Re: To qualify as a good job, the job must also provide pension and health care benefits.

A pension, or some general form of retirement benefit (i.e., as 401k)? If the former, then there are very few good jobs indeed as pensions are going to way of the dinosaur outside the public sector. And I really don't think old-fashioned pensions are a good benchmark of a "good job" since they simply are not structured for a world where most people change jobs every few years. Nor should we wish for a world where people are locked into a job for the sake of the benefits.

I miscalculated. $17/hr is only $35360/year working 40 hr weeks. Quite a bit less than the median, but still pretty close to the housing wage. So a "good job" is about what it takes to afford a decent apartment.

Yes, but the labor imports itself. So to exert the wage pressure we would have to seal our borders to a Soviet level.

Another approach is to enforce workplace rules, making employers afraid to risk hiring illegals. Complications of valid ID can be handled more easily than trying to close our border.

I do not think any illegals are getting the "good jobs". H1 Visas are accounting for them or they are "offshored".

Of cource imported low skilled worforce is not imported for taking good jobs.
However, this import prevents transforming
"bad" jobs into "good" jobs.

As the economy gets more productive and the nation gets richer we should expect that jobs get better through time, right? Dean Baker

Yeah? Why?

Increased productivity is the result of investment in capital assets -- either by the already wealthy or by workers' retirement funds, the ROI on the latter investment coming not in the form of present increased wage income but in the form of retirement income.

And we have to thank the Chinese and the rest of the world for getting us "richer" by lending us money, money, money. Don't see why workers should get pay raises because the Chinese are nuts, do you?

I don't think you can turn "bad" jobs into "good" jobs. Retail for example has always paid low wages. Walmart did not start that trend.

Don't see why workers should get pay raises because the Chinese are nuts, do you?

Of course.

They’ll live better lives. That’s one of a handful of reasons we have a country.As in Life , Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

If the country is more productive that means more stuff has been created , however that happened. And however that happened everyone should get some more of that stuff otherwise the country isn’t meeting one of its reasons for existence. (Maybe over time if a large portion of the country doesn’t share in the productivity gains there might be a price to pay . If only in reduced public spirit when sacrifices are required for the common good.)

There’s another reason I think workers should obtain some of the happiness from sharing in the productivity gains of the country. I want them to. I learned in a logic course years ago that “you can not argue first priniciples.” For some people ,for example private property is a first principle. If something has to give they will argue to protect that because they have a strong feeling that that’s right. I respect that's their principle. Mine is that the mean standard of living of , say , the bottom 20% of the income distribution should improve. I don’t expect you , or anyone else, to agree with me , nor do I agree with what I take to be your first principles. You’ve got yours. I’ve got mine. .

Corvid

Re illegal immigration, consider what the President's Council of Economic Advisers said about the recent "comprehensive reform" bill in Congress: The council estimated that if the bill had passed, it would have depressed (or, I suppose, continued to depress) US wages to the tune of about $350 billion a year.
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Since the administration favored the bill, it's safe to assume this was either the council's true best estimate or an understatement. It's also true that they estimated a $380 billion gross benefit to the economy, most of which would have gone directly into the pockets of employers paying lower wages than they would have otherwise.
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So, in essence, what we're talking about when we regularize illegal immigrants or encourage more such immigration is a huge, regressive tax on working Americans at the middle and lower 30 percent or so of the wage scale. And keep in mind, these aren't just crap jobs: Illegals are a big factor in construction and meat packing, which, within baby boomer memory used to provide decent work and solid middle-class wages and benefits.
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Unionization would be good, but it becomes much harder to organize when you have a large and growing oversupply of labor that, to top it off, is ethnically and racially splintered.
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One awaits the Democrat who will declare that, in order to rescue working Americans, we will abandon our crypto-imperialist globalization policy and declare a moratorium on all immigration, scrap the H-1 visa program and formulate a transparent trade regime that deals with other nations on a case-by-case basis, taking into account what's best for all US citizens rather than a few, hyper-favored corporate interests. Finally we need linkage--a fixed ratio (say 10 to 1) built into every corporate charter linking the total compensation for top corporate officers and their least-compensated employees on a per-hour basis.
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The Berkeley economist Brad DeLong recently asked a series of questions on his blog that boiled down to the single question of why it should matter in the least where, globally, products and manufactured, where management is formulated and implemented, or from where services are provided. The answer, as I see it, is that these things should matter only if your country matters, or only if your countrymen and women matter.
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Too many of our leaders are trying to frighten us into believing that we're in some kind of death-grip struggle with a) global terrorism, or b) other economic powers determined to seize markets, or c) some combination of both. As long as we continue to fall for this garbage, they'll continue to hollow out our country.

But has Baker demonstrated/shown/proved that workers qua workers "ought" (as a philosophical term) to share in so-called* productivity increases?

I've no doubt that philosophers think deeply about the concept of "ought":useful? required
by the "natural law"? whatever? As a layman I can't get any further than the idea that for any individual his "ought" should have a logical connection with her basic values-that "ought" is always personal.I'd be inclined to leave Baker's "ought" at that.

