Fairly long article, but the author makes a couple of interesting
points. In the following paragraph, the bold and italics are mine.
Barry
"It’s a hard-to-resist syllogism: Dirty jobs are available; Americans
won’t fill them; thus, Americans are too soft for dirty jobs. Why else
would so many unemployed people turn down the opportunity to work
during a recession? Of course, there’s an equally compelling obverse.
Why should farmers and plant owners expect people to take a back-
breaking seasonal job with low pay and no benefits just because they
happen to be offering it? If no one wants an available job—especially
in extreme times—maybe the fault doesn’t rest entirely with the people
turning it down. Maybe the market is inefficient."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45246594/ns/business-us_business/t/why-americans-wont-do-dirty-jobs/#.Tr3Ay_EqDA0
Why Americans won't do dirty jobs
Crackdown on immigrants leaves business owners struggling with shortages
Andrew Lichtenstein / For Bloomberg Businessweek
Only a skeleton crew was available recently to harvest tomatoes at
Ellen Jenkins' farm near Birmingham, Ala., where many fruits rotted
in the field.
By Elizabeth Dwoskin
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 that hire them. The law, known as HB56, is intended to
scare off undocumented workers, and in that regard it’s been a
success. It’s also driven away legal immigrants who feared being
harassed.
Rhodes arrived at work on Sept. 29, the day the law went into effect,
to discover many of his employees missing. Panicked, he drove an hour
and a half north to Tuscaloosa, where many of the immigrants who
worked for him lived. Rhodes, who doesn’t speak Spanish, struggled to
get across how much he needed them. He urged his workers to come back.
Only a handful did. “We couldn’t explain to them that some of the
things they were scared of weren’t going to happen,” Rhodes says. “I
wanted them to see that I was their friend, and that we were trying to
do the right thing.”
His ex-employees joined an exodus of thousands of immigrant field
hands, hotel housekeepers, dishwashers, chicken plant employees, and
construction workers who have fled Alabama for other states. Like
Rhodes, many employers who lost workers followed federal requirements—
some even used the E-Verify system—and only found out their workers
were illegal when they disappeared.
In their wake are thousands of vacant positions and hundreds of angry
business owners staring at unpicked tomatoes, uncleaned fish, and
unmade beds. “Somebody has to figure this out. The immigrants aren’t
coming back to Alabama—they’re gone,” Rhodes says. “I have 158 jobs,
and I need to give them to somebody.”
There’s no shortage of people he could give those jobs to. In Alabama,
some 211,000 people are out of work. In rural Perry County, where
Harvest Select is located, the unemployment rate is 18.2 percent,
twice the national average. One of the big selling points of the
immigration law was that it would free up jobs that Republican
Governor Robert Bentley said immigrants had stolen from recession-
battered Americans. Yet native Alabamians have not come running to
fill these newly liberated positions. Many employers think the law is
ludicrous and fought to stop it. Immigrants aren’t stealing anything
from anyone, they say. Businesses turned to foreign labor only because
they couldn’t find enough Americans to take the work they were offering.
At a moment when the country is relentless focused on unemployment,
there are still jobs that often go unfilled. These are difficult,
dirty, exhausting jobs that, for previous generations, were the first
rickety step on the ladder to prosperity. They still are—just not for
Americans.
For decades many of Alabama’s industries have benefited from a
compliant foreign workforce and a state government that largely looked
the other way on wages, working conditions, and immigration status.
With so many foreign workers now effectively banished from the work
pool and jobs sitting empty, businesses must contend with American
workers who have higher expectations for themselves and their employers
—even in a terrible economy where work is hard to find. “I don’t
consider this a labor shortage,” says Tom Surtees, Alabama’s director
of industrial relations, himself the possessor of a job few would
want: calming business owners who have seen their employees vanish.
“We’re transitioning from a business model. Whether an employer in
agriculture used migrant workers, or whether it’s another industry
that used illegal immigrants, they had a business model and that
business model is going to have to change.”
On a sunny October afternoon, Juan Castro leans over the back of a
pickup truck parked in the middle of a field at Ellen Jenkins’s farm
in northern Alabama. He sorts tomatoes rapidly into buckets by color
and ripeness. Behind him his crew—his father, his cousin, and some
friends—move expertly through the rows of plants that stretch out for
acres in all directions, barely looking up as they pull the last
tomatoes of the season off the tangled vines and place them in
baskets. Since heading into the fields at 7 a.m., they haven’t stopped
for more than the few seconds it takes to swig some water. They’ll
work until 6 p.m., earning $2 for each 25-pound basket they fill. The
men figure they’ll take home around $60 apiece.
