Tag Archive for: american jobs

Unanimous SCOTUS Ruling Sets Back the White-Collar Rainbow Revolution

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In a 9-0 decision in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services authored by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, justices ruled that employers cannot discriminate against a heterosexual woman and unelected judges cannot insert intersectionality into the law. A unanimous Supreme Court opinion rarely brings good news, but justices recently issued a ruling that set back judicial activism, stopped the Left’s tactic of promoting the social revolution at your expense, and exposed the inner workings of the white-collar rainbow revolution.

The plaintiff, Marlean Ames, dedicated her life to eliminating the prison rape of minors. In 2004, she started working for the Ohio Department of Youth — which oversees the state’s incarcerated juvenile population — and in 2014, Ames got promoted to become administrator of PREA: the Prison Rape Elimination Act. “In 2017, Ames was assigned a new supervisor, Ginine Trim, who is gay,” noted the Sixth Circuit’s opinion. Trim’s December 2018 performance evaluation shows Ames met competencies in 10 categories and exceeded in one. But somehow, just four months later, qualified-to-overqualified no longer sufficed.

In April 2019, Ames applied to become Bureau Chief of Quality. After the interview, “Trim congratulated Ames on 30 years of public service, but also suggested that Ames retire,” noted the Sixth Circuit. Activists aim to remake their departments through attrition: Let the old lions emit a final, toothless roar into the sunset while replacing them with young social justice warriors who will bend the arc of history toward radicalism. The department hired “Alexander Stojsavljevic, a 25-year-old gay man, for the position of PREA Administrator. … Later, in December 2019, the Department chose Yolanda Frierson, a gay woman, as its Bureau Chief of Quality.” Frierson had not originally applied for the position and did not have a college degree; Stojsavljevic had only been on the job a few years.

They gave Ames the option of taking her old job as executive secretary, cutting her salary from $47.22 an hour to $28.40. Ames accepted the job. She sued but lost at the district and appellate level. The appeals court admitted, “Ames is right that the Department has offered different reasons for her demotion at different times,” settling on the story that “her position was at-will and that it could remove her at any time without cause.”

Although the facts seem squarely on Ames’s side, the court sided against her, because she did not fulfill the “background circumstances” rule: a legal standard the court invented stating that members of a “majority group” had to meet a higher standard to prove discrimination. Justices struck down that legal fiction. “The Sixth Circuit has implemented a rule that requires certain Title VII plaintiffs — those who are members of majority groups — to satisfy a heightened evidentiary standard in order to carry their burden under the first step of the McDonnell Douglas framework. We conclude that Title VII does not impose such a heightened standard on majority-group plaintiffs,” wrote Justice Jackson. The decision does not settle the underlying issue: In a return to the Roberts court’s narrow decisions, it merely remands the case with instructions to use the prima facie legal standard.

The welcome ruling reinstates the notion behind the deeply American principle of equal justice under law, itself drawn from the biblical injunction that judges ought not be a respecter of persons. This furthers President Donald Trump’s second-term commitment to undoing discrimination against the nation’s majority in the name of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). To its credit, the Roberts court has shown leadership here, too.

As important as the facts of the case are its setting. Ohio, long the bellwether of American politics, rejects DEI. When the U.K.’s Guardian started a letter-writing campaign for Europeans to pressure Ohioans into voting for Democrat John Kerry over George W. Bush, values voters in rural, western Ohio turned out to support a state constitutional amendment barring the courts from redefining the institution of marriage (or so they thought).

Today, Ohio is a blood-red state. President Donald Trump, perhaps aided by native son Vice President J.D. Vance, won the state by 11 points in 2024; but he also won by eight points in 2020, snapping the state’s reputation for picking a winner in every presidential race. Every statewide office is held by a Republican; it has not voted for a Democrat for president since 2012. Other than the hapless administration of Ted Strickland, shortly after incumbent Republican Bob Taft entered a “no contest” plea to four misdemeanor ethics violations, no Democrat has won a governor’s race since 1986.

Yet those governors have not delivered. Mike DeWine — a former lieutenant governor, U.S. senator, state attorney general, and now governor — vetoed the state SAFE Act, protecting minors from potentially sterilizing transgender injections and surgeries. While he issued an executive order on the topic, he promptly watered down even those temporary provisions. The Republican-controlled state legislature promptly overrode his veto, codifying robust protections for children — just as Ames tried to do throughout her career.

Ohioans have expressed their will for three decades at the ballot box. Meanwhile, unelected bureaucrats advance their radicalism through the HR department by adopting a prescription offered by Saul Alinsky in “Rules for Radicals:”

“From the moment the organizer enters a community he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army. Until he has developed that mass power base, he confronts no major issues. He has nothing with which to confront anything. Until he has those means and power instruments, his ‘tactics’ are very different from power tactics. Therefore, every move revolves around one central point: how many recruits will this bring into the organization, whether by means of local organizations, churches, service groups, labor unions, comer gangs, or as individuals. The only issue is, how will this increase the strength of the organization. If by losing in a certain action he can get more members than by winning, then victory lies in losing and he will lose. Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together. Power is the reason for being of organizations.”