"If the country is more productive that means more stuff has been created"

Seems to me that for a country to be called productive it has to produce more products. A factory that produces a million widgits in 2005
wouldn't be called more productive if in 2006 it produced that same old million but did it with greater use of lenders' capital.

scrap the H-1 visa program

formulate a transparent trade regime that deals with other nations on a case-by-case basis, taking into account what's best for all US citizens rather than a few, hyper-favored corporate interests.

Finally we need linkage--a fixed ratio (say 10 to 1) built into every corporate charter linking the total compensation for top corporate officers and their least-compensated employees on a per-hour basis.

The problem on hand is to provide "good" jobs for non college educated Americans and not to destroy American economy.

Errrm, this is a shock to whom??? Sorry but I don't need an economist to tell me things are bad and getting worse. While most of them have been blowing sunshine up our skirts (or pantlegs,) it's been a race to the bottom for the workforce since Reagan targeted the air traffic controllers.

Corporate greed has replaced worker equity. Quarterly reports trump a nation's collective economic health. We have been outsourced blind despite our productivity and dug a huge hole of debt for our kids and grandkids to pay off.

If this is news to anyone, they must have been asleep longer than Rumpelstiltskin.

What about CEO of Honda, Nokia, and other internnational companies that have American workforce?

Corvid

Good question anytime anyone starts slinging around words ending in "-illion." If you're talking about, say, 30 percent of the working population of 140 million Americans--or about 42 million people at the bottom end of the scale--that comes to $830 a year out of the average paycheck. I'd say that's a lot if you're making substantially less than the $42,000 median household income.
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But then you have to add in the notion that the presence of such downward pressure not only costs these folks $830 a year in the here-and-now but also makes it that much less likely they'll ever recover that amount and then gain enough traction in the workplace and politically to begin to substantially narrow our now insane income gap in this country.
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You know, this is not the land of opportunity. If you're born poor here you're more likely to stay poor than someone born in Western Europe--even Scandinavia. We don't have the political will or even the basic trust across our weak, insular and atomized society to do much about it by public means, and we don't have anything like the kind of economic structure or ethic that would give workers the tools to fight on behalf of their own interests. And trying to fix things with the current crop of Democratic pols is like trying to reassemble a V-8 with a foam rubber wrench.

I am the guy this discussion is about. I am a skilled blue collar worker in NC who makes $17.25 and has a really good 401k and health plan. I'm 47 and I do not see the guy coming up behind me who can do my job. When I started in this business (irrigation) 20 years ago guys with some college were common. On the first crew I worked with at my present company, in 1990, all 4 of us had some college.

Now the American guys we get are high school at best. Most are drop-outs. We get smart, motivated, Hispanic immigrants, but they lack the communication sklls to run a crew or do service (my job) and deal with customers one on one.

I really hate to sound like an old fart but I have watched as Americans have become less inclined to do a job that requires getting your hands dirty. Those "good jobs" in the construction and service spheres go wanting.

Consider the shift from praising work to praising wealth. Americans don't mind dirt, but know that the big money is elsewhere. They also haven't been encouraged to seek engineering or other practical higher ed like sciences. Instead the greed guys extol MBA programs.

General labor has taken the hit along with engineering and other skilled labor. With no reasonable expectation of supporting a family as skilled labor, why would Americans study those skills?

My son wanted to follow me in show biz so I couldn't argue. Still, he was never unwilling to get dirty, working for the park district of our town, emptying garbage and watering trees, etc. I asked him recently if he would pick cabbage for 17$/hr. He said "in a heartbeat."

It's not so much that Americans are just less inclined, it's the dollar equation. There are no "jobs Americans won't do" except the ones that are losers. Make them both respectable and financially useful and there will be no problem finding workers.

The country has to side with the worker against the owner, it's that simple.

This is a mistery for me. If Americans don't want to do a good job that requires getting your hands dirty, what kind of jobs they are getting?

Pre-Reagan (or maybe, pre-Nixon; you don't want to emulate the '70s, do you?), the world was a different place. There were very few developing and emerging markets and most had severe restrictions on foreign investment. Financial globalization/liberalization has altered the investment landscape, drastically, and the rear view mirror isn't very helpful.

There's always a balance to be struck between rate of return and investment security. Lower the rate of return in secure economies (America, Europe, et als.) and investors will be induced to move to less secure emerging and developing markets.

Paper pushing and telephone dialing jobs. Mystery solved.

Not quite relevant to capital flight, but things could in fact be different if salaries paid to overseas workers were not deductible as a business expense.

A few do, most don't. But before singing yet another dirge for the "factory rat" of yore, let's remember that those jobs were often bad jobs in ways that had nothing to do with pay and benefits: they were dirty, boring, repetitive and often dangerous. The solution is not to bring back jobs like that but to make the jobs we have better.
No, I don't have a magic solution to that problem, not claiming I do. But all in all I think it's a better thing that machines nowadays often do work that used to put too many people in an early grave.

I have a magic solution, free market and technology progress. But this is not going to happen if employer can import a cheap labor to take "dirty, boring, repetitive and often dangerous" jobs.

Thank you Ellen, the one thing I'll never learn is the usage of the articles :-)
See, how great America is, with my grammar skills, I'm able to get a good job that doesn't
require getting my hands dirty.

Sometimes I'm not sure if I should say we Americans, because I'm not an American even so I'm US citizen. It's much easier for my children.