Castro, 34, says he crossed the border on foot illegally 19 years ago
and has three American-born children. He describes the mood in the
fields since the law passed as tense and fearful. Gesturing around
him, Castro says that not long ago the fields were filled with
Hispanic laborers. Now he and his crew are the only ones left. “Many
of our friends left us or got deported,” he says. “The only reason
that we can stand it is for our children.”
He wipes sweat from beneath his fluorescent orange baseball cap, given
to him by a timber company in Mississippi, where he works part of the
year cutting pine. Castro says picking tomatoes in the Alabama heat
isn’t easy, but he counts himself lucky. He has never passed out on
the job, as many others have, though he does have a chronic pinched
nerve in his neck from bending over for hours on end. The experiment
taking place in Alabama makes no sense to him. Why try to make
Americans do this work when they clearly don’t want it? “They come one
day, and don’t show up the next,” Castro says.
It’s a common complaint in this part of Alabama. A few miles down the
road, Chad Smith and a few other farmers sit on chairs outside J&J
Farms, venting about their changed fortunes. Smith, 22, says his 85
acres of tomatoes are only partly picked because 30 of the 35 migrant
workers who had been with him for years left when the law went into
effect. The state’s efforts to help him and other farmers attract
Americans are a joke, as far as he is concerned. “Oh, I tried to hire
them,” Smith says. “I put a radio ad out—out of Birmingham. About 15
to 20 people showed up, and most of them quit. They couldn’t work fast
enough to make the money they thought they could make, so they just
quit.”
Joey Bearden, who owns a 30-acre farm nearby, waits for his turn to
speak. “The governor stepped in and started this bill because he wants
to put people back to work—they’re not coming!” says Bearden. “I’ve
been farming 25 years, and I can count on my hand the number of
Americans that stuck.”
It’s a hard-to-resist syllogism: Dirty jobs are available; Americans
won’t fill them; thus, Americans are too soft for dirty jobs. Why else
would so many unemployed people turn down the opportunity to work
during a recession? Of course, there’s an equally compelling obverse.
Why should farmers and plant owners expect people to take a back-
breaking seasonal job with low pay and no benefits just because they
happen to be offering it? If no one wants an available job—especially
in extreme times—maybe the fault doesn’t rest entirely with the people
turning it down. Maybe the market is inefficient.
Tom Surtees is tired of hearing employers grouse about their lazy
countrymen. “Don’t tell me an Alabamian can’t work out in the field
picking produce because it’s hot and labor intensive,” he says. “Go
into a steel mill. Go into a foundry. Go into numerous other
occupations and tell them Alabamians don’t like this work because it’s
hot and it requires manual labor.” The difference being, jobs in
Alabama’s foundries and steel mills pay better wages—with benefits.
“If you’re trying to justify paying someone below whatever an
appropriate wage level is so you can bring your product, I don’t think
that’s a valid argument,” Surtees says.
In the weeks since the immigration law took hold, several hundred
Americans have answered farmers’ ads for tomato pickers. A field over
from where Juan Castro and his friends muse about the sorry state of
the U.S. workforce, 34-year-old Jesse Durr stands among the vines. An
aspiring rapper from inner-city Birmingham, he wears big jeans and a
do-rag to shield his head from the sun. He had lost his job prepping
food at Applebee’s, and after spending a few months looking for work a
friend told him about a Facebook posting for farm labor.
The money isn’t good—$2 per basket, plus $600 to clear the three acres
when the vines were picked clean—but he figures it’s better than
sitting around. Plus, the transportation is free, provided by Jerry
Spencer, who runs a community-supported agriculture program in
Birmingham. That helps, because the farm is an hour north of
Birmingham and the gas money adds up.
Durr thinks of himself as fit—he’s all chiseled muscle—but he is
surprised at how hard the work is. “Not everyone is used to this. I
ain’t used to it,” he says while taking a break in front of his truck.
“But I’m getting used to it.”
Yet after three weeks in the fields, he is frustrated. His crew of
seven has dropped down to two. “A lot of people look at this as slave
work. I say, you do what you have to do,” Durr says. “My mission is to
finish these acres. As long as I’m here, I’m striving for something.”