Alinksy even likened these left-wing fiefdoms to a church:

“When people agree on certain religious ideas and want the power to propagate their faith, they organize and call it a church. When people agree on certain political ideas and want the power to put them into practice, they organize and call it a political party. The same reason holds across the board. Power and organization are one and the same.”

One hears echoes of this in teachers union president Becky Pringle when she called on her delegates to “build our power” by enrolling everyone “in our righteous cause.” From teachers, to librarians, to HR departments, to district court judges handing down national injunctions, leftists see the workplace as a political battlefield — or, if you believe Alinsky, the mission field to spread a false religion. The Supreme Court decision comes as welcome relief.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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Decades Of Data Stands Behind Trump’s Claims About Illegal Immigration And ‘Black Jobs,’ Experts Say

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Corporate media outlets recently locked arms to dispel Donald Trump’s assertion that illegal immigration hurts “black jobs,” yet experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the former president is right about the problem being all too real.

Trump said during a Q&A with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) that “coming from the border are millions and millions of people that happen to be taking black jobs,” according to Politico, with the remarks igniting a bevy of critiques from corporate media outlets, with one going as far to say that “black jobs” don’t exist and others leaning on experts to characterize the assertion as “not true.” However, the reality is that immigration has a depressive effect on wages and employment, with experts pointing out how illegal immigration has disproportionately affected industries and localities where black Americans frequently work.

Immigration has been a driver of black unemployment for “over 200 years,” Andre Barnes, Historically Black Colleges and Universities engagement director at NumbersUSA, told the DCNF.

“During the First World War there was a halt to immigration, and all of a sudden, factories in the North could not get enough people to work, so where did they go for their labor supply? Black Americans.” Barnes told the DCNF. “We had the 1924 Immigration Act, and it reduced immigration from 700,000 to less than 200,000 per year, and the level stayed at less than 200,000 per year for over four years. And what did we see during that time period? You saw an increase in black employment. We saw an increase in black economic power.”

In response to those who doubt immigration’s effects on black employment, Barnes gave the example of a Smithfield Foods slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina, which lost 1,500 immigrant workers after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid, according to The New York Times in 2008. After the raids, the factory saw its proportion of black workers go from 20% to 60%.

“When we’re talking about black jobs, we’re talking about these situations here,” Barnes said. “We’re talking about the meat packing jobs that are disappearing between the 90s and the early 2010s that went from majority black to majority Hispanic. That’s what people need to talk about when they’re talking about black jobs.”

In fiscal year 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had over 2 million encounters at the southern border, according to CBP data. Since President Joe Biden took office, there have been 1.7 million known “gotaways” that evaded border patrol, according to the House Committee on Homeland Security.

Most illegal immigrants originate from Mexico, according to Pew Research data in July. Those illegal immigrants make up large shares of multiple low-skill sectors, including agriculture, construction and manufacturing, according to Pew Research in 2020.

E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF that since black workers are a large part of the low-skill labor force, the arrival of mostly low-skill immigrant workers means black Americans face pressure on their wages and employment.

“When President Trump says illegals are taking away black jobs, I don’t see any [other] way to interpret that than they are competing with black Americans who have those jobs,” Antoni said. “And because of the increased competition, they are losing those jobs. A disproportionate amount of black people have unskilled jobs, it has nothing to do with skin color.”

Immigration depresses wages and employment, particularly in the black community, due to the increase in labor supply, according to a 2010 study from the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights. It found that since the black community is “disproportionately employed in the low-skill labor market,” the effects of immigration affect black Americans more than other groups.

Gordon Hanson, urban policy professor at Harvard University and co-author on a 2006 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study on immigration and black employment, told the DCNF that while immigration affects labor markets, we’ve learned more since 2006 on its effects to certain demographics and what industries and places in America are most vulnerable.

“We’ve learned that immigration’s impact on labor markets depends much more on your occupation and where you live than on your demographic characteristics, such as your race or ethnicity,” Hanson told the DCNF. “If there are groups in the labor market, be it workers who are black, Hispanic, or others, who live in places where the local economy has declined or who have education or experience levels that leave them exposed to adverse events in the broader economy (such as globalization or technological change), then these groups are likely to be affected disproportionately by any such negative changes. But the impacts on these workers aren’t about their race or ethnicity. They are about the segment of the labor market that these workers happen to occupy.”

When the amount of workers increased by 10% from immigration, wages for black workers decreased by 4%, employment by 3.5% and black incarceration increased by 0.8%, according to the NBER in 2006. For white men, there was a 4.1% decrease in wages, but only a 1.6% decrease in employment and a 0.1% increase in white incarceration.

