Guest Worker Program: The Worst of All Worlds

It's hard to have an intelligent debate about immigration without watching it spiral into a mindless series of personal attacks about "racism," "xenophobia," and "nativism." But no matter where one personally stands on the internally divisive issue, it's imperative that we recognize the proposed "guest worker" program frequently cited by the administration and business conservatives poses a devastating threat to virtually all domestic goals of progressives.

Simply put, the idea of a "guest worker" program reduces a human being to a set of hands on the factory floor. "Guest workers" will live within American borders as dehumanized servants to Mammon and his bottom line. They will be used for their labor over a set period of time at which point the parties hiring them get to trade up. This represents a complete political disempowerment for a rising percentage of workers toiling in the most physically demanding jobs, thus enabling their employers to operate even further under the radar than they do now. After all, politicians don't represent "guest workers" who are citizens of another country so what's their motivation to regulate the commerce in their respective fields? A "guest worker" program is taxation without representation, which members of civilized society should view as a form of slavery.

That is the most humanistic grievance I have with a "guest worker" program, but in terms of employment policy it also represents a race to the bottom. Employers have an added incentive to bust unions and demand wage concessions if they have a "guest worker" program that will reward them with a cheap, disempowered labor force without even leaving American soil.
Take Delphi, for instance. After their bankruptcy, they are demanding that union workers take a 63% pay cut. Even if workers agree to those terms, Delphi is gonna have a hard time keeping a factory floor full of employees if they plan to pay $10 an hour. Enter a "guest worker" program and the problem goes away overnight. The good union jobs of yesterday become the "jobs Americans won't do" of tomorrow. All perfectly legal and all perfectly below-the-radar of the average middle-class American in the suburbs.

And so it will go with a guest worker program. The already shrinking number of well-paying semi-skill jobs will continue to artificially join the ranks of "jobs Americans won't do," while employers get a workforce full of non-voting "guest workers," helping them to evade labor laws, raise company profit levels and thus contributions to the Republican Party, and take away money and votes from the Democrats. Lovely!

Mac Is Back, Redux

The good news: A new season of MacGyver is being released on DVD today. The even better news: It's the fourth season, MacGyver's best. Without the faintest hint of a doubt, MacGyver was the greatest show in television history. It had its occasional flaws, not the least of which being the one-dimensional supporting characters, the gratuitously happy endings complete with toothy-grinned freeze frames at the closing of the epilogues, the bad acting in the early seasons and the heavy-handed preaching of later seasons. But the good news about the fourth season is that it was right in the middle of the series' run, where the cheese of the early years had waned and the self-righteousness of the later seasons was yet to fully congeal. The result: a superior selection of 19 ingeniously-crafted episodes with first-rate production values (for the 80's anyway). Sure, those desperately looking for something to nitpick about will find it, but those looking for 19 hours of television more fun than anything on the TV schedule today will thoroughly enjoy the ride.

The fourth season was a transitional year for MacGyver. Perhaps sensing that the formula needed to be tweaked so the series didn't repeat itself and flame out, the writers and producers broadened their horizons. The addition of scriptwriter John Sheppard was noticeable throughout the season, as his twisted fingerprint was abundantly evident in the series' decidedly darker tone. The decision for MacGyver to go dark this year was revolutionary for this otherwise lighthearted series, but not necessarily revolutionary for 80's era action/crime series as both Miami Vice and The Equalizer, among others, shifted to a darker tone in one of their respective seasons. Production logistics weighed heavily in the shift as the series was filming in bleak Vancouver during its winter months, a scenario that forced the series indoors to complete episodes on schedule. Mac even traded in his trademark brown leather jacket for a black one that better fit the season's style.

The darker, brooding stories also presented the opportunity for Richard Dean Anderson and other supporting players to flex their muscles as actors. While the series usually didn't go so far as to taking itself seriously, it also was no longer straitjacketed to the tongue-in-cheek lightheartedness of seasons past which although monstrously fun, kept the series stuck in a ghetto of low expectations and canny acting. The fourth season changed that, while still maintaining most of the kinetic energy and fun of the early years. Not an easy task, but judging from the fact that MacGyver actually saw its ratings climb (and rather dramatically) this season indicated that the strategy worked. Even more impressive is that MacGyver was able to mount its creative and Nielsen comeback this year despite a six-week head start by its sitcom competitors in the fall of 1988, triggered by the writers' strike of the previous summer. Given MacGyver's grueling production schedule, ALF, The Hogan Family and Newhart were able to churn out episode much more quickly than MacGyver. At the end of the day, this turned out to be more of an asset than a liability since more MacGyver episodes aired between January and May, notoriously the series' best ratings season since it wasn't competing with Monday Night Football on its own network in Western time zones. MacGyver proved it was the real deal this season, and here are some of the primary reasons why:

"The Secret of Parker House"--the Halloween special that kicked off the season, setting the stage for the dark and brooding feel of the episodes to come with a cleverly-crafted haunted house story.

