Daily Caller – by Scott Morefield
Fox News host Tucker Carlson wasn’t happy with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) response to his program’s inquiry about its attempts to lower the adverse affect wage rate in order to help U.S. companies “bring in more foreign workers.”
With the U.S. losing over 20 million jobs, “getting our people back to work must be our top national goal period,” Carlson contended. “Poverty over time will kill more Americans and destroy more American families than any virus ever could. Yet amazingly some of our country’s leaders are working tonight to make certain Americans remain unemployed.”
The Fox News host referred to a report that Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue “is fighting to lower something called the adverse affect wage rate,” a “special minimum wage that applies only to guest workers in agriculture” that is higher than the “normal U.S. minimum wage” and originally “designed to prevent companies from using foreign workers to drive down American wages.”
“Of course, driving down wages is the dream of most companies,” Carlson said. “Why wouldn’t it be? Now the department of agriculture is working to help companies do that.”
Carlson argued that such a cut, in addition to making it easier “to bring in more foreign workers,” would “allow companies to force pay cuts on any domestic employees they currently have.” He then cited the USDA’s reply to his show’s inquiry about why “lowering wages and bringing in more foreign workers” is “suddenly so important right now.”
They replied:
“Long-standing challenges facing the agriculture industry have been exacerbated by these uncertain times.”
“So there you have it,” said the Daily Caller co-founder. “Long-standing. In other words, they’ve been trying to do this for quite some time. And the crisis is just a perfect time to do it.”
Carlson listed several other things that could be done to secure the U.S. food supply, such as helping “out of work Americans get temporary jobs on farms” or “subsidize their wages for the duration of this disaster,” but contended those “options are being ignored.”
“Right now it turns out, there is no labor shortage in the United States, just the opposite,” said the Fox News host. “We are drowning in available workers. Millions of them. Maybe 20 million … If you want workers, pay them American wages. The rest of us would be happy to buy slightly more expensive lettuce.”