Posted on 11/15/2011 10:19:20 AM PST by JerseyanExile
Skinning, gutting, and cutting up catfish is not easy or pleasant work. No one knows this better than Randy Rhodes, president of Harvest Select, which has a processing plant in impoverished Uniontown, Ala. For years, Rhodes has had trouble finding Americans willing to grab a knife and stand 10 or more hours a day in a cold, wet room for minimum wage and skimpy benefits.
Most of his employees are Guatemalan. Or they were, until Alabama enacted an immigration law in September that requires police to question people they suspect might be in the U.S. illegally and punish businesses -
(Excerpt) Read more at today.msnbc.msn.com ...
What size jeans do you wear?
If these firms were prosecuted and their officers jailed for hiring these ‘Columbians’ they would eventually be forced to pay ‘market’ wages according to need. Pass the cost onto customers; I’d pay more if it meant my grand daughters didn’t have to worry about illegals in this country. I have no sympathy whatsoever with producers, growers, manufacturers, whatever with respect to wages they’d have to pay because illegals aren’t there any more. Screw them.
In this sort of conversation it is often noted how hardworking illegal Mexicans and Guatemalans and others from poor nations are. Why would that be?
I think it’s very simple. When the illegals come to the US from dirt poor nations with little opportunity for them, even a minimum wage job in the US will increase their standard of living five to ten fold or more. Of course they are motivated. They go from having almost nothing to having many times more than they could have in their home nations.
That’s the incentive for their hard work. Give an American a job that increases their standard of living even two or three fold and you’d seen similar motivation. But for the lower paying jobs in the US, welfare or other benefits provides them as much, and actually more when you consider Medicaid benefits than working those lower paying jobs.
So, any illegal increases his standard of living many fold with a low paying job in the US. Many Americans would decrease their standard by taking a low paying job.
The solution is to end illegals working in the US, allow the wages to rise, then have more real welfare reform that ends most welfare when there are jobs available.
They never talk about the strange diseases (many formerly eradicated here once, horrible criminal acts (DUI deaths, rapes-many many, murder, etc.), public service costs, school costs, buses, public transportation, and all the FEDERAL benefits they can often get. I agree. Heavily punish the employers and make it stop. Prices will rise, but the other costs they force us to pay will end.
“The fact of the matter is: if you can’t get anyone to gut fish for less than $100 an hour, the rate for fish gutting is now $100 an hour, no matter what YOU think it should be.”
Exactly.
We need legal immigration reform too.
We are favoring all the wrong groups and I’m not so sure that immigration isn’t being used to try to destroy traditional American values.
That's all true. Those who hire illegals and even legal immigrants for the lowest paying work are transferring a sizable amount of labor overhead costs and social costs to the taxpayers, present and future. That cheap labor is only cheap for the employers who utilize it and pay only a fraction of the real costs.
But it’s largely about the tax cheating too — an illegal can get more value from the same amount of pay if they get paid in cash and have no intention of paying taxes on it.
They also pass on to the rest of us the costs of things they wouldn't have anyway, but can access here, like health care.
It's a variation of what I call "Mall Wife Syndrome."
The clothes stores in the malls rarely pay enough to outfit their workers in the style of clothing the store demands of it's employees, let alone support their households, too. So what they do is give discounts on clothes to their employees. That way they attract many housewives looking for something to do into taking jobs where they get discounts on clothes they like, and a little bit of spending money, too.
Trouble is, when you analyze the cash flow of the employees households, the main breadwinner is actually supplementing the cost of maintaining a worker for the clothing store.
Says all I need to know about the nonsense you spew. Enjoy your day.
Just as your silence tells me all I need to know about your ability to make excuses.
“... for minimum wage and skimpy benefits.”
Um. Then pay them more.
Saying that only Latinos will do the work equates Latinos with plantation slaves. Very, VERY insulting to hard-working Latinos to call them plantation negros.
Eliminate welfare and unemployment and the scum will either do whatever work is available or they can lie down in the street and die!!!
Another gimmick a friend of mine told me was that when these illegals HAD to be paid by check and leave a paper trail, they filled out W-4 forms which said they had eight dependents (IRS wants proof at nine), even when they were unmarried or in the 18-25 age group. All they paid was SS because they couldn't dodge that one.
Got any cites that support this assertion?
I can only cite my personal experience, as well as that of many other farmers and ranchers that I know. I’ve stated our situation pretty clearly in the thread.
There's no law that says your company can be profitable at the wage level you need to pay to attract American labor, especially with the availability of welfare making unskilled American labor unavailable. This is why jobs go overseas.
We used to have import tariffs to protect American industries, but import tariffs are at historic lows.
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