islander wrote: 
No, what we are seeing is an influx of cheap illegal labor.  The reason the wages were high in the trades was due to the skill levels of jobs usually learned by the apprentice route.  Anyone can slap paint on a wall.  Anyone can hang drywall or butcher wood. But for a really pretty and well crafted job, it takes years to reach those levels.  I used to help out my wife on jobs when she was still able to work.  She had 25 years of experience painting professionally.  What I learned watching her was mindblowing.  The skills involved were of a high level, commanding  up to $75 hour depending on the types of finishes and treatments required and that is here in Cleveland, after leaving California, only 11 years ago.  She had also reached the level of a licensed general contractor in California, which requires much certification.  You get what you pay for.  Hire some illegals at $10 hour to do your painting, you can see the difference and it ain't pretty.

Your CAD argument is not valid to this point.  Your CAD argument is valid in the deliberate overtraining of skills at the college level to create an oversupply of skilled labor.  The Cleveland Clinic has done that here in town with the overtraining of medical administrators and technicians in an effort to lower labor costs.  They partnered with the local Community Colleges and set up aggressively recruited programs to create this over supply.  And it has worked, for the Clinic.

The whole purpose of legal immigration is to only admit people who have needed skills so as not to displace American workers and lower wages.  At least that was the original purpose.  We admit millions per year legally already.  These people are willing to do the right thing, abide by the law.  What we are doing with the illegals is a sucker punch in the gut of all here legally, including citizens.

And you want to pick apples ?  Pay em by the bushel, not by the hour or day.  You'll prolly find more people willing to do the labor.  Piece work is a thing of the past.

 kurtster wrote:  You're generalizing from one specific example, which I'm afraid leads to a rather simplistic view of the issue.

Non-unionized workers may demand high pay if their skill is in demand and there are not enough other skilled workers to meet the demand.  When enough people in search of a living wage learn how to paint, that changes the supply/demand balance.

What you're saying is you want some form of "protectionism" similar to tarriffs, to keep wages artificially high.  Why don't we expand this to every walk of life?  No more baseball players from the Dominican Republic, for example.

Unionization is the historically established way for workers to exert economic leverage to protect themselves from the vagaries of the supply/demand fluctuations in job markets.  Your "keep em all out" protectionism scheme is not really viable.  Not only is it prohibitively expensive, but employers and the job applicants they seek can, will, and do find ways around these barriers, be they physical or legal.

 oldslabsides wrote: 

That we're lazy?

*bump*

 oldslabsides wrote: 

 kurtster wrote: 
We agree on the policy. I don't think it will impact wages much. I do think it will improve the overall situation just by virtue of having a reasonable set of enforceable rules.  I think illegal activities tend to be inherently inefficient, they appear efficient by skirting the rules and not paying for the services they use (actually driving up the cost of most enforcement programs).

 kurtster wrote: 
I used to be able to charge $75/hour for AutoCAD work. There weren't many people with the tools or skills to do the work and I was able to pick and chose not only the work but the customers. Times were good. Then ITT started graduating a lot of people with basic AutoCAD skills and Computers got cheaper. I had to drop my rates to stay competitive. Then the customers started deciding that if people would work cheap enough, they would be okay with lots of rework and oversight as long as they didn't have to pay more than about $15/hour. So I stopped doing that work and went back to school.

My competition wasn't illegal, but the lesson is similar. No one is guaranteed a wage for life. Things change, markets evolve and so must its players.

What people are willing to pay for food drives what the cost of production must be. The piece I linked to earlier showed farmers offering $160/day for workers and not being able to get any takers.  Illegal workers are just responding to a market condition that is ultimately driven by the customer.  Our government is the one who should be making policy that supports a safe and reasonable workplace, not structuring the competitive climate.

What you are seeing is the free market at work. 

 islander wrote: 

kurtster wrote:

 aflanigan wrote: 
I'm saying that in California in particular, illegals have quarmed these formerly excellent paying non union construction jobs.  Carpentry, drywall, masonry and painting to name a few.  I'm married to a displaced California painter.  Her ex won a suit against a former employer over being replaced by illegals, via age discrimination. My father is a licensed architect for the state of California.  I have much first hand knowledge of this.

We are not talking about union jobs.  A good non union painter in SoCal made $35 per hour and up without being in a union.  Non union carpenters averaged $25 and up for years.  These jobs have been taken over by the illegals.  There are some RPeeps who have made similar comments to this effect over the years.

And let's call them what they are, illegal.  Undocumented is bs.  Either you're legal or you're not.  Sorry if the truth hurts anyone's feelings on this, not.

 mzpro5 wrote:
 
Shade tobacco pickers were required to pick a minimum of 100 bents a day (a bent is the distance between two of the array of poles that hold up the tent cloth that shades the tobacco from direct sunlight, approx. 33 feet apart).  That represents somewhere between thirty and forty thousand leaves a day, that had to be carefully picked (without bruising the leaf) and carefully stacked in pads of 6-12 leaves for a dragger to come by and pick up for the drying shed.  Some fast pickers were able to pick up to 200 bents a day (I never made it to 200, came close a few times).

