Today, domestic politics uses a series of quips and methods to gain people’s attention and support. From repeating simple phrases like “X should be a human right,” or “X isn’t good for the economy,” it can almost be redundant when tuning on any sort of news channel that covers politics. Among these vague statements comes the one rhetorical line that seemingly gets everyone to support something. Whenever we as a country measure how useful a new building project could be, like infrastructure, we always paraphrase its effectiveness for the general public by stressing all support on the phenomena of job creation.
It is common knowledge that any country requires good infrastructure to function economically and must open up jobs for people to work and earn money. Infrastructure bills have been used as far as the Great Depression to put people back into work. Today, we see left wing politicians like Joe Biden boasting about how many jobs have been created once a project for a highway has been started. However, there is one major problem with lots of these plans.
If you’ve ever been on a highway and see workers working there and building parts of the road, you’d immediately realize these jobs are helpful to everyone except the people who actually build the infrastructure. With fumes being breathed in and potentially causing cancer or breathing problems for workers, it’s a one sided job offer to those desperate enough to work in the required place. Sure, the government and private industries aren’t pointing a gun at these people’s heads forcing them to work for them, but do they have many other options? The next opportunity for many of these workers is simply joining the military and staying at some military base in some foreign country half way across the globe (a separate critique for another article.) The government fully acknowledges this, but they choose to put it under the rug given that they pump tons of money into private companies to hire cheap labor for these projects.
With all this said, important action needs to be taken. Instead of allowing the federal government to pay private companies for these projects, they need to be using unions. With unionized work, individuals who work in these environments will have the power to demand better working conditions. More action also needs to be taken as in how we view government policy. We can’t just excuse genuine problems that still persist because some politician made it sound so swell.