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Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

latimes.com

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Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#201

Post by samirillian »

edblarney wrote: post #82
samirillian wrote: post #66

This argument is a bit double-edged. Okay, so it's implicitly immoral to keep immigrants out. But it's moral to hire them for jobs that Americans won't do because they're so unpleasant?

There is absolutely nothing unpleasant about working in food services. What makes it 'unpleasant' is the destruction of the social contract that valued 'regular work', and the fulfillment of specific jobs by illegal migrants which creates a negative 'social class signalling' dynamic to the work. It's socially destructive, and irreversible - and I believe it adds considerably to inequality.

However you construe the problem (unpleasant, low social capital, etc.) I've gotta believe that in a functional labor economy, illegal immigration would not be incentivized to this degree.

And yeah, some of the jobs are very unpleasant (I've worked a few of them). The article's sly portrayal of toothless guys and drug addicts refusing cushy gigs picking grapes at vineyards is meant to give an impression without coming out and saying something that probably cannot be supported by the data: the jobs are good and the citizens are lazy.

Every argument that "we simply can't get American citizens to do it" seems to be an appeal to a broken system staying broken.

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#202

Post by Eridrus »

lacampbell wrote: post #161

This persistent myth that first world western countries need mass migration because there are jobs "$NATIONALY won't do" really needs to die. Japan is a high income first world nation, very low immigration, and yet somehow they are able to find people to drive taxis, serve food and sweep streets. It's nothing more than an emotion based persuasion technique to get the first world working class to accept lower wages. D…

Food can be shipped though, so there's a cap on how high wages can rise unless you start adding import taxes.

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#203

Post by GFischer »

Eridrus wrote: post #202
lacampbell wrote: post #161

This persistent myth that first world western countries need mass migration because there are jobs "$NATIONALY won't do" really needs to die. Japan is a high income first world nation, very low immigration, and yet somehow they are able to find people to drive taxis, serve food and sweep streets. It's nothing more than an emotion based persuasion technique to get the first world working class to accept lower wages. D…

Food can be shipped though, so there's a cap on how high wages can rise unless you start adding import taxes.

The U.S. uses import caps instead of import taxes to protect the local farmers and ranchers. My country and Argentina and Australia would sell them all the meat they could otherwise.

Europe does the same. So yes, farmers and ranchers are protected by import restrictions.

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#204

Post by virtuabhi »

edblarney wrote: post #73
greedo wrote: post #28

When I was younger, I worked at a McDonalds in SoCal. Almost all the employees were white teenagers. The managers were white as well. We didn't make much, just a bit above minimum wage, but we were all mostly high-school students or college students working in the summer to pay tuition. This went on until around 1984 or so, when it became much harder to hire this demographic. It wasn't as cool to work at fast food, a…

"It wasn't as cool to work at fast food, and the area was becoming more affluent." If you walk into a 7-11 in Scandinavia (yes, they have some there) - esp. in a small town - you'll sometimes see a drop-dead '10' Swedish model working behind the counter. Why? Because 'it's normal' for people to do such jobs - as you say - 'when you were young' it was normal. When those jobs are done by non-citizens, especially of a d…

I am appalled by the casual sexism and racism of the parent comment. "esp. in a small town - you'll sometimes see a drop-dead '10' Swedish model working behind the counter" --> Is it okay to refer to a person by a sexist score? Does the HN community condones this and at the same time rally against sexual harassment at statups? How is this comment not dead yet?

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#205

Post by Merad »

stale2002 wrote: post #3

Well then obviously wages haven't risen enough. For an extreme example, pay me 200$ an hour and I'll quit my web dev job and do it myself.

No matter how much the job pays, it's still very hard work. 60 hours a week of manual labor is no joke. I grew up on a small farm and have a bit of experience with how difficult farm work can be. Honestly, I might even hesitate to do it at $200 an hour (and we all know that's an insanely unrealistic figure).

On top of that, it's a job with zero job security and basically no potential for advancement. It's no surprise that people take other options whenever possible.

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#206

Post by DrScump »

dmode wrote: post #156
greedo wrote: post #28

When I was younger, I worked at a McDonalds in SoCal. Almost all the employees were white teenagers. The managers were white as well. We didn't make much, just a bit above minimum wage, but we were all mostly high-school students or college students working in the summer to pay tuition. This went on until around 1984 or so, when it became much harder to hire this demographic. It wasn't as cool to work at fast food, a…

I didn't grow up in the US, but is this because parenting changed around this time ? Where I grew up, we would hear stories about kids in the US leaving their homes at 15 and trying to figure things out. But when I moved here, i have never seen it. All the families I know take good care of their kids throughout college and even after. So there is no need for them to work at low paying fast food jobs. Their parents ca…

  we would hear stories about kids in the US leaving their homes at 15 and trying to figure things out
I think that's a pre-WW2 concept at best. With the advent of child labor laws, a child has restraints on numbers of hours and time of day, especially during the school year.

When I was 16, we needed school-issued Work Permits to work at all and were limited to 4 hour shifts on "school nights" with a 10PM limit.

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#207

Post by postsantum »

virtuabhi wrote: post #204
edblarney wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It wasn't as cool to work at fast food, and the area was becoming more affluent." If you walk into a 7-11 in Scandinavia (yes, they have some there) - esp. in a small town - you'll sometimes see a drop-dead '10' Swedish model working behind the counter. Why? Because 'it's normal' for people to do such jobs - as you say - 'when you were young' it was normal. When those jobs are done by non-citizens, especially of a d…

I am appalled by the casual sexism and racism of the parent comment. "esp. in a small town - you'll sometimes see a drop-dead '10' Swedish model working behind the counter" --> Is it okay to refer to a person by a sexist score? Does the HN community condones this and at the same time rally against sexual harassment at statups? How is this comment not dead yet?

There is no mention of gender or race in the parent comment. Here is only your opinion implying only females can be models and that being an illegal immigrant is somehow tied to a race.

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#208

Post by DrScump »

dragonwriter wrote: post #114
datatan wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, but if they wanted the jobs, they'd come to CA for them. CA is facing a mass exodus right now. Why on Earth would anyone willingly move there with costs being what they are? I left 10 years ago and will never go back. I can earn just as much with a cost of living being half of that in any number of states. > Most people in California—who are, after all, themsleves outside of Silicon Valley, which is a small pi…

> CA is facing a mass exodus right now. No, it's not. It's facing a slowing rate of inward migration, but it still has net inward migration, not an "exodus" at all, much less a mass one (and a lot of the slowing is part of the national net out-migration of undocumented immigrants—the only a mass exodus involved—offsetting in-migration of others.)

"Figure 1 [0] shows California’s Department of Finance’s (DOF) estimate of domestic migration, migration between California and other states. According to the DOF, California’s domestic migration has been negative in 18 of the past 20 years."

[0] http://www.newgeography.com/content/003584-california-a-worl...

Also, see http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/article3267975...

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#209

Post by patrickg_zill »

decebalus1 wrote: post #18
kingmanaz wrote: post #6

Immigration laws seem likely to be enforced, illegal alien labor scabs self-deport in advance, and wages rise. Not hard to understand.

> illegal alien labor scabs self-deport in advance, and wages rise You know when there was a bug in the codebase so hard to fix and for so many years that developers started building on top of that and considered the bug to be 'not really a bug' but more of a design decision. And then some new hire comes along and fixes it without a deep understanding of the dependencies and breaks existing functionality. And then th…

Almost nothing. Head of lettuce, for instance, might go up 5 cents per head at wholesale, thus 15-25 cents per head at retail, max. i.e. less than 10% of current price, will be the amount of the increase
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