Daniel Costa for the Economic Policy Institute: I don’t doubt how productive and valuable Mexican immigrant crab pickers in Maryland are. Their bosses say they’re the heart of the crab industry. But upon closer inspection, it seems the seafood companies don’t really think this important work is worth a fair wage. The companies have lobbied tenaciously to make sure that the legal and regulatory framework of the H-2B visa program allows them to legally underpay their workers compared to what they would have to pay to attract workers in the free market …
Maryland crab is delicious, if you can afford it. At $30 to $50 per pound, it’s certainly not cheap. That’s why I was curious to know just how much these H-2B workers were valued by their employers. I looked up the H-2B disclosure data from the Department of Labor for two … seafood processors … Russell Hall Seafood and G.W. Hall and Sons. According to those records, in fiscal 2017, the Labor Department certified 50 H-2B jobs for Russell Hall Seafood and 30 for G.W. Hall and Sons.
The H-2B workers are paid $9.50 an hour. The Labor Department data list the wages employers promise to pay their H-2B workers, and indeed both promised to pay $9.51 an hour for the 2017 season. If this seems too low for this grueling work — work that requires especially talented and fast workers from Mexico — that’s because it is.
All of the labor certifications for these 80 H-2B workers were classified under the occupational title of “Meat, Poultry and Fish Cutters and Trimmers,” which is one of the top H-2B occupations every year. According to Labor Department survey data, the national average wage for this occupation is $12.27 per hour, and the Maryland statewide average wage is $13.32 per hour. The $9.51 the two employers pay their H-2B workers is $3.81 less per hour than the statewide average wage. …
The quick, talented women who come from Mexico on H-2B visas to pick crab meat in Maryland deserve to be paid $3 to $4 more per hour — at least the local or state average wage for the jobs they do. And who knows? At $13 an hour, maybe some Maryland residents would want to give crab picking a try, just as they did before the H-2B visa was created.
GOP policies will hurt our stats
Juhem Navarro-Rivera for Demos: The Decennial Census is one of the most important statistical tools available to Americans. It provides a snapshot of our present and helps us plan our future. Today this periodic and constitutionally mandated population count faces major threats on two fronts. The first threat is the underfunding of the program by congressional Republicans and President Trump. The second is the Trump administration’s attacks on vulnerable populations that are often the hardest to count. …
In this sense, we must consider the Republican Party’s handling of the census budget as another battle in the war against effective government. Attacking the census undermines many governmental functions. Its data is used to ensure fair representation in Congress, reapportioning seats according to population size. Its information on race is used to enforce civil and voting rights at a time when GOP legislators and governors are making it harder to vote and the Supreme Court has weakened hard-fought voting protections.
Moreover, other actions by this administration will make the census’s job even harder. This administration has made a point of persecuting racial and ethnic minorities, which are often undercounted in the census. Latino communities live in fear of a deportation force unleashed with little to no checks. The government continues fighting to implement a ban on Muslims. The attorney general wants to return to the misguided prosecution and incarceration policies that have destroyed African-American communities, while the president dismisses the concerns of American Indian activists at Standing Rock. Only with adequate funding can the Census Bureau improve outreach to these groups to count them accurately.
Purdue becoming a higher-education test lab
Alan Smith for the R Street Institute: Purdue University President Mitch Daniels has accomplished a number of significant milestones, including a six-year tuition freeze. There may not be another university in the country that plans to charge students less tuition in 2019 than was paid in 2012. The student loan default rate for Purdue graduates hovers around 1 percent. The Milken Institute ranked Purdue No. 1 for technology transfer among public universities without a medical school.
Now, the university is going to expand its offerings to millions of people online. Instead of committing to a multiyear project to build a significant online learning university, Purdue announced April 27 that it is creating a new public university (temporarily named “New U”) by acquiring most of the assets of Kaplan University, a competency-based online learning business of 15 campuses in the United States, 32,000 nontraditional students and nearly 80 years of remote-learning experience.
Kaplan offered the nation’s first totally online law school and has created study courses to review vast amounts of material for various accreditation and professional certification exams. It is a global provider of education programs in more than 30 countries and has forged partnerships with many colleges, universities and school districts and more than 2,600 corporations. The educational networking possibilities are nearly limitless.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
