FAIR: As Ford Downsizes Its Workforce, Bush Plans to Downsize Work

WASHINGTON, Jan. 24, 2006 -- The American worker is caught between outsourcing jobs and importing foreign workers, and no one in Washington is standing up for them. As 55,000 Ford workers join 50,000 General Motors workers facing the prospect of finding new jobs, the Bush administration is pushing a new foreign guestworker plan to import workers, the Democrat leadership is pursuing increased immigration, and organized labor is disintegrating, with a growing number of unions focused on organizing immigrant workers rather than defending American jobs.

Here are some sobering facts to consider as President Bush gears up for an all-out effort to increase the number of foreign guest workers admitted to this country:

  * According to the government, there are about 7.4 million unemployed
    Americans, who will soon be joined by about 55,000 former auto workers.

  * These official unemployment statistics do not reflect the full picture.
    Millions more American workers have dropped out of the labor force
    entirely, or are working at jobs that pay a fraction of what they used
    to make.

  * Every net new job created by the U.S. economy since 2000 has been filled
    by a newly arriving immigrant, and about half of those by illegal
    immigrants. Thus, the modest job growth over the past five years has not
    benefited American workers.

  * While the jobs being cut in the latest round of layoffs by the auto
    companies paid as much as $30 an hour, the new jobs are being taken by
    illegal worker earning about $300 a week.

  * The percentage of full-time workers enjoying employer-provided health
    insurance is steadily falling.

"The image of an industry that practically invented the middle class worker is crumbling before our eyes, while the president puts out a 'Help Wanted' ad for millions of low wage workers," observed Dan Stein, president of FAIR. "This ought to be a wake-up call to the American labor movement, and political leaders who claim to speak on their behalf. We are rapidly approaching the point of no return for the middle class in America, as we export high wage jobs and import low wage workers," said Stein.

"While the American worker agonizes over where the next paycheck will come from, and whether it will support a family, the administration and the Senate try to pass new laws to increase the giveaway of American jobs to foreign workers," observed Dan Stein, president of FAIR. "The irrelevance of the American labor movement will be permanently fixed in the mind of American workers if it fails to act in defense of American jobs for American workers. The breakaway unions that are focused on organizing immigrant workers, most of them illegal entrants, are not only destroying the union movement, they are selling out American workers."