09/25/2014
Employees at The Washington Post are finally getting a taste of what they are trying to impose on American workers, as new owner Jeff Bezos is imposing a cheap labor regime on Washington’s leading newspaper by cutting pensions. It couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people.
WaPo is a longstanding supporter of mass immigration and infuriatingly resistant to making any connection between American poverty and the deliberate importation of millions of workers from the Third World. It’s therefore a time for Schadenfreude now that the policy consequences of open borders and globalization are biting back.
The Washington Post announced large cuts in retirement benefits on Tuesday, declaring that it would eliminate future retirement medical benefits and freeze defined-benefit pensions for nonunion employees.These pensions were promised to employees before Jeff Bezos purchased the paper. One could even call fulfilling these pensions a moral obligation. And employees hired before 2009 who planned on receiving these pensions are left utterly in the cold, perhaps only grateful that they were not terminated outright.The company also said that in negotiations that started Tuesday, it will seek to impose the same conditions on employees covered by the union — one of the first indications of how The Post’s new owner, Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, will manage relations with the staff of the news organization.
[Washington Post announces cuts to employees’ retirement benefits, by Steven Mufson, Washington Post, September 24, 2014]
The Mufson article quotes one Josh Gotbaum, former director of the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., who comments: “Sadly, rather than cutting costs by sharing them, some companies instead are giving up on providing pensions at all and dumping the responsibility and risk on employees, who are least prepared to handle it.”
And for WaPo employees, every indication is that the worst is yet to come.
But this precisely what is happening to our country. The costs of mass immigration are not shared, but simply dumped on American workers. And as low-skilled mass immigration and globalization turns our economy into one giant race to the bottom, what is happening at the Washington Post will be common practice at every company around the country.
The only people who benefit: the billionaire owners of the economy, just as only Jeff Bezos benefits from this transformation of the once-family-owned Washington Postinto another profit seeking machine that exploits its employees like livestock.
Still, I have to ask the question: will this make The Washington Post reporters get it? It’s said that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged — is an immigration patriot a liberal reporter who just lost his pension?
There is no issue more relevant to economic equality, workers’ rights, and the destruction of the American middle class than mass immigration. And the only way to fight income inequality and restore the American Dream for millions is to create a tight labor market.
Many more people have it far worse than Washington Post reporters. Our real unemployment (and underemployment) figures are far higher than what the government claims, even as the Obama Administration frantically imports millions more workers to take American jobs and welfare recipients dependent on taxpayer dollars.
Is any of this finally getting through to the besieged employees of the Washington Post? And if it can report so breathlessly on the economic threat to its own employees, might it spare a moment for the American workers who are struggling as a direct result of their own pro-immigration reporting?
Maybe it’s time for an extended feature at the Washington Post on the high cost of cheap labor.
After all, the ultimate price we pay for mass immigration is the loss of the country itself.
Donald A. Collins , is a freelance writer living in Washington DC and a former long time member of the board of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. His views are his own. He is the author of From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013
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