I'm on the east coast this week and walking around at lunch, I spotted these guys.
Way back in prehistoric times, I had a job like this. I loved it and I loved the guys on the road crew. When I saw this, I immediately thought of the border. The whole point of keeping the border open is to put these men out of work by bringing in a labor force who will work under the table.
Why are we doing this?
I know why the elites are doing this. The Republicans want their business donors to have cheap labor and the Democrats want ignorant voters to make up for the votes these racist homophobes cast, but why do we want it?
A real value of social media is the ability to get around the elite gatekeepers in the media and the academy and ask each other these questions. God knows they don't want this discussed. That's why they talk about "opportunities" on the right and "racism" on the left. Screw that. I like walking by fellow Americans working hard like this. A part of me remembers that work and I want to be back with them again. I certainly don't want them out of work.
Build the wall and protect these guys and their families.
8 comments:
... would be what, exactly?
As best I can tell-- and I'm being serious-- it's jobs that are under-paid for the work*, one-directional** and/or illegal. (There is demand for illegal work, even when a lot are 'self employed' so to speak.)
The most charitable thing I can come up with for why folks do this is the same impulse that causes folks to give a drunk a twenty, instead of a hamburger, or that makes parents be friends with their kids instead of being parents. (mom is my friend, but that's only after she was done being my mom)
Conflating "nice" with "good" or "kind."
*that is, the same job with higher pay does not have problems filling the slot
** the employer has no obligations to the employee, but the employee has obligations to the employer; example from H1Bs, the pay is fine for the work, but not for the environment, and that's before actually illegal abuses come up (can be patched by making it so H1Bs aren't tied to an employer, just a job)
These aren't the jobs people are talking about. Construction jobs, especially road work jobs, are very much in demand. They pay well and have decent security.
Every winter the ski resorts in Colorado, Utah, and most other western states are short staffed. Kids no longer want to take a semester off to be a ski bum. So the resorts import seasonal workers. Every year, Mar-a-Lago faces the same shortage and also imports foreign workers. The National Parks also import kids from all over the world to work seasonally because they can't get enough staff.
Peach growers in Georgia claim they can find enough seasonal workers to harvest their crop. They tired hiring locals and they couldn't/wouldn't do the work, even after raising pay considerably. My local contractors claim they can't find enough strong backs, so they hire illegal day laborers. Our local meat processing plants hire immigrants because, once again, they claim they can't keep domestic workers. The work is hard, conducted under difficult and dangerous conditions, and few Americans are interested in it.
When the economy is good there is just too much work for those citizens able to do it. And many industries only need seasonal work. Something not prefered by Americans if they have the choice to do something else.
The answer to the labor shortage is to raise wages for Americans, not to bring foreigners to steal our patrimony.
(White House press briefing sometime in the future) The Labor Department has conducted a thorough and extensive analysis of our employment statistics and workforce availability and has come to the inescapable conclusion that our only option is to leave the border completely undefended and allow everyone and anyone to rush into the country.
I don't know peaches, but I do know apples, cherries and other hand-harvest fruits or veggies in Washington.
A lot of those guys claim they can't find enough legal workers, too; their neighbors say they're full of it. The orchards right next door weren't having trouble finding people, because they didn't insist on pretending that "unskilled labor" like harvesting actually means that you can grab a random guy off the street and have him picking like a 20 year veteran, they don't do any on-the-job training. (Similar things can be seen in fast food-- the places that don't do more than a 15 minute intro have trouble keeping people.)
Additional considerations are that the places not having issues will do stuff like have a bus or van so the pickers don't have to drive all the way out (lowering their costs, allowing those without vehicles to be hired) or provide a bunk-house/picker-cabin/RV parking, local laws allowing.
Resorts likewise have a lot of issues when they treat workers like utilities, rather than a valuable resource that needs to be cultivated. Treat people like crud, and they will leave. The classic "you only work two days this week, it's the closing shift on Tuesday (ending 11 or 12pm) and the opening shift (starting 6AM) on Wednesday" type situations are a good example.
Another part of the issue is that legal workers cost a lot more than illegal ones, even if you hand them both the same pile of cash-- insurance, taxes, etc are expensive. The rule of thumb I've been told for Washington state is that you estimate double whatever you are paying them for the "cost" of a worker. (Folks in other states have estimated only 1/2 or 3/4.)
We lost a really good ranch-hand to being a picker. Even though his morals wouldn't allow him to work under the table(they usually get more in cash that way), he could still make enough by picking that it out-weighed a steady paycheck.
In the case of the fruit pickers in Georgia, they raised the wages. Perhaps not enough. But if those wages go up too much, so does the cost of the fruit you buy at the store. Cheap food relies on imports and cheap farm hands.
One big change since I (and KT) were kids, is the unwillingness of high school kids to do manual labor. My aunt sorted raisins during summer in high school. Our classmates, picked fruit out of people's yards in Rancho Santa Fe to sell at roadside stands. Try to find a high schooler to mow a lawn or shovel snow off of a walk. It is not easy. Significantly fewer high schoolers are willing to do this kind of manual labor for summer cash. That is a whole group of low paid labor that has been removed from the market.
Again, wages aren't the only thing; there's also reducing costs for the workers-- a picker bus, or a place to park and camp, reduces the amount they have to spend a lot more than it increases what the orchard has to spend. Training your workers, especially if you can get them well trained and they show up every year, greatly increases your output.
It's basically a yearly fill-the-inches news report to have some kid from the news office go out to spend a day picking next to the orchard guys after a ten-minute "this is how you do it" intro, and invariably they manage like one basket while the guys who do this for a living get five or six. The first day is, incidentally, when most of the new guys quit...for the places that don't do actual training. (after payday for the places that actively train their guys)
One big change since I (and KT) were kids, is the unwillingness of high school kids to do manual labor.
Most of what I grew up doing is now illegal, unless you're working on a farm your parents own more than half of.
And the labor laws for teens are ludicrous.
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