Thread: Raiding jobs, appropriate, necessary and defensible

San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial

Raiding jobs

[b]There's a reason immigrants do thankless work

2:00 a.m. September 21, 2009

With Congress about to revisit the issue of illegal immigration, it's time to put in a good word for a controversial enforcement tool — and correct a misconception.

Workplace raids may not always be pleasing to the eye but they are an appropriate, necessary and defensible way to combat illegal immigration. However, they're not a silver bullet for the ailments of the U.S. workforce.
When immigration officials storm a meatpacking plant or a chicken-processing company or a peach orchard and haul off illegal immigrant workers, it can temporarily change the workforce. If employers have to pay higher wages to replace those workers, it might attract U.S. workers for a time.

That was the point of a recent article in USA Today, which suggested that U.S. workers are the beneficiaries of immigration raids.

Yet, before long, we can expect many replacement workers to recall why they didn't take those jobs before — because they're hard, dirty, difficult or dangerous. Before long, they'll quit. And the employer will be back at square one, trying to entice workers who don't really want to work there.
That's what happened a few years ago in Stillmore, Ga., according to the Wall Street Journal. In 2006, after a raid by immigration agents, a chicken-processing company called Crider Inc. lost three-fourths of its workers. To recruit replacements, Crider raised pay at the plant to $9 an hour and offered free rooms in a company-owned dormitory. American employees lined up for the jobs. But the story didn't end there. According to the Journal, the plant was soon struggling with retention, lower productivity and disputes over working conditions. Many workers left.

Georgia Southern University professor Debra Sabia said it best, telling the newspaper: “If you gave a survey to Americans and asked them where they'd want to work, a slaughterhouse would not be on the list. These are not jobs we aspire for our children to take.â€

Oh please! I have known American women who worked in meat packing places. They enjoyed their jobs.

Where are the migrate farm workers that we allow into the country? Let me guess? They have moved from the fields into the ESC (unemployment lines) b/c they only E-Verify migrate farm workers ONLY.

the plant was soon struggling with retention, lower productivity and disputes over working conditions.

If companies worried about their EMPLOYEES ( and took care of them) as much as they do the bottom line, things tend to work out for BOTH parties. But when the comapny bullies their workers into doing "business" and treating them like the "product" then employees start standing up for their rights.

[quote]Georgia Southern University professor Debra Sabia said it best, telling the newspaper: “If you gave a survey to Americans and asked them where they'd want to work, a slaughterhouse would not be on the list. These are not jobs we aspire for our children to take.â€

From a 2001 article:

The meat-packing industry offers a vivid example of how losers are created. The industry today is dominated by immigrant workers. The tasks of disassembling America's hogs, sheep and cattle are nasty, tedious and risky. Most news stories I see about these industries state that these are jobs Americans won't do.

But until this recent renewal of mass immigration, those were jobs done almost entirely by native-born Americans. Until immigration levels began rapidly increasing in the late 1970s, they were jobs that Americans not only would do but formed lines to get hired to do.

Workers with few skills and little education could earn up to around $18 an hour in today's dollars. Strong unions guarded the health and safety of the workers.

People held on to their slaughterhouse jobs like gold. And they pulled strings to get their relatives and children into the plant. Because nearly all packing companies offered handsome pay and benefits, no company had trouble remaining profitable while treating its workers well.

But by the 1980s, the pool of foreign workers had grown so large that relatively new companies could use them to undercut the established unionized firms. The new corporations busted unions and slashed wages so that the old giants of the industry - Armour, Swift, Wilson and Cudahy - could not compete while honoring their contracts to provide safe, middle-class jobs to their workers. All four eventually got out of the slaughterhouse business.

Jobs have so deteriorated that it is difficult to keep workers - whether native-born Americans or immigrants. Stress-related disorders and injuries drive many workers off the jobs within months. During the 1990s, annual turnover rates of 50 to 100 percent have been common. Meatcutters now are injured 400 percent more often than workers in the average U.S. industry. In terms of injuries, meatpacking in the 1990s had become the most dangerous industry in America.

The full article is here:

http://vdare.com/fulford/usa_today.htm