In a neighboring field, Cedric Rayford is working a row. The 28-year-
old came up with two friends from Gadsden, Ala., after hearing on the
radio that farmers were hiring. The work is halfway complete when one
member of their crew decides to quit. Rayford and crewmate Marvin
Turner try to persuade their friend to stay and finish the job.
Otherwise, no one will get paid. Turner even offers $20 out of his own
pocket as a sweetener to no effect. “When a man’s mind is made up,
there’s about nothing you can do,” he says.
The men lean against the car, smoking cigarettes and trying to figure
out how to finish the job before day’s end. “They gotta come up with a
better pay system,” says Rayford. “This ain’t no easy work. If you
need somebody to do this type of work, you gotta be payin’. If they
was paying by the hour, motherf—–s would work overtime, so you’d know
what you’re working for.” He starts to pace around the car. “I could
just work at (MCD)McDonald’s,” he says.
Turner, who usually works as a landscaper, agrees the pay is too low.
At $75 in gas for the three days, he figures he won’t even break even.
The men finish their cigarettes. Turner glances up the hill at
Castro’s work crew. “Look,” he says. “You got immigrants doing more
than what blacks or whites will. Look at them, they just work and work
all day. They don’t look at it like it’s a hard job. They don’t take
breaks!”
The notion of jobs in fields and food plants as “immigrant work” is
relatively new. As late as the 1940s, most farm labor in Alabama and
elsewhere was done by Americans. During World War II the U.S. signed
an agreement with Mexico to import temporary workers to ease labor
shortages. Four and a half million Mexican guest workers crossed the
border. At first most went to farms and orchards in California; by the
program’s completion in 1964 they were working in almost every state.
Many braceros—the term translates to “strong-arm,” as in someone who
works with his arms—were granted green cards, became permanent
residents, and continued to work in agriculture. Native-born Americans
never returned to the fields. “Agricultural labor is basically 100
percent an immigrant job category,” says Princeton University
sociologist Doug Massey, who studies population migration. “Once an
occupational category becomes dominated by immigrants, it becomes very
difficult to erase the stigma.”
Massey says Americans didn’t turn away from the work merely because it
was hard or because of the pay but because they had come to think of
it as beneath them. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the job
itself,” he says. In other countries, citizens refuse to take jobs
that Americans compete for. In Europe, Massey says, “auto
manufacturing is an immigrant job category. Whereas in the States,
it’s a native category.”
In Alabama, the transition to immigrant labor happened slowly.
Although migrant workers have picked fruit and processed food in
Alabama for four decades, in 1990 only 1.1 percent of the state’s
total population was foreign-born. That year the U.S. Census put the
combined Latin American and North American foreign-born population at
8,072 people. By 2000 there were 75,830 Hispanics recorded on the
Census; by 2010 that number had more than doubled, and Hispanics are
now nearly 4 percent of the population.
That first rush of Hispanic immigrants was initiated by the state’s
$2.4 billion poultry and egg industry. Alabama’s largest agricultural
export commodity went through a major expansion in the mid-’90s,
thanks in part to new markets in the former Soviet Union. Companies
such as Tyson Foods found the state’s climate, plentiful water supply,
light regulation and anti-union policies to be ideal. At the time,
better-educated American workers in cities such as Decatur and Athens
were either moving into the state’s burgeoning aerospace and service
industries or following the trend of leaving Alabama and heading north
or west, where they found office jobs or work in manufacturing with
set hours, higher pay, and safer conditions—things most Americans take
for granted. In just over a decade, school districts in once-white
towns such as Albertville, in the northeastern corner of the state,
became 34 percent Hispanic. By the 2000s, Hispanic immigrants had
moved across the state, following the construction boom in the cities,
in the growing plant nurseries in the south, and on the catfish farms
west of Montgomery. It wasn’t until anti-immigration sentiment spread
across the country, as the recession took hold and didn’t let go, that
the Republican legislators who run Alabama began to regard the
immigrants they once courted as the enemy.
A large white banner hangs on the chain-link fence outside the Harvest
Select plant: “Now Hiring: Filleters/Trimmers. Stop Here To Apply.”
Randy Rhodes unfurled it the day after the law took effect. “We’re
getting applications, but you have to weed through those three and
four times,” says Amy Hart, the company’s human resources manager. A
job fair she held attracted 50 people, and Hart offered positions to
13 of them. Two failed the drug test. One applicant asked her out on a
date during the interview. “People reapply who have been terminated
for stealing, for fighting, for drugs,” she says. “Nope, not that
desperate yet!”
