islander wrote: 

Another point is that we now import over half of our food supply.

Fast food chains such as McDonalds have contract growers.  They do not participate in the open market as a rule.  This is how they maintain their supply, costs, product standards and consistency.

 oldslabsides wrote: 
Our food is so cheap it won't support the market cost to produce it.   Normally, this isn't really a big deal. When the cost of production and distribution of an item is more than the market is willing to pay for it in the face of competing goods, those items tend to just go away. But food is much more of a necessity, so we should be worried.  When we have fast food places offering up 'dollar menus' as competition for people making burgers at home, it forces stores to try and lower prices, they pressure producers who then trim where they can - usually labor.  We've become so used to cheap plentiful food, we're not willing to pay enough to support an individual to harvest that food.  We've done the same thing with DVD players and lots of consumer goods. But chasing the lowest dollar in our food supply will not end well.

 kurtster wrote: 
Probably from all that time I spent on the tobacco farm sliding backwards on my ass between rows of tobacco plants.

 oldslabsides wrote: 

Well one thing that is germane is that about 5 years ago we crossed the point where more people live in cities than in rural places.  The labor has moved away basically.

 Proclivities wrote: 
Absolutely.  The job providers create the magnet that attracts these people.  Those that hire them need to be punished, severely.  That is one reason a real guest worker program is needed so badly.

 steeler wrote: 
from you of all people, I was hoping for a somewhat more elaborate response.

 aflanigan wrote: 
Protectionism is equated to keeping tresspassers or someone illegal from working ?

Boy have you got things backwards. 

I would love to see our country adopt the same immigration laws as Mexico.

 kurtster wrote: 
These illegal aliens are hired by American citizens who run construction companies and other businesses.  The lawsuit you mentioned was carried out against an employer, not against some Central American government.  I will agree that the presence of cheap labor, whether performed by legal or illegal workers, has often lowered, or, at least, stagnated the wages for tradesmen, but all of the jobs have not been "taken over" by illegals.  Arguably, someone who knowingly hires illegal workers is doing more harm than the illegal workers themselves.

 islander wrote: 
No, what we are seeing is an influx of cheap illegal labor.  The reason the wages were high in the trades was due to the skill levels of jobs usually learned by the apprentice route.  Anyone can slap paint on a wall.  Anyone can hang drywall or butcher wood. But for a really pretty and well crafted job, it takes years to reach those levels.  I used to help out my wife on jobs when she was still able to work.  She had 25 years of experience painting professionally.  What I learned watching her was mindblowing.  The skills involved were of a high level, commanding  up to $75 hour depending on the types of finishes and treatments required and that is here in Cleveland, after leaving California, only 11 years ago.  She had also reached the level of a licensed general contractor in California, which requires much certification.  You get what you pay for.  Hire some illegals at $10 hour to do your painting, you can see the difference and it ain't pretty.

Your CAD argument is not valid to this point.  Your CAD argument is valid in the deliberate overtraining of skills at the college level to create an oversupply of skilled labor.  The Cleveland Clinic has done that here in town with the overtraining of medical administrators and technicians in an effort to lower labor costs.  They partnered with the local Community Colleges and set up aggressively recruited programs to create this over supply.  And it has worked, for the Clinic.

The whole purpose of legal immigration is to only admit people who have needed skills so as not to displace American workers and lower wages.  At least that was the original purpose.  We admit millions per year legally already.  These people are willing to do the right thing, abide by the law.  What we are doing with the illegals is a sucker punch in the gut of all here legally, including citizens.

And you want to pick apples ?  Pay em by the bushel, not by the hour or day.  You'll prolly find more people willing to do the labor.  Piece work is a thing of the past.

 kurtster wrote:  You're generalizing from one specific example, which I'm afraid leads to a rather simplistic view of the issue.

Non-unionized workers may demand high pay if their skill is in demand and there are not enough other skilled workers to meet the demand.  When enough people in search of a living wage learn how to paint, that changes the supply/demand balance.

What you're saying is you want some form of "protectionism" similar to tarriffs, to keep wages artificially high.  Why don't we expand this to every walk of life?  No more baseball players from the Dominican Republic, for example.

Unionization is the historically established way for workers to exert economic leverage to protect themselves from the vagaries of the supply/demand fluctuations in job markets.  Your "keep em all out" protectionism scheme is not really viable.  Not only is it prohibitively expensive, but employers and the job applicants they seek can, will, and do find ways around these barriers, be they physical or legal.

 oldslabsides wrote: 

That we're lazy?

