Some years ago, I saw a comedian mock the idea that immigrants were a threat to American jobs by joking that he had always wanted to be an underpaid farm laborer and can't make that dream work because the illegal immigrants took all those jobs.
In America, it used to be common for young men in high school and college to do construction work during the summer. Now, it's mostly immigrants.
When I was still a military wife, they changed the fitness test to be less stringent for younger members because they were having so much trouble getting qualified recruits. It really pissed my husband off because they didn't make his test any easier. He was in his thirties and was told "You've been working out for years. You are in the best shape of your life."
Developed countries are turning into nations of couch potatoes who turn their noses up at hard physical labor and probably couldn't do it if they wanted to. Or could but it would be extremely hard on them and there would be additional personal costs akin to training for a marathon.
> In America, it used to be common for young men in high school and college to do construction work during the summer. Now, it's mostly immigrants.
Because college or college-bound adults are, if they are motivated enough to work in the first place, mostly focussed on work that provides a competitive advantage in college admissions and post-college careers, which trade labor mostly isn't.
And because young people are less physically fit than they used to be, so they don't have the muscle and stamina required by such jobs.
But the reasons why are almost irrelevant. The pertinent detail is that employers can't fill these jobs without immigrant labor. Most Americans don't want them at any pay rate.
Not sure how attacking "young people" as weak solves anything. It's simply what the job demands.
If you are working in construction chances are you are stronger than someone sitting at a desk. Put the person sitting at the desk in the construction job for a month and I bet they build some muscle.
Same as sitting the construction worker at a desk 8 hrs a day will make them physically weaker.
This is the reason for the boom in gym membership in the last ~15 years.
I'm not attacking young people as weak. It's a known trend, a trend that even the federal government implicitly acknowledged by lowering fitness standards for younger military members but not older members.
Gym membership may be up because we've lost a lot of other avenues for getting some exercise. Lifestyles have changed in recent decades. Kids are much more likely to play video games instead of playing sports with neighbor kids out in the yard or street.
I'm not against vide games. My kids always played a lot of them. But I also made sure they had opportunities to get some physical exercise, if only so my insomniac oldest child would sleep some and he couldn't sleep if he didn't get some physical activity in on a daily basis.
Being a solider is dangerous.
Being a nurse is dangerous.
The real problem isn't just wages - it is also that our society decided some jobs are for people not bright enough to get into university so stigma hollowed the pride of the working class and that is what really cheapened and demoralized their labour.
> It does not need to be most Americans and a lot of office workers would prefer to be farmers if the wage were correct.
Most everyone would prefer to be farmers (= farm owners = capitalist of at least the petit bourgeoisie, if not actually the haut bourgeoisie) instead of wage laborers.
But, no, I don't think that many office workers would prefer to be manual laborers, whether farm laborers or otherwise. Sure, with enough of a wage premium they might be lured away. But there are limits to the ability to pay higher real wages to farm labor, because food cost is a major basic expense to start with so higher nominal wages for farm labor necessarily (because while there is lots of aggregate profit in food, there's not lots of proportion of profit, which is where the room for absorbing wage increases without price impact comes from) means higher price index, which reduces real wages for everyone, including the farm laborers.
Some people do white collar work because they aren't physically capable of doing hard physical labor.
That includes me.
One thing missing from a lot of conversations is the detail that modern medicine is good at keeping you alive after a serious medical crisis. It's not so talented at restoring you to full function. The result is a lot of disabled people and that fact rarely enters the conversation about labor trends.
I suspect another element is that we have more pollution and what not impairing the functioning of pretty much everyone, but saying that risks being accused of being a conspiracy theory nutter. But it's been on my mind a lot here lately because pollution is down across the globe, traffic is down in my small town and my energy is -- "coincidentally" -- up and I'm getting more done than usual here lately, in spite of my underlying condition being an incurable genetic disorder.
I don't claim I know what to do - but I don't like us jumping straight to the answer that this would not work - it is like the meme "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".
This is where an imaginative government or community runs experiments - there are people like Elon Musk's brother - have they not been thinking about this?
If we have a large number of people turning their hand to something new - the solution space will open up and we might see new business models in production and distribution.
The political is part of this - there are now large numbers of angry young people wearing masks in the cities.
For growth technology firms that is true - I remember his debate with Eric Schmidt - he was really arguing being a technology firm should be a temporary award contingent on how the firm behaves instead of a title. Technologies mature into infrastructure and stop being thought of as technologies.
This is part of his thesis that technology companies should be monopoly companies - and that the regulator should treat companies like Google as monopolies but the companies producing new value should be classified as different and given a honeymoon period.
His pointing at a technology rust belt is evocative evidence for the position.
