This went on until around 1984 or so, when it became much harder to hire this demographic. It wasn't as cool to work at fast food, and the area was becoming more affluent.
Fast forward five years, and 99% of the staff was now Hispanic, including several illegal immigrants. The restaurant had to do what it could to make money and stay in biz.
I don't know how high wages would have to be to attract the previous demographic to that type of work. The area is far more affluent than when I was growing up, and house prices start at over $700K and go higher easily.
I do think something is missing though when kids don't learn what it's like to hold a retail type job dealing with the public. You learn hard work, humility, and often an appreciation for higher education.
Anecdotally, it seems that as general affluence within a community rises, so does the value placed on social standing. So your compensation package has to cover increased lifestyle expenses, adjusted for the position's impact on your status in the community.
If wages stagnated, but somehow McDonald's just kept getting trendier, I expect they would retain more of their original demographic than if McDonald's was increasingly seen as a place that only employs losers and morons.
Plus, fast-food jobs developed a stigma as loser/dead-end jobs. Teenagers needed spending money, but not at the cost of being "uncool."
The government has of course solved this problem.
One, the actual amounts didn't go down, they simply didn't keep pace with inflation. And as actual measures (ie. "Big Mac index" type indices) kept going down, they were systematically removed from tracking by the FED. So the government can claim that they didn't in fact go down by a factor of 3.
In reality nobody has lost any wages you see, and the fact that a fast food worker's (esp. immigrant ones) "apartment" (room is a more apt description generally) today is tiny, looks barren and has absolutely nothing in it worth anything, or the issue that their cars are invariably beaters. Well that was the case for lowest-level jobs in the 1980s as well, wasn't it ?
Wait ... no it wasn't. First of all, they owned houses and cars.
But you see, according to the fed's measures of inflation everything is about the same. And of course it is. You see, people today only use about a third of the housing as people of the 1980s. That must be because people now ... euhm ... are about 1/3rd the size of back then ? They also only use 1/3rd transport (fuel, public transport, ...) ... now there's some small justification for that, as a gallon of gasoline goes a lot further now, but still.
A minor nitpick, but you are probably referring to the amnesty component of the 1986 immigration reform law, which was during the Reagan Administration, not the first Bush Administration.
Taught me more about life than any class or book ever could.
That degree and hard work got me more money. The rest is all the same
The progression with most other fast food chains in CA was that once you start hiring employees who don't speak English, then you have to have all shift managers be Spanish-speaking, leaving no upward path for line employees who aren't bilingual. Before long, most of the kitchen crew is non-English-speaking.
Some of it is likely due to "organic" stratification and segregation of society, which is a less-nice way of saying people keep to their own circles. Some of it may be deliberate discrimination due to factors such as attractiveness and access to resources, often obscured by information asymmetry in the hiring process. Some of it may be that these businesses tend to be located in more prosperous areas that are both distant and difficult to access to by people who lack reliable transportation.
Several of these factors, while alone may not be significant, can occur together to striking effect.
I would probably advise my kids to shadow a tradesman, volunteer at a hospital or for a political campaign, plant trees, lead at a summer camp, or any other thing that will lead to better opportunities than fast food. Even working in a high end restaurant would be better.
I agree fully. Especially once you get to college, you need to start looking for internships and having more things on your resume makes you that more competitive.
Technical skills are only useful if they command a salary lucrative enough to live on but not so lucrative that you find yourself on the automation chopping block.
we would hear stories about kids in the US leaving their homes at 15 and trying to figure things out
When I was 16, we needed school-issued Work Permits to work at all and were limited to 4 hour shifts on "school nights" with a 10PM limit.
I think this is a matter of costs (wages) and not much else.
Probably either none or things (paid or not) connected with their career plans and aspirations, often through personal networks jump started from their parents networks. Same as teens and young adults from affluent families now.
If you walk into a 7-11 in Scandinavia (yes, they have some there) - esp. in a small town - you'll sometimes see a drop-dead '10' Swedish model working behind the counter.
Why? Because 'it's normal' for people to do such jobs - as you say - 'when you were young' it was normal.
When those jobs are done by non-citizens, especially of a different ethnicity, then there is a 'stigma' associated with that work, and the social value drops quite a lot.
The notion that 'the area became more affluent' and kids wouldn't do those jobs is a total misrepresentation of reality.
A) If the social context didn't change, then kids would do those jobs.
B) 'They had to hire illegal migrants' is again another lie. As the area becomes more wealthy - guess what - wages are supposed to rise. Yes, that means the price of burgers should rise a little bit as well. But it's again, a total misrepresentation, borderline lie to imply that the 'only way to have service workers is to hire illegal workers'. This is beyond false.
The anecdote you described provides the fundamental basis for the rise of inequality in America.
The notion that 'illegal workers' must be used to support economic activity is obviously unfeasible in the long-term, that somehow growth depends on a class of workers who'll work below the real prevailing wage - and who cannot organize, collect social security, healthcare etc.
No - it's completely upside down.
