The guys fakes his own death in an airplane crash, and now he hires illegal aliens.
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 ...
Maybe the job is worth more than $7.25 an hour.
Can you honestly see a bunch of the OWS kids gutting fish for a living? You could pay them $20/hour and they simply aren't going to do it.
“It’s that illegal labor artificially lowered the going value of labor.”
And don’t forget where all of these arguments lead - to make the illegals LEGAL! Of course once they are legal, they won’t need to settle for the too-low wages, so nothing is solved.
I think a lot of the lack of young American workers is that mom and dad provide so much. But it can also be hard as an employer to hire someone under 18 if you are going to follow all of the rules.
As a kid I would work summers on my dad’s construction sites doing nasty dirty jobs. He would always tell me “Now you know what you DON’T want to be when you grow up!”
I’m always reminded of that when I’m out working on some hillside covered in mud and making my way through the blackberries in the rain or somesuch! Most of the time I love it! (And the pay is a lot better than when I was 14.)
Because the fact is it's still not enough, regardless of qualifiers like "for this area of the country." If the pay was excellent, you'd have workers.
You sound EXACTLY like the old car dealers who wanted to keep paying their technicians like "grease monkeys" long after their skill set DEMANDED they be treated as professionals.
It’s that illegal labor artificially lowered the going value of labor.
***If it weren’t for the illegals, he’s be raising his rate until an American would take the job.***
Not necessarily. Back in 1964, I worked for THE CHICKEN MAN at less than minimum wages due to it being agriculture work.
Then I went into the military. When I got back there were lots of Mexicans now working for THE CHICKEN MAN.
The story was an accountant found a way to pay evryone 25 cents more an hour without affecting the bottom line profits of the company.
When he told the President of the company about this, the CHICKEN MAN said “I’m not going to pay them 25 cents an hour more!”
Other opertunities began to open and and people left. He could not get people to fill the job openings for his starvation wages so he went to Mexico and brought back the first bus loads Mexicans to this area.
Now we got Somalis here.
It's smelly, nasty, and unpleasant, especially when you don't catch them yourself. :)
I agree about ending a lot of the government handouts, but there is a reason roofers, miners, trash collectors, and even the most basic assembly line workers don't get paid minimum wage. Just because labor is "unskilled" doesn't mean it's not hard work. It's not for everybody, and many folks aren't tough enough to handle it.
Now he'll have to pay a decent wage to do a disgusting job.
Again, if it wasn't for the illegals, he would have had to raise his prices. THE CHICKEN MAN is driving Americans out of work because of his importing illegals.
The business owners and growers got used to being able to treat humans like slaves, the party is over. I do not feel bad for them.
If memory serves me right the problem of catfish packers with employees goes back to the beginnings of the new catfish farming methods that brought more catfish to market than the market could absorb. Packers, facing declining prices have consistently attempted to control labor costs. News stories from thirty years ago describe American workers being forced to work with minimum bathroom breaks, driven to carpal tunnel syndrome. Some things never change. Cat fish packing is a competitively cut throat business and as long as Americans reject the product, for the most part, it will remain a dead end business
We better start raising a new generation of people who don't view jobs such as cutting up fish as something they will never do. Until then, expect immigrants, and I'm talking about legals, to take these jobs. Immigrants will work for minimum wage all day long and usually run circles around your average American.
How do I know this? I have two very legal Guatamalans that work part-time for me on my homestead. Their full time job is working for the State of Louisiana as golf course maintenance men. These two men will do in 4 hours what it would take for the locally-available 'workforce' a couple of full days to do. They don't turn up their noses at the nastiest of tasks.
Actually you raise a very interesting question, and I'm not trying to be flip in my response, but if you have no takers for the job then the local people who have heard about your job offer don't think that the overall compensation is sufficient for the work you want them to do. For some people it may be sufficient, for others it clearly isn't. No doubt if you offered $50 per hour a much larger portion of the people who hear the offer would say yes. Of course you can't necessarily do that since the market also sets your selling price and you have to keep your cost structure in line with that.
Have you ever asked people why they don't want the job? I suspect some people would rather subsist on lower government benefits instead of working. Also, $8 to $12 per hour for field work does not seem like much of a premium over other easier work, like standing behind a cash register in McDonalds. Can you identify high productivity workers who are worth paying more per hour? Sometimes one group or another is more inclined to do a certain kind of work.
Sometimes a different compensation scheme attracts workers, like piecework, or some other approach.
Sometimes people choose to take difficult jobs based in part on the social circumstances. I did some very hard jobs as a teenager (harder than field work) because all my friends were there.
Exactly!
The dirty little secret among America's entrepreneurs is we don't have a problem with sorry workers: we have a problem with cheap bastards!
I'm sorry, but you don't have a clue what you're writing about. There is a whole segment of our population that can live a substandard life and never get off the porch because the government will take care of their meager wants. Until that changes, there will be immigrants taking lower wage jobs.
In MY area, there are way too many people existing on the dole, and they see no reason to work. If the phony disability payments, food stamps and welfare payments stopped tomorrow, I could find people to work for a good and honest wage.
And you think they are going to continue working like that for their entire productive career?
You used to see neighborhood kids bussing tables and mowing lawns then overnight the kids were gone and people showed up who couldn't understand you when you asked for more butter or to shut the gate.
Apples and oranges. Gutting fish has not changed a bit over the years. Same for lots of manual labor. Working on cars has changed drastically and now involves more computer savvy than pure wrench-turning.
Pay enough, they’ll do it.
I have an unemployed son, age 20. Pay him $20/hr. He’d do it.
Your average butcher is not involved in the slaughter of the animal. They stand on line or behind the counter and trim. VERY similar to what these workers did/do.
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