Rhodes says he understands why Americans aren’t jumping at the chance
to slice up catfish for minimum wage. He just doesn’t know what he can
do about it. “I’m sorry, but I can’t pay those kids $13 an hour,” he
says. Although the Uniontown plant, which processes about 850,000
pounds of fish a week, is the largest in Alabama and sells to big
supermarket chains including (DEG)Food Lion, Harris Teeter, and
(WMT)Sam’s Club, Rhodes says overseas competitors, which pay employees
even lower wages, are squeezing the industry.
When the immigration law passed in late September, John McMillan’s
phone lines were deluged. People wanted McMillan, the state’s
agriculture commissioner, to tell them whether they’d be in business
next year. “Like, what are we going to do? Do we need to be ordering
strawberry plants for next season? Do we need to be ordering
fertilizer?” McMillan recalls. “And of course, we don’t have the
answers, either.”
His buddy Tom Surtees, the industrial relations director, faces the
same problem on a larger scale. Where McMillan only has to worry about
agriculture, other industries, from construction to hospitality, are
reporting worker shortages. His ultimate responsibility is to generate
the results that Governor Bentley has claimed the legislation will
produce—lots of jobs for Alabamians. That means he cannot allow for
the possibility that the law will fail.
“If those Alabamians on unemployment continue to not apply for jobs in
construction and poultry, then [Republican politicians] are going to
have to help us continue to find immigrant workers,” says Jay Reed,
who heads the Alabama Associated Builders & Contractors. “And those
immigrant workers are gone.”
Business owners are furious not only that they have lost so many
workers but that everyone in the state seemed to see it coming except
Bentley, who failed to heed warnings from leaders in neighboring
Georgia who said they had experienced a similar flight of immigrants
after passing their own immigration law. Bentley declined to be
interviewed for this story.
McMillan and Surtees spend their days playing matchmaker with anxious
employers, urging them to post job openings on the state’s employment
website so they can hook up with unemployed Alabamians. McMillan is
asking Baptist ministers to tell their flocks that jobs are available.
He wants businesses to rethink the way they run their operations to
make them more attractive. On a road trip through the state, he met an
apple farmer who told him he had started paying workers by the hour
instead of by how much they picked. The apples get bruised and damaged
when people are picking for speed. “Our farmers are very innovative
and are used to dealing with challenges,” McMillan says. “You know,
they can come up with all kinds of things. Something I’ve thought
about is, maybe we should go to four-hour shifts instead of eight-hour
shifts. Or maybe two six-hour shifts.”
McMillan acknowledges that even if some of these efforts are
successful, they are unlikely to fill the labor void left by the
immigrants’ disappearance. Some growers, he says, might have to go
back to traditional mechanized row crops such as corn and soybeans.
The smaller farmers might have to decrease volumes to the point where
they are no longer commercially viable. “I don’t know,” says McMillan.
“I just don’t know, but we’ve got to try to think of everything we
possibly can.”
Since late September, McMillan’s staff has been attending meetings
with farmers throughout the state. They are supposed to be Q&A
sessions about how to comply with the new law. Some have devolved into
shouting matches about how much they hate the statute. A few weeks
ago, Smith, the tomato farmer whose workers fled Alabama, confronted
state Senator Scott Beason, the Republican who introduced the
immigration law. Beason had come out to talk to farmers, and Smith
shoved an empty tomato bucket into his chest. “You pick!” he told him.
“He didn’t even put his hands on the bucket,” Smith recalls. “He
didn’t even try.” Says Beason: “My picking tomatoes would not change
or prove anything.”
While the politicians and business owners argue, others see
opportunity. Michael Maldonado, 19, wakes up at 4:30 each morning in a
trailer in Tuscaloosa, about an hour from Harvest Select, where he
works as a fish processor. Maldonado, who grew up in an earthen-floor
shack in Guatemala, says he likes working at the plant. “One hundred
dollars here is 700 quetzals,” he says. “The managers say I am a good
worker.” After three years, though, the long hours and scant pay are
starting to wear on him. With the business in desperate need of every
available hand, it’s not a bad time to test just how much the bosses
value his labor. Next week he plans to ask his supervisor for a raise.
“I will say to them, ‘If you pay me a little more—just a little more—I
will stay working here,’ ” he says. “Otherwise, I will leave. I will
go to work in another state.”
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