It's a great point you make above, and reflects a lot of a wave of change in our country over the past 40 years. The analysis of meat packing goes one level dee

It's a great point you make above, and reflects a lot of a wave of change in our country over the past 40 years. The analysis of meat packing goes one level deeper and according to the US govt has an additional cause: > Industry consolidation has been accompanied by important changes in labor relations in meatpacking. In 1980, 46 percent of workers in the meat products industry were union members, a figure that had remained stable through the 1970’s. Most unionized slaughter plant workers belonged to the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, whose base wage rate was $10.69 an hour in 1982. In that year, many unionized firms began to press for large reductions in base wages, to $8.25 an hour, consistent with what was being offered in non-union plants. The union at first acceded to wage cuts, but by 1984 adopted a strategy to vigorously contest them, in the view that large wage cuts at older unionized plants only postponed plant closings. Between 1983 and 1986, there were 158 work stoppages in cattle and hog slaughter plants, involving 40,000 workers. There were lengthy strikes, plant closings, and deunionizations at some ongoing and reopened plants.14 By 1987, union membership had fallen to 21 percent of the workforce, and has remained at that lower level through the most recent data (1997); wage reductions were imposed in most plants, and wages have risen only modestly since then. > Declining unionization coincided with changes in slaughter plant demographics. Immigrants, primarily from Southeast Asia, Mexico, and Central America, make up large and growing shares of the workforces at both hog and cattle slaughter plants. There was a structural shift in power between workers and corporations. Unions representing the worker who had pushed for those higher wages were fairly systematically pushed out of power. The loss of power of unions is what led to the low wages. The use of immigrant labor is just the particular method companies went about implementing it, but if there hadn't been people immigrating it still would've been forced low wages by the corporations. This is evidenced by the fact that the low-wages began in the non-union corporations. A lot of people look at this same situation and mistake the cause for the effect. The cause of the situation was a huge shift in power away from workers to corporations via the loss of union power. The particular manifestation of how corporations used that power was by changing who they were hiring, but to be clear even without immigrants, wages would've still fallen as they already were doing. Ie if unions had negotiated and maintained a minimum wage of $10 or $12 it's irrelevant where the people they're hiring come from. 1. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/41108/18003_aer785d_1_.pdf?v=41061 https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/41108/18003_ae...