agency said.
Among those who could benefit from a more efficient process to seek deportation relief, known as “deferred action,” are Georgia farm workers who experience or witness labor abuses of the kind unveiled roughly a year ago by Operation Blooming Onion. In that case, investigators uncovered a “modern-day slavery” operation that they say trapped workers from Latin America in “brutal” and “inhumane” conditions.
Immigrant and labor advocates in the region welcomed the Biden administration’s announcement.
Meredith Stewart, senior supervising attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project said, “Workers in the Deep South face additional risks due to the region’s lack of state-based labor protections. … When immigrant workers can raise complaints and organize without fear of retaliation, labor standards rise for all workers.”
The new DHS policy follows other initiatives rolled out by the Biden administration to empower vulnerable migrant workers. Last year, the U.S. Department of Labor laid out its own process to support immigrant whistleblowers and encourage participation in workplace investigations.
Immigrant advocates said making it easier for undocumented workers to come forward could make a significant difference in a city like Gainesville, where a sizable undocumented workforce helps power the nation-leading poultry industry.
In January 2021, Gainesville made national news when a preventable liquid nitrogen leak at a poultry plant claimed the lives of six workers, most of whom had immigrant backgrounds.
As law enforcement and first responders rushed to the scene that day, “Our folks ran for their lives not just because … it was impossible to breathe, but too because they were afraid in an instance like that, that they were going to be deported,” Maria del Rosario Palacios, a former poultry worker and executive director of mutual-aid group GA Familias Unidas, said in a 2022 online forum.
In the ensuing investigation, Palacios said some workers were granted protections from immigration enforcement actions on a case-by-case basis.
The new DHS policy formalizes and streamlines the process to seek relief, a “long-awaited development,” Palacios said Friday.
The Sur Legal Collaborative, an immigrants’ and workers’ rights nonprofit based in Atlanta, issued a statement. ”We know that every day, immigrant workers risk their lives to put food on our tables, clean and build our homes, and so much more. … We must do everything in our power to ensure that employers who … are abusing workers are held accountable,” it said. “This requires that there be set protections for immigrant workers who experience workplace violations.”
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After an apparent boom during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, labor productivity in the U.S. economy has been underwhelming since. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported declining labor productivity for three of the last five quarters, and the most recent report only found growth of 0.3% in the third quarter of 2022.
The dramatic increase in productivity during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic was in part a function of which workers were working. Jobs that have lower levels of labor productivity—measured as real output per labor hour—were more likely to confront layoffs or reductions in hours. In contrast, jobs in fields that are measured as highly economically productive often transitioned more easily to remote work.
Now, many companies in productive fields are shedding workers. Major companies like Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft—which operate in the technology field, a field that generates a high amount of outputs relative to labor costs—have announced large layoffs in 2022. Simultaneously, the labor market remains tight in other industries that are not as economically productive.
These trends in the composition and productivity of the labor market are significant indicators for the U.S. economy. Producing more goods and services with less labor helps businesses generate profit, expands choices and lowers prices for consumers, and can theoretically raise wages for workers. However, on the latter count, data shows that the relationship between productivity and wage growth has become weaker over time.
From the 1940s to the early 1970s, steady growth in labor productivity tracked closely with growth in real hourly compensation. However, over the last half-century, the rate of growth for labor productivity has continued to increase, while wage growth has stagnated. As a result, there is now a gap between productivity and wages. While productivity has grown by nearly 450% since the late 1940s, real hourly wages have grown by only 229% over the same period.
The phenomenon of the productivity-compensation gap is apparent in sectors across the economy. Nearly every industry shows a faster rate of growth in productivity than in wages over the last few decades, with finance and the arts being the major exceptions.
The information sector stands out as the industry with the largest gap: since 1987, the information sector has averaged 12% annual growth in productivity but just 3.3% growth in wages annually. With advances around computing, internet access, mobile devices, and more making technology an essential part of life and commerce, productivity in related information businesses has exploded. The information industry has had faster annual wage growth than any other sector, but even with that being the case, productivity gains easily outpace wage increases in recent years.
Differences in industry composition also help explain the places where productivity gains have been most pronounced recently. Washington and California, two states that have economies that are highly dependent on the information sector, respectively rank first and third in the percentage change in labor productivity over the last decade at 32.2% and 28.4%. Meanwhile, five states have actually seen negative growth in productivity in recent years. At the bottom of the list is Wyoming, where labor productivity declined by 5.1%.
The data used in this analysis is from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. To identify the states with the largest increase in labor productivity over the last decade, researchers at HowtoHome.com calculated the percentage change in the BLS labor productivity index between 2011 and 2021. In the event of a tie, the state with the greater change in real value-added output was ranked higher.
Here are the states with the largest increase in labor productivity over the last decade.
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