My hometown has two poultry processing plants : A Honeysuckle White and a Tyson's. In HS, the student body was divided between kids who were going to go to college, and kids who planned to start there immediately upon graduation. These last considered themselves clever, because they believed they'd make more money and have better benefits than we college kids would ever get from our MBAs. In the 1980s, that was a logical conclusion.
In the early 1990s, Tyson's especially began hiring illegals. But it wasn't until the mid 1990s that it became obvious that the plant management was systematically replacing local workers (white, black, and 'other') with mainly illegal Hispanics. They did so by a variety of means, starting with draconian enforcement of minor rules with termination for any infractions, and ending with what appears to be management complicity with acts of violence against local workers on the part of the imported workers, especially against white female workers and clerical staff.
Today, Tyson's is nearly all Hispanic. The sheriff gave a front page interview to the local paper in 1998, and he described how the crime rate had jumped almost 40% over a 12 month period, most of it attributable to crimes commited by illegal immigrants. (Most of it being minor crimes, like clothesline theft and bar scuffles.) TB and other once eradicated diseases are making a comeback, housing costs are skyrocketing, and employment is much higher than the national average, this in an area where the minimum wage is the average wage. And the INS raids at the plants every few months...the rumors that plant management is sending busses to the border to pick up prospective workers...and the EPA infractions, like 6 FEET of fat floating on a manmade pond and contaminating the groundwater....and the way none of the INS or EPA charges ever seem to make it to court...and the way we have to boil our water now because the plants have strained the water tables to the breaking points....and so on, and so on...
There is a certain type of poster to FR (I won't call them freepers) who come to these threads to boast of their cleverness in firing American workers and hiring illegals at much lower rates. Well, here's the strange part-the new workers are not being paid any less than the local workers were! I cannot give a lot of details due to privacy concerns, but my husband through his job (not at one of these plants....) is in a position to know what local and "imported" workers (at least the legal ones) are being paid there. The plant does NOT save money by firing American workers and hiring recent immigrants. Nor can one claim that the American workers were to lazy or to proud to do the work they were doing right before they were fired and replaced; they were proud and happy to be working at a job where they could make a decent living without a college degree. And there was no union or talk of union, so far as I'm aware. So why fire Americans? The only (nontinfoil* conclusion I can reach (and this is pure speculation) is that American workers felt they were entitled to be considered for management jobs, based on seniority and performance, which the plant management wished to reserve for college degreed family members. The immigrants just want jobs.
By the late 1990s, people who once supported families on one decent job at the poultry plants were working 2-3 minimum wage service jobs doing fast food or retail sales. Some of these people tried to improve their lot by *somehow* attending classes at the local community college, mainly for computer skills, while working horrendous hours AND trying to raise a family. Can you guess what those associates degrees that the people who stuck with the programs are now worth? Hint : People with good degrees in Computech from 4 year universities , with years of experience, are in unemployment lines or watching the work they once did being 'outsourced' overseas.
The fired poultry plant workers tried to play by what they thought were the rules : They got decent, honest jobs and worked steadily and faithfully at them till the management threw them aside. When that happened, they acted on the words of about a milion freepers :"They should go back to school and learn a trade...Everyone can take classes at a local college and make themselves more attractive to prospective employers, while working 60-80 hours, right?" And now their computer degrees aren't worth the paper they're printed on, and some have student loans to repay on top of their other problems.
This is the reality behind the "They just work at jobs Americans are too proud and lazy to do", mantra , which some delight in parroting. And I understand that liberal democrats love describing hardworking Americans with blue collar jobs and diplomas or less as "redneck trailer trash",but it's disconcerting to me how often that attitude shows up at conservative sites, too.
*My 'tinfoil' conclusion? Slo-mo genocide. The PTB want rural southerners and midwesterners to crawl off and die because we are the people most apt to try to stand up for the US constitution and US national sovereignty against the Global Elite's preference for no borders, no national sovereignty, government by NGOs and appointed bureaucrats rather than elected officials obeying nationallaw.... A global government combining the worst features of the EU and the UN, with the ICC as the ultimate law and a huge global army in blue helmets to see that the serfs stay in line. Crazy beyond tinfoil? Maybe...but again, the plant management is not paying the imported workers less than the locals were getting. I thought it was a cost saving measure at first, but it's not. So what is the reason????
If you are right it would signify the desire on the management/owners side to further the stratification of society into two classes - the Latin American style division into upper oligarchical class and into docile peons.
Those who like to protest the "class warfare rhetoric" might be conveniently forgetting about the real conflicts of interest and about the reverse class warfare which is as ancient as post-tribal societies when the greed takes the priority before the common good.