I'm not saying they should not - I'm saying they have been slowly becoming infrastructure and a regulator should delay antitrust if they are building up more infrastructure for future technology - Rodney Brooks has been saying there needs to be improvements in the road networks for self driving to be sped up.
It would have to be quite a downturn to be a real threat. They would have to have revenue drop by more than their large profit margin and their access to debt markets.
Not a chance. When you're paying a couple bucks a pound for fresh ______, it didn't take 15 minutes of a migrant worker's time to plant/pick/care/pack that pound.
My guess is that the migrant worker proportion of retail cost is <10%. Quadrupling their income would increase retail cost by 30%.
edit:
> What would happen to consumer food costs if farm wages rose and the extra costs were passed on to consumers? The average earnings of field workers were $9.78 an hour in 2008, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture survey of farm employers, and a 40 percent increase would raise them to $13.69 an hour. If this wage increase were passed on to consumers, the 10 cent farm labor cost of a $1 pound of apples would rise to 14 cents, and the retail price would only rise to $1.04.
A long time ago, I read that you could double the wages of farm laborers and it would add like two cents or four cents to the cost of a box of breakfast cereal.
Again such a naive viewpoint, in an economy everything is interconnected. If the prices of groceries rise, there are knock-on effects on everything. Yep, EVERYTHING From healthcare to housing, to transport, and whatnot will rise many-x and this bravado will evaporate in the time you took to read this post.
At 20 USD/hour I think you would be able to fill these jobs.
But if you want to make that salary picking fruit, then we'll have to pay more for it -- or you'll need to have some automation to increase productivity.
I doubt we'll want to pay more, consumers would rather buy imports instead.
Migrant labor was $20-25/hour over a decade ago in parts of the rural US where I knew the rough market rate. You are greatly underestimating what a market clearing wage that would entice people to live out there looks like.
The $100+k oil companies are required to pay to entice Americans to work in their remote oil fields is much closer to the reality.
The reality is, the proportion of your fresh fruit cost that is migrant labour isn't very much. If that cost only were passed on, we wouldn't see much of a difference in price.
Kinda how like Walmart could double the wage of its retail employees by increasing its prices by 6%.
Historically, Walmart thrived in relatively small town, rural areas. When I was homeless in downtown San Diego, I had to take a bus elsewhere to occasionally visit the Walmart. There aren't any in the downtown area. They don't typically do well in the big city.
You presume people have those options. You presume they can readily and conveniently get to them in a way that makes financial and logistical sense.
In my small town, people who hate Walmart and are happy to drive an hour to a bigger city once a month to "visit the city" and do some of their shopping grudgingly shop at Walmart because it's the only source for a lot of things, even if you are happy to pay more money just to spite Walmart.
People from even smaller towns around us take the bus to shop here (or drive here), mostly at the Walmart. My small town is a regional shopping hub and has shopping and eateries more like a city several times larger because of it. We still can't reasonably get away from shopping at Walmart.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a Walmart fan and wouldn't have moved here if there was no Walmart. I'm just saying I've spoken with a local who hates Walmart and grudgingly does some of their shopping there anyway because they can't always find reasonable alternatives, try though they might.
Historically Walmart drove out all the other shopping in small towns that was barly hanging on as the place locals went when they needed something fast. Until Walmart opened in my town we planned monthly trips to the city an hour away for most of what we needed. The local shops had some things, but the high prices and poor selection meant we couldn't afford to shop local often.
Note that Walmart of then is not the Walmart of today. They used to have quality products at a good price.
'cept Walmart has been raising its corporate minimum wage. Then there's Costco that has always paid a wage about the prevailing for retail. No shortage of price-conscious customers at either.
Everyone was raising wages, so everyone’s prices also went up, and Walmart still likely has the best cheap:convenient ratio. Point is Walmart can’t choose to raise everyone’s wages 6%, unless everyone else does too, because the whole reason people go to Walmart is it’s the cheapest.
Costco targets people with more disposable income, so not exactly a comparable market.
What people want to do work that damaged their body, is subject to short term changes in demand due to weather and has high income instability, and leads to no future growth?
$20/hour for temporary backbreaking work in exchange for not being near friends or family, having to move constantly, having to live in a rural area (not what most people want), having no upward income mobility.
The people that do it, do it because they have no better option. Not because they want to.
The army has relatively low wages (but good benefits, which have been quietly eroding for decades), separates you from family on a routine basis and puts you in harm's way where people may be literally trying to kill you. They advertise it as "an adventure."
Some people join the army because they actively desire to get away from their family. Not everyone has some loving, cherished family situation.
Young people seem happy to be separated from their family for a few months to backpack across Europe or go play digital nomad.
During WW2, we promoted Victory Gardens and lots of people got on board.
I have tried to suggest that we should be checking our county extension office for info and trying to foster Victory Gardens in the face of the pandemic. We shouldn't wait until people are actually going hungry. But I'm a big fat nobody and I don't have much pull, so it's not exactly catching on like wildfire.