*bump*

 oldslabsides wrote: 

 kurtster wrote: 
We agree on the policy. I don't think it will impact wages much. I do think it will improve the overall situation just by virtue of having a reasonable set of enforceable rules.  I think illegal activities tend to be inherently inefficient, they appear efficient by skirting the rules and not paying for the services they use (actually driving up the cost of most enforcement programs).

 kurtster wrote: 
I used to be able to charge $75/hour for AutoCAD work. There weren't many people with the tools or skills to do the work and I was able to pick and chose not only the work but the customers. Times were good. Then ITT started graduating a lot of people with basic AutoCAD skills and Computers got cheaper. I had to drop my rates to stay competitive. Then the customers started deciding that if people would work cheap enough, they would be okay with lots of rework and oversight as long as they didn't have to pay more than about $15/hour. So I stopped doing that work and went back to school.

My competition wasn't illegal, but the lesson is similar. No one is guaranteed a wage for life. Things change, markets evolve and so must its players.

What people are willing to pay for food drives what the cost of production must be. The piece I linked to earlier showed farmers offering $160/day for workers and not being able to get any takers.  Illegal workers are just responding to a market condition that is ultimately driven by the customer.  Our government is the one who should be making policy that supports a safe and reasonable workplace, not structuring the competitive climate.

What you are seeing is the free market at work. 

 islander wrote: 

kurtster wrote:

 aflanigan wrote: 
I'm saying that in California in particular, illegals have quarmed these formerly excellent paying non union construction jobs.  Carpentry, drywall, masonry and painting to name a few.  I'm married to a displaced California painter.  Her ex won a suit against a former employer over being replaced by illegals, via age discrimination. My father is a licensed architect for the state of California.  I have much first hand knowledge of this.

We are not talking about union jobs.  A good non union painter in SoCal made $35 per hour and up without being in a union.  Non union carpenters averaged $25 and up for years.  These jobs have been taken over by the illegals.  There are some RPeeps who have made similar comments to this effect over the years.

And let's call them what they are, illegal.  Undocumented is bs.  Either you're legal or you're not.  Sorry if the truth hurts anyone's feelings on this, not.

 mzpro5 wrote:
 
Shade tobacco pickers were required to pick a minimum of 100 bents a day (a bent is the distance between two of the array of poles that hold up the tent cloth that shades the tobacco from direct sunlight, approx. 33 feet apart).  That represents somewhere between thirty and forty thousand leaves a day, that had to be carefully picked (without bruising the leaf) and carefully stacked in pads of 6-12 leaves for a dragger to come by and pick up for the drying shed.  Some fast pickers were able to pick up to 200 bents a day (I never made it to 200, came close a few times).

There were essentially two techniques used to pick the leaves off the plant:  "fan" picking, or "butterfly".  In "fan" technique, you placed your palm on the top surface of the leaf while grabbing the stem with your thumb and pressing downward. In the "butterfly" technique, you placed your palms on the underside of the leaves and gently curled your fingers and thumb around the edges of the leaf until your hand almost closed around it, and snapped the leaf stem off the plant.  Slow pickers who were not likely to last the season would use the fan technique with one hand  and stack their leaves into a pad held in the other hand.  You had to take three leaves from each plant at a time (the rest were left for the next "pick" the following week). Fast pickers tended to favor the butterfly technique, and would pick nine to twelve leaves at a time (distributed in both hands) before combining them into a pad deposited on the ground for the draggers.  Do the math; in an eight hour day with half hour for lunch and two ten minute coffee breaks, you had 25 thousand seconds in your work day.  You also had down time moving from one row to the next, and riding a bus from one field to the next (pickers trying to make 200 bents would often run to their next row and would be the first ones off the bus at the new field).  So you had about a half a second or less to harvest each leaf.  If you spent more than one second on each plant, you'd never pick anywhere near the limit.

Edit:  This old photo shows boys performing the first "pick" of the season.  The plants were fairly short in early July, and you were not allowed to stand.  You had to scoot backwards down the row on your butt (but you had a lap to assemble your pad in).  They marked a line on your forearm 14 inches from your fingertips; any leaves shorter than that were discarded.


By the end of the day, these boys would have the hairs on their head stuck together with tobacco plant residue; their hands would be covered with a dark, gummy mixture of this residue and dirt.  Their clothing would also have a layer of this sticky substance on it.

 oldslabsides wrote: 

That is actually a bigger issue than immigration IMO.

 islander wrote: 
What does it say about us that we can't find enough of our own citizens willing to perform manual labor to harvest our own food?

 mzpro5 wrote: 
No disagreement, that's why we need a guest worker program.