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  Friday  November 28  2003    01: 01 PM

labor

Europe's Cheap U.S. Labor

Meanwhile, another pillar of the Euro-corporate community, the Danish security company Group 4 Falck, is taking a similar tack with the thousands of security guards it employs here since it purchased Wackenhut Corp. in May 2002. In Denmark, Group 4 Falck's security guards receive 111 hours of training and make between $16 and $19 an hour. In the United States its guards receive as little as one hour's training, and pull down an hourly wage of about $8. In suburban Chicago, where the Service Employees International Union recently won family health insurance for guards at 30 companies, Group 4 Falck refused to sign the contract and informed its employees that if they wanted to maintain their company health insurance they'd have to leave the union.

So it's come to this: When European employers look to the United States, they see roughly the same thing that U.S. employers see when they look to China: millions of low-wage workers who have all but lost the right to organize and a government intent on keeping things just the way they are.

The erosion of worker power and the growth of employer supremacy here have transformed the bottom half of the U.S. workforce into a vast exploitable mass worthy of a colonial backwater.

Something to chew on as we give thanks for the marvel that once was America.
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