Workers worked over

Article 11-23-09

Enterprise doesn't pay in Massachusetts

by Michael Graham
DNN Staff - EXCLUSIVE!
Monday, Nov. 23, 2009

According to my dad, when I was just 10 years old and he was trying to get me to help with some household chore, I (allegedly) told him: “Father, I was not put on this earth for manual labor.”

Now I’m not sure I trust my father’s recollections, but if it’s true all I can say is that I came to the right place. Massachusetts is a great place to live - unless you have to work for a living.

Did you read the Herald story about state senators proposing “Prius-only” parking zones on Massachusetts streets? Advocates of “green parking” are obsessed with climate-change kookery (they’re also getting it wrong - more Hummers circling the block looking for parking is hardly eco-friendly).

But my first thought wasn’t about global warming, it was about local workers. You know who’s not parking their hybrids outside trendy coffee joints? People with real jobs. Plumbers, contractors, delivery guys, electricians. I talked to one self-described “green nut” who is a personal trainer and carries a small gym’s worth of equipment to every gig. “I need a big truck to do my job.”

A “job,” did you say? As in “the private sector”? Gee, I thought Gov. Deval Patrick had gotten rid of all those by now.

Sorry, but this is Massachusetts. Self-righteous, Prius-driving government bureaucrats in the front. Hard-working, tax-producing citizens in the back. Way back.

The green-parking issue is largely symbolic. But it is also symptomatic of the backhanded treatment blue-collar workers get from the current residents of Beacon Hill. When a carpenter is forced to park his Tahoe down the block in deference to the moral superiority of some Cambridge tree-hugger’s hybrid, it’s annoying. But when that carpenter is sitting at home because illegal immigrants are doing a job he would otherwise have, that’s absolutely outrageous.

And yet in the middle of this recession, Patrick is trying to make it easier for the illegal immigrant to work and tougher for the working American to compete.

Advocating driver’s licenses and taxpayer-subsidized college tuition for illegal immigrants would be a lousy deal for working Bay Staters any time. But it’s almost a form of political abuse for Patrick to do it at a time when our unemployment is almost 10 percent, manufacturing jobs are fleeing the state and he’s already hit blue-collar families with $1 billion in higher sales and other taxes.

Does Patrick realize who’s paying his new double-tax on beer? His pals in the pate-and-pinot crowd don’t feel it. But working guys who are out scrounging work to feed their families get it right in the wallet. Again.

Patrick knows that the issues of driver’s licenses and tuition breaks for illegals “drive everyone’s blood pressure up,” as he put it. He says we should look past those two items and at his administration’s “New Americans Agenda” as a whole.

Well I have. It involves massive government spending that would reward people for breaking the rules, coming to our state illegally and taking jobs from legal residents who desperately need them. If driver’s licenses and tuition drive up our blood pressure, the details of this government giveaway would put most Massachusetts wage earners in the ICU.

It’s easy for our liberal elites to preen and posture on the issue of illegal immigration. The only real life encounters they have with it are when they’re paying their landscapers - in cash, of course.

Regular working guys don’t have the luxury of being PC. While Massachusetts pols are debating preferred parking, these guys are out trying to make the car payment.