The Biden administration began in June to restrict new asylum requests at the southern border if the daily average over a week exceeds 2,500. However, jobs growth touted by the administration highly depends on immigrant labor, as foreign-born workers got drastically more jobs overall than native born Americans.

“Illegal immigration disproportionately affects black workers, including other minority workers, and we need to do everything to protect them from their jobs from being taken away,” Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the DCNF, saying that around 1.1 million jobs went to foreign-born workers as native-born Americans saw a 943,000 job decrease over the past year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

“Black unemployment continues to be higher than when President Trump was in office, ” Leavitt said. “And real wages for black Americans are lower under Biden-Harris. That is why President Trump has promised the largest deportation operation in American history since President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kamala Harris will give amnesty and citizenship to all 15 million illegal aliens and make permanent the assault on black American jobs.”

AUTHOR

Wallace White

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Wall Street Is Panicking That Trump’s Policies Could Make The Economy Work For Average Americans

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Wall Street is panicking that former President Donald Trump’s populist economic policies will hurt growth in a second term, but experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that it’s average Americans who stand to benefit.

Wall Street traders are increasingly betting that Trump will win the presidency following President Joe Biden’s dismal debate performance at the end of June and are worried that the former president’s immigration and trade policies will hurt topline economic growth, according to Politico. While Trump’s economic policies might harm the results of headline economic reports, they channel benefits to average American workers who are dealing with the effects of a massive surge of illegal immigration and unfavorable trade policies, according to experts who spoke to the DCNF.

Trump has campaigned and governed on key populist policies that prioritize trade protectionism and American manufacturing. This goes hand in hand with Trump’s immigration policy plans for his potential next term, as he pledged to implement the largest domestic mass deportation during an Iowa campaign speech in December.

“What the Biden administration has done is they have just essentially stopped enforcing border laws, and they parole these illegal immigrants into our country,” Michael Faulkender, chief economist at the America First Policy Institute, told the DCNF. “They give them work visas. And this is why people on the left are saying that Trump’s policies would cause inflation. It’s because if we deport all of those workers, then somehow we wouldn’t have enough workers to do all the work that’s currently being done.”

In the last year, the number of employed foreign-born workers rose by over 600,000 to nearly 31 million, while the number of employed native-born Americans dropped by nearly 300,000. The disparity indicates that benefits under Biden are going to foreign-born workers rather than native-born Americans.

“The average American is no longer going to have to compete against the incredibly low-wage labor that is driving down the standard of living,” E.J. Antoni, a public finance economist and Richard F. Aster fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF about the effect of Trump’s immigration policy in a second term. “In other words, you will increasingly see businesses pay living wages to their employees.”

“This was actually a key reason why a lot of blue-collar jobs saw such rapid wage growth during the first Trump term,” Antoni told the DCNF. “It was because they really helped stem the tide of illegal immigration that existed before Trump. As less of that illegal labor came across the border, it helped buoy the labor market, at least for Americans.”

A key feature of Trump’s economic policy in his first term that remains a part of his planned agenda for a second is trade protectionism, which involves setting tariffs on imports, particularly from foreign competitors like China, and promoting American manufacturing.

“Take a look at the significant application of tariffs that President Trump did during his first term,” Faulkender told the DCNF. “We had sub 2% inflation during his entire presidency. So if applying tariffs at the scale President Trump has talked about were to be as inflationary as the Democrats or demagoguing people into believing, where was the inflation during President Trump’s presidency?”

Peter Earle, senior economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, disagrees with the effectiveness of tariffs, arguing that these trade policies ultimately burden American business owners and consumers by raising costs through inflation.

“Because disinflation is underway, for now, it seems less likely that the concern is higher rates of inflation in coming years owing to monetary policy,” Earle told the DCNF. “It’s more likely that worries about Trump’s promised tariffs are causing higher yields on longer-term bonds. Tariffs increase the costs of imported goods, and if they are put on a wide variety of goods can give rise in the overall price level of goods and services.”

“To be sure, his recent call for 60% tariffs would be devastating to world trade, even beyond the U.S. and China. When costs to businesses rise, such as those for inputs which are imported, consumer prices will rise,” Earle told the DCNF.

Other economists, like Faulkender, say that Trump’s economic and trade policies actually benefit Americans across the board.

“The Trump era was very good for average Americans, for working-class Americans, and it was good for investors,” Faulkender told the DCNF. “If you look at the stock market’s performance during the Trump administration, it did exceptionally well. I really just dispute this analysis, coming from the left, that suggests that the economy is this zero-sum game and that benefiting workers is bad for investors. With the right set of policies, we can improve outcomes for investors and workers alike. That was the record under President Trump, and that’s what I expect the second term to go back to.”

AUTHOR

REBEKA ZELJKO

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.