excalibur
Diamond Member
- Mar 19, 2015
- 28,875
- 58,398
- 2,290
It was always a lie. A big lie.
All it was for was to keep wages low.
The chamber of commerce Republicans went along with it.
Charlotte, N.C., is making headlines this week because dozens of construction sites have gone silent. ICE swept through the region, and the labor force evaporated almost instantly. A major American city discovered, in real time, that its building boom was being held together by workers who couldn’t legally be there. Watching that footage hit me hard, because I’ve seen it before — not on the evening news, but in the slow collapse of my own childhood community.
I grew up forty miles north of Louisville, Ky., in a one-stoplight town held together by tobacco, construction, and the kinds of gritty jobs that built the region’s character. My dad ran a small construction contracting business and held a small tobacco base, which gives you the legal right to grow a certain weight of tobacco. My brothers and I worked tobacco as teenagers, starting at 12 or 13, and my brothers did construction with Dad as soon as we were old enough to hold a hammer.
Those jobs weren’t easy. Tobacco paid around $10 an hour in the early-to-mid 1980s, the equivalent of $30 today, and you earned every penny. The work was filthy, exhausting, and dangerous: Sticky sap soaked into your skin, July sun cooked you alive, and harvest season meant hatchets, long metal spikes, and dark, dusty barn lofts where one bad step could break a leg. But we did it gladly because the pay was good and the work meant something. Every kid I knew in high school worked tobacco, along with a good share of the adults. It was the backbone of the community.
Then illegal labor arrived, and things began to shift. The first wave hit the tobacco farms. Farmers who had paid teenagers and local laborers fair wages realized they could hire adults from Mexico and Central America for far less and house them in the kinds of conditions Americans would never tolerate: eight men to a sagging, leaking trailer with no electricity, no running water, no insulation. They were paid in cash, they didn’t complain, they worked year-round, and they had no leverage because they knew their employers could always get them deported. Within a few seasons, American teenagers were no longer hired. Within a few more, the full-time local farmhands, many of whom had been in the area for generations, were gone, too. My parents saw exactly what was happening when one neighbor proudly moved an entire illegal crew into a run-down trailer on their property on a hillside, right in the center of a dairy cow pasture. They thought they had found a clever solution to their labor costs. My parents were disgusted, because they understood what it meant: the beginning of the end for the community’s economic life.
How the Native-Born Labor Market Collapsed, One Job at a Time
The second wave hit construction. Illegal workers who came for tobacco began taking roofing, concrete, and general contracting jobs. My father watched his own bids get undercut again and again by contractors who weren’t paying insurance, taxes, workers’ comp, or legal wages. He played by the rules. They didn’t. His bids were honest. Theirs were impossible. And the impossible bids kept winning. Small local contractors began collapsing one after another, and with them went the trades that had once provided steady work for generations.
The third wave hit Louisville’s meatpacking plants, dangerous but decently paid jobs that could support a family. After illegal labor penetrated the industry, wages plummeted. Locals stopped applying because they couldn’t survive on what those jobs now paid. The companies didn’t care. Illegal crews would fill the shifts at half the cost.
The fourth wave was quieter but devastating: the wives and older kids of the new arrivals began filling fast-food, restaurant, and service jobs. Those jobs disappeared for American citizens as quickly as the farm and construction work had. Suddenly, teenagers couldn’t get any jobs at all. The ambitious ones left for the cities; the rest were stranded with no path into adulthood. That drained the cultural lifeblood from the town. When you lose your youth, you lose your future.
The social collapse followed the economic one. Welfare, once nearly nonexistent, became a survival mechanism. A government housing complex went up, something unimaginable a decade earlier. Property crime increased as people stole scrap metal, tools, and anything they could sell.
...
And through all of this, politicians, pundits, and corporate lobbyists kept repeating the same line: “Americans just won’t do these jobs.” That phrase infuriated me from the first time I heard it. I knew it was a lie. I had done the tobacco work myself. My brothers had. Every teenager we knew had. Every adult performed the hard labor that kept the region alive. Americans didn’t suddenly lose their work ethic. The jobs were taken from them — not by immigrants directly, but by American employers who built a business model on illegal labor and by a federal government that looked the other way for forty years.
What Americans “won’t do” are jobs that have been made illegal in everything but name — jobs where wages have collapsed to exploit desperation, where safety standards are ignored, where workers are paid off the books, where insurance and taxes are bypassed, and where living conditions violate every regulation on the books. When the floor is lowered that far, legal workers cannot enter the market at all. That isn’t laziness. That’s math.
...
pjmedia.com
All it was for was to keep wages low.