There were essentially two techniques used to pick the leaves off the plant:  "fan" picking, or "butterfly".  In "fan" technique, you placed your palm on the top surface of the leaf while grabbing the stem with your thumb and pressing downward. In the "butterfly" technique, you placed your palms on the underside of the leaves and gently curled your fingers and thumb around the edges of the leaf until your hand almost closed around it, and snapped the leaf stem off the plant.  Slow pickers who were not likely to last the season would use the fan technique with one hand  and stack their leaves into a pad held in the other hand.  You had to take three leaves from each plant at a time (the rest were left for the next "pick" the following week). Fast pickers tended to favor the butterfly technique, and would pick nine to twelve leaves at a time (distributed in both hands) before combining them into a pad deposited on the ground for the draggers.  Do the math; in an eight hour day with half hour for lunch and two ten minute coffee breaks, you had 25 thousand seconds in your work day.  You also had down time moving from one row to the next, and riding a bus from one field to the next (pickers trying to make 200 bents would often run to their next row and would be the first ones off the bus at the new field).  So you had about a half a second or less to harvest each leaf.  If you spent more than one second on each plant, you'd never pick anywhere near the limit.

Edit:  This old photo shows boys performing the first "pick" of the season.  The plants were fairly short in early July, and you were not allowed to stand.  You had to scoot backwards down the row on your butt (but you had a lap to assemble your pad in).  They marked a line on your forearm 14 inches from your fingertips; any leaves shorter than that were discarded.


By the end of the day, these boys would have the hairs on their head stuck together with tobacco plant residue; their hands would be covered with a dark, gummy mixture of this residue and dirt.  Their clothing would also have a layer of this sticky substance on it.

 oldslabsides wrote: 

That is actually a bigger issue than immigration IMO.

 islander wrote: 
What does it say about us that we can't find enough of our own citizens willing to perform manual labor to harvest our own food?

 mzpro5 wrote: 
No disagreement, that's why we need a guest worker program.

 kurtster wrote: 

Yes, this statement is spectacularly incorrect!

 islander wrote: 



Harvesting produce is extremely hard work and these days few Americans would stoop to do the work (pun intended).

In addition each type of crop requires unique knowledge on how to pick/harvest that particular crop at a productive pace. Tomatoes are different than apples which are different t,Han lettuce, etc.

 kurtster wrote: 
http://www.theolympian.com/2011/11/03/1863797/gregoire-sends-inmates-to-help.html

From the article:
  
So where were all the workers that needed jobs?  This article is from last year. We are having the same debate in the state right now. "tough on immigration" policies have caused a shortage of farm workers here. The result hasn't been higher wages and more Americans back at work in the field. It has caused crops rotting in the fields, and ruin for farmers. So now that we know this isn't working, how about some reasonable discussion of a guest worker program?  Let's get people to come do work, then go back home without fear of being locked out of the country. Perhaps if we reduced the barrier to entry under acceptable circumstances and allowed more free movement across the borders we could have better compliance with the rules, fewer problems with illegals and more resources available to address the fewer trying to game the system and stay here improperly.

 kurtster wrote: 
Are you sure you've identified the correct scapegoat on this issue?  Are you saying undocumented construction workers come into a unionized construction site and chase away all the unionized workers, scabbing their jobs forcing the construction company to pay them lower wages?  Or have "right to work" laws and other lobbying efforts on behalf of construction company owners eager to maximize profits created an environment where demand for unionized workers has dried up and demand for undocumented laborers willing to work for peanuts has increased?

 pjcle wrote: 

My apologies for the when I was a kid stuff.  I'm finding it hard to keep out of my comments, but the reality of that is what it was like then versus now is no longer relevant.  I'll work harder to avoid it.

There are hardly any family farms anymore.  Its a big box operation now.  Kids will never really work on farms again, even that is being legislated out with new farm labor laws.  Kids won't even get off the couch anymore, so its a moot point.

I'll disagree with the part about firing illegals won't increase wages.  It certainly will in the construction business.  If we can just get a simple guest worker program going, it will solve a ton of problems.  Wages will be one of them.

The primary reason wages are so low for illegals is because they are illegal.  Establishing a guest worker program will raise wages because once legal, the workers can demand more money because there is no one behind them who is illegal and can undercut them.  We can do this without amnesty and without a path to citizenship.  I have no problems with a guest worker program as long as those who do not sign up and are caught are deported.

Your thoughts about where all the unions went.  They are primarily the casualty of all the mergers and leveraged buyouts that started in the 70's IMO.  As companies were bought up, union contracts became void under the new ownership.  I don't think that in the beginning of these buyouts union busting was a goal.  Buying up a company for diversification was more the goal.  The steel companies were the first big ones to try and diversify to save their butts.  They bought up businesses they had no business in running, it was outside of their experience and under poor management were run into the ground or sold off. 

But union busting sure became a big part of the buyouts later on.  Namely because of the pension burdens of the old union employees, more so than the wages.  The federal government had to start a whole new agency to handle all these unfunded pensions that got dumped on the government in the process of these buyouts.  I forget the name.  This is probably where big business first got the idea that they could get the gov to bail them out of mistakes and ugly situations.  Now we are seeing a similar thing with pensions and benefits going on in the public sector, some 20 years after the first round from the private sector.  The first round was about the same time as the Savings and Loan crisis, in which again, the gov bailed out the banks by buying up foreclosed properties.  It took 10 years to sort that out.  The Resolute Trust Fund was the org that managed all of that and rather successfully. 

 oldslabsides wrote: 

I would say that having cheap food is a good thing.  If corporations are greedy and pay their employees poorly, then surely you can see why people need some entity to represent them, so they can be treated fairly.  So what happened to all the unions?  Reagan is what happened to the unions.  Boy!  That one lazy union guy.  We sure showed him.

 pjcle wrote: 
The US Census stopped counting farmers in this country in like, 1995 because there were so few of them.  As a skill, it is basically dead in this country.  Our food is produced on immense, industrial farms owned by immense, greedy corporations who pay their employees shit.  These same corporations now own not only the congress and the white house, but the supreme court as well.

Folks, we are screwed, blued and tattooed.  It was fun while it lasted.