Loaded terminology
The Washington Post recently ran an article concerning our current (or former?) Washington, D.C. lobbyist. Our lobbyist, stated the article, “has succeeded in convincing the Republicans in Congress to support the commonwealth’s right to pay low wages and keep lax immigration and labor laws.”
Notice that there is something very troubling about this Washington Post statement. The terminology is slanted, loaded and profoundly biased. In legal parlance, the Washington Post is “leading” the reader in the court of American public opinion–and we must strenuously object.
The part about “the right to pay low wages” is extremely misleading. It implies that the CNMI government and private sector uniformly pays low wages to all employees. By implication, it is almost as if every single CNMI employee–resident or nonresident–is suffering from government-enforced low pay. It is almost as if the Washington Post were suggesting that it would be illegal for any CNMI employee to be highly compensated.
In reality, some of our nonresident workers are very well paid. In the CNMI’s largest garment factory, there are professional Filipino managers and accountants who make more than $30,000 a year. That’s more than a million Philippine Pesos in annual compensation!
Of course, we can probably be sure that the liberal elitists at the Washington Post do not think very much of a $30,000 annual salary. When liberal American journalists decry the CNMI’s “low pay,” they are invariably immersing themselves in good, old-fashioned American ethnocentrism. When they say “pay low wages,” they mean it in relation to the world’s sole remaining superpower: to the United States of America, the richest nation on earth.
America’s liberal journalists don’t care that $3.05 an hour is considerably higher than most of the world’s government-mandated minimum wage. They don’t care that it is higher than the minimum wages in most of Asia, Africa, and Central and South America.
The liberals don’t care about the fact that, even in the mainland United States, national minimum wage policy cannot accurately reflect local economic conditions. As the November edition of Reason Magazine makes clear, $20,000 in New York city, which represents the combined earnings of a couple at the federal minimum wage, amounts to $10,597 in Los Angeles (California) and $9,530 in Houston (Texas). In other words, due to the different cost of living conditions in different US cities, the federal minimum wage might be either adequate or inadequate in terms of defraying living expenses, which means that local policy-makers should be allowed to set policy according to their particular circumstances.
Ideally, the Washington Post article should have instead read as follows: “[The CNMI lobbyist] has succeeded in convincing the Republicans in Congress to support the commonwealth’s right to pay market-based wages and tailor their immigration and labor laws to their own unique needs.” That would have been a fair statement to make.
Strictly a personal view. Charles Reyes Jr. is a regular columnist of Saipan Tribune. Mr. Reyes may be reached at charlesraves@hotmail.com