Most people work because they must. Even rich people have to do at least some work to effectively manage their wealth or it will run out. They just typically have more pleasant working conditions, but it's sort of a myth that rich people don't have to work.
They are less compelled to work at any particular thing right this minute so they can still eat next week, but when rich people do nothing at all but spend money, it eventually runs out.
(This may not be true for billionaires, but a million isn't worth what it used to be. This is generally true for most people, even people with a fair amount of wealth.)
I've been dirt poor for years. I'm a freelance writer by trade. I like writing. I've always wanted to be a writer. I hate being poor, of course.
I've been told for years to "go get a real job." I'm medically handicapped. For that and other reasons I can't readily "just go get a real job."
The fact that you hate the working conditions and pay doesn't mean you inherently hate the work. There are people who garden as a relaxing and enjoyable hobby.
The assumption that all poorly paid people hate their work and all well paid people enjoy their work sounds like classist prejudice to me.
I knew someone (a programmer, in fact) who made good money, got fed up with the job and they we're told by someone close to them "You can't just up and quit. A job at Home Depot wouldn't even cover your car payment."
I've also seen stuff on the internet from people who are miserable, desperately want to change jobs and feel stuck because they make good money and can't readily walk away from their good income. They have family to support or college loans to pay or whatever.
What you find is that even people who are overall happy will bitch about their job or whatever, if only because it's a socially acceptable bonding ritual. Bragging to the miserable people around you about how everything in your life works wonderfully well all the time is a good way to get everyone to hate you.
There are real quality of life issues for low paid work, farm labor work, etc. But there are farm laborers who live in Mexico and work the fields in the US because they like living in Mexico, they have no desire to move to America and it pays ten times better than jobs in their town.
Not all of these people feel exploited or victimized. Exploitation isn't a good thing in any job, but it's not somehow the inherently part of doing physical labor and inherently not part of the picture for jobs with better public perception.
Everybody has days when you just want to be lazy. A job won't give into that feeling.
Every job has something you don't want to do. Either it is tedious and boring, or it is hard in same way. Many of those things could be ignored (my windows at home are dirty...) in your personal life but the job forces you to do them.
The above factors means even if you love your job there are things to complain about.
I've done physical work and it's fun at first, and I do like the physicality of it, but it gets boring fast and that I object to. After getting boring it gets soul destroyingly dull. I mean, working eg. in a warehouse can make people hollow. OK, some do like it, but many I knew didn't. Most tolerated it because they had no choice.
It's a very good thing for a period, as a part of growing up, but as a career, or for long periods. It's not good.
There will be plenty in the fields who would have had a career as a scientist, technician, engineer, who the world is now deprived of that because they are forced financially to work in a field (in the literal sense).
That basically seems to be New Zealand's (and Australia's?) mode of operation. Give the rich countries' young adults fresh out of school a work&travel visa for a year and extend it for a few months with sufficient farm work. They have fun doing new and interesting things and return to their countries with a good impression of yours. Of course that won't work if every place tries it though. I wonder how they're faring right now.
I live in a small town with high unemployment and an excess of homeless people. I have fantasies of putting together an "irregular jobs/work" program to help connect locals with remote work, gig work, seasonal work, etc.
My theory is that if you can find some way to connect people to "irregular jobs" who don't want (or can't reasonably do) "regular jobs," a lot of people would be willing to work who aren't working currently.
When I and my sons were homeless, we tried to figure out how to find something like day labor jobs and we were mystified. I asked around on the internet and got a smidgen of feedback, but we never figured it out.
I feel like something went wrong somewhere along the way and America no longer knows how to help people find work of that sort anymore. But maybe some of our social ills would improve if we found a solution to that piece of it.
> Some years ago, I saw a comedian mock the idea that immigrants were a threat to American jobs by joking that he had always wanted to be an underpaid farm laborer
Oh, I heard that too, years and years ago and always wondered who it was. Somehow the internet has delivered!
I'm with you. I'm optimistic that if the market can set a fair price there's plenty of work. As someone from maybe a generation after you I'd have been happy to work in the manual labor sector if it paid better than my job at Staples but alas it paid far worse.
In America, it used to be common for young men in high school and college to do construction work during the summer. Now, it's mostly immigrants.
When I was still a military wife, they changed the fitness test to be less stringent for younger members because they were having so much trouble getting qualified recruits. It really pissed my husband off because they didn't make his test any easier. He was in his thirties and was told "You've been working out for years. You are in the best shape of your life."
Developed countries are turning into nations of couch potatoes who turn their noses up at hard physical labor and probably couldn't do it if they wanted to. Or could but it would be extremely hard on them and there would be additional personal costs akin to training for a marathon.