It’s funny how stereotypes work. Latin American immigrants head to the US and provide a labor pool for jobs US citizens don’t want, working the fields, picking fruit, moving with the seasons to do the backbreaking work that keeps our agricultural produce costs low. Politicians clamoring for stronger immigration controls do so with a wink and a nod to the CEOs of massive farms who depend on that labor. Right?

US laborers are unwilling to do that work because it’s hard, dirty, and requires stamina and a willingness to work for peanuts. A common perception, yes?

The reality extends well beyond the realm of agriculture, however, and extends far beyond the Southwest and West Coast, too. Consider the field of high-rise construction in heavily unionized New York.

Unionized construction laborers there average between $17 and $19 per hour. 77% of them are accruing funds in retirement pensions. Only 35% of non-union folks are given pensions and they average $10 to $12 per hour. 82% of the union members get company provided healthcare while only 46% of the unorganized folks do. [source]

Now let’s consider the rest of the reality.

Though the number of annual fatalities remains fairly stable, the proportion that are Latinos has been growing. This not only points to differences in safety precautions but suggests Latinos are a fast growing percentage of the construction force.

Thomas Leavitt of Seeing The Forest provides the skinny from Truthout on the way illegal aliens are utilized (read: victimized) by the creative ways employers use temp agencies to skirt the law.

So it’s $7.50/hr and no overtime, compared to the $10-$12/hr other nonunion laborers make. For the employer on a building that size, that could mount up to millions saved. But at what cost to those immigrant’s families? And at what cost to US citizens?

Leavitt asks humorously where Eliot Spitzer is. But we know he’s off policing Wall Street. James Wolcott, quoting economist Steven Roach, points to a similar obsession off top Wall Street traffic cop Alan Greenspan.

From the top to the bottom of business and industry and government, great attention is paid to the asset based part of the economy. During Greenspan’s tenure, NASDAQ has moved from 400 to 5100 to 1100 to 2200. The NYSE went from 2000 to 7100 to 4500 to nearly 7500. Exxon Mobil has gone from $12 to $48 to $30 to $64. High-end homebuilder Toll Brothers went from $7 to $1 to $91, with the Fed’s interest rates responsible for the rise from $10 in 2000, as NASDAQ was collapsing.

But what has occurred to the wage-earning classes during each of these successive speculative investment bubble cycles? I need go no further than my own experience to demonstrate that.

In 1968, at the age of 15, I washed dishes for the minimum wage of $1.60/hr. Six years later, I made $5/hr as a construction laborer. And in 1975, I was making $7 as a non-union carpenter. By the end of 1976, I made what those immigrants make today, over 28 years later. Adjusting for inflation from 1968, they make less than I did when I was washing dishes at 15.

But it’s not just the exploitation of immigration laws; the impact on all wage earners in non-union construction was evident. From December 1976 to September 1989, my wages advanced from $7.50/hr to $11/hr as a foreman. Then started sliding backward for the next year.

My experience was hardly unique. The period from 1971 to 1991 was a wage stagnation period in that field. Most, at best, merely kept pace with inflation. I was intelligent and motivated enough to make forays into other occupations and into uncapitalized self-employment. But I had no concept of most of the underlying macroeconomics that was impacting me. I sensed OPEC strikes limited things in the 70s and the union-busting policies begun under Reagan kept wages down in the 80s. Finally, disgusted, I quit the profession, a year before it reached bottom. And missed the 14 year period of serious wage gains since.

But enough of bemoaning my own fates. The point is that Reagan, then Greenspan, have advanced the interests of businesses and of people with the wherewithal for serious investment. But much of that’s come on the backs of labor exploitation, particularly under conservative rule.

Look at the gray states (or red states, if you prefer calling them that) and you’ll see so-called ‘Right To Work’ laws abound, which have directly weakened the numbers of workers represented by unions. Coupled with the Greenspan monetary policies that favor capital, legislation that advances the interests of financials while mandating insurance in increasing areas and increments, and the massive borrowing and spending done by conservatives (which saddles us working slobs with debt service, too), the non-vested working classes get nothing but empty promises about the rising tide that never really floats our boat.

Policies that promote the outsourcing of jobs, that limit labor via union-busting and business deregulation and the insourcing of a compliant labor pool easily exploited, while widening the gap between rich and poor by stunning amounts, creates another bubble that economists don’t dwell on. That’s the bubble of the American Dream deferred. And if it keeps bubbling as it has, the question is not if, but when that bubble explodes.