The chamber of commerce Republicans went along with it.
Charlotte, N.C., is making headlines this week because dozens of construction sites have gone silent. ICE swept through the region, and the labor force evaporated almost instantly. A major American city discovered, in real time, that its building boom was being held together by workers who couldn’t legally be there. Watching that footage hit me hard, because I’ve seen it before — not on the evening news, but in the slow collapse of my own childhood community.
I grew up forty miles north of Louisville, Ky., in a one-stoplight town held together by tobacco, construction, and the kinds of gritty jobs that built the region’s character. My dad ran a small construction contracting business and held a small tobacco base, which gives you the legal right to grow a certain weight of tobacco. My brothers and I worked tobacco as teenagers, starting at 12 or 13, and my brothers did construction with Dad as soon as we were old enough to hold a hammer.
Those jobs weren’t easy. Tobacco paid around $10 an hour in the early-to-mid 1980s, the equivalent of $30 today, and you earned every penny. The work was filthy, exhausting, and dangerous: Sticky sap soaked into your skin, July sun cooked you alive, and harvest season meant hatchets, long metal spikes, and dark, dusty barn lofts where one bad step could break a leg. But we did it gladly because the pay was good and the work meant something. Every kid I knew in high school worked tobacco, along with a good share of the adults. It was the backbone of the community.
Then illegal labor arrived, and things began to shift. The first wave hit the tobacco farms. Farmers who had paid teenagers and local laborers fair wages realized they could hire adults from Mexico and Central America for far less and house them in the kinds of conditions Americans would never tolerate: eight men to a sagging, leaking trailer with no electricity, no running water, no insulation. They were paid in cash, they didn’t complain, they worked year-round, and they had no leverage because they knew their employers could always get them deported. Within a few seasons, American teenagers were no longer hired. Within a few more, the full-time local farmhands, many of whom had been in the area for generations, were gone, too. My parents saw exactly what was happening when one neighbor proudly moved an entire illegal crew into a run-down trailer on their property on a hillside, right in the center of a dairy cow pasture. They thought they had found a clever solution to their labor costs. My parents were disgusted, because they understood what it meant: the beginning of the end for the community’s economic life.
How the Native-Born Labor Market Collapsed, One Job at a Time
The second wave hit construction. Illegal workers who came for tobacco began taking roofing, concrete, and general contracting jobs. My father watched his own bids get undercut again and again by contractors who weren’t paying insurance, taxes, workers’ comp, or legal wages. He played by the rules. They didn’t. His bids were honest. Theirs were impossible. And the impossible bids kept winning. Small local contractors began collapsing one after another, and with them went the trades that had once provided steady work for generations.
The third wave hit Louisville’s meatpacking plants, dangerous but decently paid jobs that could support a family. After illegal labor penetrated the industry, wages plummeted. Locals stopped applying because they couldn’t survive on what those jobs now paid. The companies didn’t care. Illegal crews would fill the shifts at half the cost.
The fourth wave was quieter but devastating: the wives and older kids of the new arrivals began filling fast-food, restaurant, and service jobs. Those jobs disappeared for American citizens as quickly as the farm and construction work had. Suddenly, teenagers couldn’t get any jobs at all. The ambitious ones left for the cities; the rest were stranded with no path into adulthood. That drained the cultural lifeblood from the town. When you lose your youth, you lose your future.
The social collapse followed the economic one. Welfare, once nearly nonexistent, became a survival mechanism. A government housing complex went up, something unimaginable a decade earlier. Property crime increased as people stole scrap metal, tools, and anything they could sell.
...
And through all of this, politicians, pundits, and corporate lobbyists kept repeating the same line: “Americans just won’t do these jobs.” That phrase infuriated me from the first time I heard it. I knew it was a lie. I had done the tobacco work myself. My brothers had. Every teenager we knew had. Every adult performed the hard labor that kept the region alive. Americans didn’t suddenly lose their work ethic. The jobs were taken from them — not by immigrants directly, but by American employers who built a business model on illegal labor and by a federal government that looked the other way for forty years.
What Americans “won’t do” are jobs that have been made illegal in everything but name — jobs where wages have collapsed to exploit desperation, where safety standards are ignored, where workers are paid off the books, where insurance and taxes are bypassed, and where living conditions violate every regulation on the books. When the floor is lowered that far, legal workers cannot enter the market at all. That isn’t laziness. That’s math.
...
'Jobs Americans Won't Do': The Lie That Broke a Nation and the Economic and Social Devastation It Hid
Explore the economic and social impacts of illegal labor in America.
pjmedia.com
