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Originally Posted by DemolitionMan  That issue is what first got me interested in politics. I posted about it on every forum I was a member of. There were alot of letters written and calls made by people who would not have done it otherwise. It didn't do alot of good though. I don't think the Mexican trucks have had as big of an impact as we all thought, but the potential was always there. |
It was one of the major things I started writing about very early at
Union Review, I saw the writing on the wall. I once worked in a union warehouse in Brooklyn, NY. It was a hard job, one of the ways to keep the job was that you had to have a high enough production each day to pass the 90 day probation to be in the union. I recall the number was 1024 cases in 8 hours. That was picked, packed, palletized and loaded onto a truck. To make a long story short eventually they moved out of New York to Vermont, who at first salivated at the idea of getting the business and gave them all sorts of tax abatement's, and as a bonus a union free shop. I'm not gonna get into that debate here, as now the fella's in VT. are realizing that after 12+ years the pay for pick idea is beating them up physically and are now fighting to unionize, BUT, a thought occurred to me. What if the owner of the warehouse could get the stores to order their products 1 day earlier? That's plenty of time to get a truck straight up from Mexico to New York to supply their supermarket chains. How about UPS and FedEX? Whats to stop a package from getting sorted, picked, packed and delivered directly from Mexico? That's a lot of American jobs.
The entire main reason that the program had not worked to a high degree is because it was a pilot program that limited trucks to an extremely low number. If the green light to the full program as per NAFTA states, we will be in trouble. Don't think that for one second almost single business that could reasonably get labor from Mexico would not. One of my most recent articles at my own site Joe's Union Review speaks about the new Hershey's factory in Mexico and the 300+ jobs that are now lost, this doesn't include the construction, food processing plants are huge in the construction phase, a lot of workers required and a lot of money they could have spent here in our country. Here's the real kick in the proverbial expletive.
The minimum wage where the new Hershey plant is located in Mexico -
$3.60 A DAY
You can read more in my story entitled "
America's workers lose fight to compete with Mexico wage of $5 a day, Hershey's plant looses 300 jobs in Peppermint Patty factory move"
It's also posted in the union/non-union debate forum here, because it effects all of us. Especially the hard working men and women who break their a** driving trucks for a living, maybe not today, but if they could, Hershey's would trounce on the chance to use $3.60 a day drivers.
I can just imagine the US Post office outsourcing the mail system to a US firm in Mexico, the private firm losing money and our tax dollars bailing them out. Remember 15 years ago nobody imagined that when they called their local telephone company that they would be speaking to a guy in India claiming to be "Charlie".
DemolitionMan, keep on top of this and all the other bad stuff happening to us, the American worker. We need people like you, think of the 99.9% that haven't a clue what this is about.
Mexican Truck Program --- GONE!!! 
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