So much for the "Doing Jobs Americans Won't Do" While I will be the first to admit that is the case in some instances, but it isn't true in all cases. We need to stop allowing people to make that statement like it is fact.
Friday, June 18, 2010
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Excellent post. I believe the problem is one of those 'dirty little secrets' that no liberal wants to actually address. A prime example is the meat packing industry (no pun intended). There probably is a lot more current information about this but just a quick Google search turns up what I have heard from friends in the mid-west for years. Mainly, that the meat processing industry used to provide good stable employment, and was often unionized. The quotes below are from this online article.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2006/12/15/meatindustry/
"During the 1960s and 1970s, meatpacking wages were relatively higher than at manufacturing plants, running about 14 percent to 18 percent above manufacturing wages at that time, Mintert said. By 2002, meatpacking wages were running 25 percent below manufacturing wages."
"Accompanying the wage drop was the decline of unions in the plants. In the late 1970s, about 45 percent of the meatpacking industry was unionized. By the late 1980s, that had dropped to 21 percent as more immigrants took jobs in the industry ..."
The jobs are primarily occupied by non-citizens, likely some legal and illegal, but the net result was to take an industry that used to provide a living wage and substitute minimum wage workers.
The fact that this industry used to be almost exclusively populated with American citizens (as recently as the 1970's), puts the lie to the claim that this is work that only illegal aliens will do.
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