"Blood Brothers"--A trip to his Minnesota hometown provides further insights into MacGyver's "tragic hero" profile. The series' anti-gun moralizing was often heavy-handed, and was here as well, but it doesn't take away from the strength of this pivotal episode.

"The Outsiders"--The sap factor goes off the charts with this engrossing episode involving the Amish, eminent domain, and little kids trapped in a well. Even though this episode "borrowed" heavily from the Harrison Ford film Witness and the TV-movie The Jessica McClure Story, it had its own undeniable MacGyver fingerprint and a genuinely goosebump-provoking finale.

"On a Wing and a Prayer"--A back-to-the-basics adventure episode featuring Jack Dalton and Mac heading to Central America to rescue an injured Pete Thornton and a nun from revolutionaries with Jack's new sea plane. MacGyverisms a plenty ensue. Good stuff.

"The Survivors"--The chemistry between MacGyver and boss Pete Thornton (always well played by recently-deceased character actor Dana Elcar) hit a new level in this episode where they're trapped in the woods during a Phoenix field-training exercise and uncover an offshore drug operation. All of the problems that arised from filming in Vancouver were more than made up for with Smokey-the-Bear lush-green forest adventures like this.

"Deadly Dreams"--This first-rate episode introductes Dr. Zito, easily MacGyver's most worthy adversary. While many like to claim that Zito is a retread of Hannibal Lecter, the similarities are only skin-deep as are the plot similarities with Silence of the Lambs. With all the darkness of the fourth season, this is perhaps the darkest and most over-the-top intense MacGyver episode of this season or any season. The fiendishly clever science and plot mechanics should impress even the series' most clueless critics. Highly recommended.

"Cleo Rocks"--Frequently cited by reviewers as the best MacGyver of all (a feeling I share), this dark and ingenius tale portrays scar-faced archrival Murdoc as the Phantom of the Opera. Complete with Penny Parker gyrating in a leotard, death threats by way of poems, underground dungeons with iron-clad cages and boiling pools of water, and relentless gallows humor winking at us to not take anything too seriously, this episode is one of a kind.....a smorgasbord of MacGyver Magic that offers more fun than is legally allowed in certain Puritanical red states.

"Fraternity of Thieves"--A late Cold War-era espionage thriller where Pete Thornton's son sells out his country and his estranged old man. Strong acting and a welcome opportunity for Pete to grow as a character.

"The Challenge"--The first of the now-infamous Challenger's Club episodes, but also the hands-down best, featuring Cuba Gooding, Jr. in a rock-solid performance that leads the way for one of the best-acted episodes of the series. While the gang-banger motif is very dated, the story remains powerful.

"Gold Rush"--Perhaps the best-produced hour of a weekly TV series that the medium has ever seen, MacGyver accompanies a Soviet delegation to the Arctic Circle to recover millions of dollars of gold lost in a plane crash during World War II. Watching this epic adventure episode today and enjoying all the crafty old-school special-effects, I still can't believe they were able to produce something like this for television back before computerized backgrounds became the standard. Worse yet, I really can't believe that this episode was nominated for an Emmy on visual effects....but didn't win!

"The Invisible Killer"--A brilliantly-executed mystery thriller involving Phoenix employees hiking through the woods with a murderous escaped convict amongst them. The paranoia of the characters is shared by the viewers and the stakes are raised with every plot twist. This is an episode I appreciate more every time I watch it.

"Brainwashed"--My personal pick as MacGyver's second-best episode, Jack Dalton is brainwashed into assassinating an African President. The insanely dark and exciting plot takes so many delicious turns that the viewer is nearly exhausted at the episode's end from having so much fun. Watching this episode consistently reinforces the perception that writer John Sheppard probably single-handedly saved this show from jumping the shark two years earlier than it did.

"Easy Target"--Another smartly-crafted thriller, this time involving terrorists who hijack an electromagnetic pulse as leverage to free their jailed leader. Once again, the thrill ride never stops with this episode.

Not all of the episodes rose to this level of quality, but only one episode qualifies as a total stinker, and that's "Unfinished Business," one of those vapid "flashback" episodes. With Jack Dalton along for the ride, this one had its moments, but the story and eventual resolution was predictable and disappointing.

