[heartwood]

Hey, Haley, you pay enough and you’ll have Americans working in those chicken plants, and conditions will be be better for the workers too, because they won’t have any fear of being deported if they complain.

Not that illegal immigrants have much need to fear being deported. However, if they rose up, unionized, and started making demands on the corporations that employ them, somehow, it seems that Big Business’s love of the illegal would fade out.

Supply and demand, Haley baby. Econ 101.

[Ben Ficklin]

"Supply and demand, Haley baby. Econ 101"

In Econ 101, when you study supply an demand, you also study elasticity and inelasticity. In certain situations demand may rise in the form of higher wages but the supply is inelastic so it doesn't grow.

The labor supply has a degree of inelasticity because it takes 20 years to produce a new worker.

And sometimes supply may increase not within the market, but outside the market. We might be able to get that chicken cheaper by importing it from Mexico or China. Or, I don't want to pay that price for chicken so I substitute tuna. Or, the chicken processor facing tight labor supplies will respond by not trying to produce more product(birds) but by producing more valued added product such as a cooked bird so he can make more money per bird.

Looking at the CIA factbook stats we have a birth rate 13.42 per 1000 and an immigration rate of 2.45 per 1000 and when you subtract out the death rate we end up with a population growth rate of 0.77% per year. But each year the median age of the workforce increases

[sheana]

At one time all those plants had Americans working in them. Nobody wants to work with Mexicans in them.
When I was young I worked in a turkey plant. When the Mexicans started moving in I left. I went to a potato shed and worked the onions in that same shed. The Mexicans started moving into the onion shed and eventually into the potato sheds. Now a white person can’t be found.
No one wants to work with them. That’s the truth.

[Boowhoknew]

I have worked at a chicken plant in Mississippi. And it is a dirty hard job. I know H.B couldn't make a day there. But Haley had us ( regular Mississippians )believing in him after Katrina but he picked the big power and money lobby. The racial ratio in the chicken industry in Mississippi is 60% hispanic, 30% white ( maintenance department) and 10 % mixed clerical workers. And there is a undercurrent of theft and corruption so prevalent that it would seem a mandated thing.
Lots of inmate workers won't stay because the hispanic gang which controls the day to day work areas don't take their crap. So gang affiliation wont help the black gangs (unless the ratio is changed by forced inmate labor. That, of course, is off the table with the current protected status they enjoy in prison). So current political winds tie in with this underclass.
The poor imigrant. In reality, unaffiliated hispanic workers who are not at least sympathetic to the controlling hispanic group have a tough time getting promotions and may have to pay someone for protection. Pay enough and there wouldn't be any need to send frozen chickens to China to be processed.But that;s probably chickens from the mid country farms as the system is fixed for us down south
The top 10 % get paid like teachers in Miss. just shut up keep quiet and do your job. Maintenance workers get purged in pogroms designed to keep the vocal trade workers from getting a chance to do any harm. But that's not likely. The press would have to be interested in helping the working class to expose what goes on just to get that tasty piece of chicken on you plate. And as we know, that wont happen anytime soon.