There's something to satisfy just about every taste in MacGyver: The Complete Fourth Season. Even if you don't own the previous three seasons, season four is a fantastic place to start.

The Auto Industry Wal-Martizes

A fellow progressive diarist at the liberal blog website The Daily Kos gloated last week about the financial peril of General Motors. In his eyes, GM was getting a dose of poetic justice after years of bad management, subpar vehicle quality, and overproduction of gas-guzzlings SUV's. Purchasing Toyotas and Hondas was this guy's delusional way of "sticking it to the man," and he viewed GM's recent round of layoffs as validation of his pseudo-populist revolt.

As is the case with much of the suburban-bred yuppie-esque "new left", the Democratic Party's core constituency of blue-collar workers isn't even on this guy's radar screen. The elimination of 30,000 union jobs at GM was cause for his celebration, even though it represents another stake through the heart of the political party that he claims to have allegiance to. Without the financial and ground support of what's left of organized labor (and particularly the United Auto Workers), the Democratic Party's ability to win elections will be even more impaired that it is now, yet this guy can't make the connection even after reports of 30,000 layoffs makes the headlines, let alone when he's buying his non-union import at the Honda dealership.

The dynamics of the auto industry have become more complicated in the last decade. Japanese automakers have found a cost-effective way to endear themselves to the American marketplace: manufacturing their cars here. As a business strategy, it's incredibly shrewd in every sense. Just as the Japanese business climate was becoming ossified in the early 1990's, the American business climate was becoming increasingly friendly, and no place more than the American South where Toyota, Honda and Nissan have constructed all of their new plants in the last decades. These companies were showered with so much corporate welfare from the states where they located that the automakers themselves have little personal investment cost. And despite the fact that they could get away with paying a lower wage level in this part of the country, the automakers decided to pay average wages only 10-15% less than what UAW workers make. Did they do this out of the goodness of their hearts? Hardly. The high wages are meant to be a disincentive for their conservative Southern workforce to become members of the UAW.

And the disincentive has worked. Workers have consistently voted down efforts to unionize, perfectly content to piggyback on the sacrifices of autoworkers past who raised the industry wage level to what it is. So for the short-term, Toyota and Honda have lower labor costs and considerably lower benefit costs, particularly the uber-generous "retiree health benefits" that GM foolishly signed onto during its 1950s and 1960s heyday which are now acting as an anvil around its neck. This, in turn, allows Toyota and Honda to produce cars of equitable or higher quality and sell them for less money than GM. With all that in mind, it was only a matter of time until Toyota and Honda's Wal-Martesque business strategy caught up to GM....and that time is now here. But what other consequences can we expect from this realignment of the auto industry?

Well, nothing good. The UAW will shrivel to the point of near dissolution, vaporizing a chief ally of the Democratic Party and allowing a progressive insurgency at home to drift even further out of reach; a non-union Southern-based auto industry whose Republican-voting workforce will lack the collective bargaining capacity to quell significant wage concessions that will inevitably occur due to global market forces and the decapitation of the UAW, which has propped them up for years by proxy; and ultimately, the same race-to-the-bottom, union-busting mentality that will eventually turn today's high-paying auto jobs into tomorrow's "jobs Americans won't do," filled by $7-an-hour immigrants with "guest worker" visas. Sound crazy? I suspect not if you're of the founders of Iowa Beef Processing, who engineered the same kind of coup in the meatpacking industry a generation ago.

In my response to the diarist lauding the financial hurt of GM and insisting that everybody should follow his lead and buy Hondas, I asked him why he doesn't just eliminate the middleman and contribute to the Republican Party directly. By directing one's automobile budget to the right-to-work-law South instead of the Rust Belt North, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize which side of the red-blue divide wil be victorious. He fired back with the expected drivel of "cost-efficiency ruling the day" and "not being willing to buy an inferior product to benefit unions." And that's where it struck me. If Daily Kos diarists can't be bothered to put forth a little energy and/or sacrifice to save what's left of the American working class from it's impending genocide, who will? If the instant gratification of saving $200 per year because of the improved fuel-efficiency of a Honda is more important than helping hundreds of thousands of American autoworkers save their jobs and aid progressive Democratic causes, then what future does the "other America" that works with its hands have to live above the poverty line?

There are so many issues where I've convinced myself that if people either thought through their positions better or were sufficiently informed of the likely consequences of their actions, enough of us would respond in kind to correct the situation. But when I look at a turn lane full of Hondas and Toyotas heading for the Wal-Mart SuperCenter, it becomes harder not to accept the inevitably of a bloody defeat for most of the people in my hometown and everywhere else in blue collar America.