There are so many places in the world where 'regular kids' continue to work at McDonald's. Wages and benefits are higher, and there is no real social stigma. (Of course, working at McD's is never going to be considered a choice job, but you did it :) )
"I do think something is missing though when kids don't learn what it's like to hold a retail type job dealing with the public."
Yes - I fully agree. Been there.
But a bifurcated society creates stigma and deep 'social class signalling' in these jobs and it destroys the social compact.
Imagine this for a moment: that Obama or Trump gives all illegal migrants instant citizenship with full rights, healthcare, the right to organize labour, social security.
Then guess what happens by the 'illegals are necessary economic logic': McDonald's has to 'fire the new citizens' and 'hire actual, new illegals'!
It's a destructive, unsustainable Ponzi scheme.
Local wages should rise until the jobs are filled.
Some farming jobs just won't work out - those crops can be grown elsewhere.
Yes - we need to treat people with humanity and dignity and there'll always be some people who 'fall through the cracks' - but the systematic importation of illegal workers on a large scale is inhuman.
It's nothing more than an emotion based persuasion technique to get the first world working class to accept lower wages. Don't fall for it.
Europe does the same. So yes, farmers and ranchers are protected by import restrictions.
From the article, it seemed like at least for some their business model was questionable. If the only way to be profitable is to rely on illegal immigrant or non-competitive wages (one of the farmers mentioned could only stay profitable at $8/hr but it seems anything above $10/hr seems unprofitable. "Wineries paid $700 for a ton of grapes, and Klein could make a solid profit paying $8 an hour, the minimum wage.") than you're better off growing something else anyways. (almond and olive trees in this guys case). Even if there was a way to get visas to get labor, the cost of application and transportation might still prevent some of these low margin farms.
Googling shows that other manual labor type jobs in Napa valley [1] seems to be $17+ and often offers training + transport. Seeing as how grapes seems to be used in wine industry, wouldn't the wine industry pay more for the grapes as supply dwindles and make it profitable again?
If I could go work at a farm during summer to save some money for my college, I would consider it. But looking at cost of living/risk involved/ lack of benefits for season workers/ pay, it doesn't appear to be worth it.
So, yes, preventing people willing to work and make it work from doing so it not a good solution. But the narrative that Americans would never work on a farm given the choice is also not true, imho. I've met plenty of white Americans who would like to do it, but lot of the work seems to be seasonal.
Grapes, IIRC, have a multi-year cycle time. You don't just drop in a set of vines and have a useful harvest for wine in 6 months. As such, that dents the supply/demand cycle and turns it into a game of "chicken".
If I know that we're all hurting growing grapes, the only question is whether I can hold out longer than the other folks who go bankrupt and finally shrink the supply.
Another way to think of it might be: How much would I have to pay you for you to walk around with a small amount of shit on your forehead all day?
We have somehow gotten ourselves in the position where manual labor relegates one to be a social untouchable. This means that anyone with a shred of self-interest gets out ASAP, which means the political power of labor is disproportionately weak in comparison to its size.
It's like how Stranger Things HAD to be set in the 80's---because you can't have sympathetic characters in small towns in the modern era, because anyone with a head on their shoulders gets out as their first order of business.
Hogwash. If the salary rises high enough, people will do the jobs. Why do people only seem to like capitalism when it suppresses wages?
I guarantee you that if the farmers paid $30/hour, they'd have plenty of people to fill those jobs.
Every time I hear about one of these job "shortages" I always sympathize quite deeply: "Yep, I have a similar problem. There is an acute shortage of supermodels willing to have sex with me."
Amazing how that puts things into perspective really quickly.
I think Stranger things had to be set in the 80s cause if you were about to be killed by an inter-dimensional monster you'd be live streaming it on Facebook to the very end which throws a kink in the narrative.
Farm workers would have status. (Of course, farmers would also have to make a lot more than they do now, or require far less hired labor, for farm work to typically pay $200k/yr.)
To be fair, this is an incredibly common view historically. It would be extremely unusual for a society not to believe that manual laborers were a lower class than non-manual-laborers.
Machine picking is taking over. Every crop which can be machine harvested already is. All the staple crops were mechanized decades ago. Fruits and vegetables are mostly mechanized. Orange picking has been mechanized.[1] (The mechanism is brutal, but over 10 years, production isn't affected.) There's a newer, more gentle mechanism.[2] The orange picking machine is a big version of a grape harvester.[3]
Very few kinds of produce require full robotic picking. Apples to be sold whole do, and robotic apple picking exists, but is still experimental.[4] Robotic strawberry picking machines are available.[5]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyI6-jKIfoo [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av17eM1Ruyo [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXTnd90XFWE [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI
Potato harvesters are simple. They drive a horizontal blade through the ground at root level, and bring up everything above the blade onto a conveyor with slots. The dirt falls through the slots back onto the ground, and the potatoes are carried upward. Here's an operation that's digging 450 acres a day. Look how fast the trucks fill up with potatoes. No amount of hand labor could compete with that.[2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7gydrEpzAs [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KL7OrHkDaY
For an extreme example, pay me 200$ an hour and I'll quit my web dev job and do it myself.
Here's a real example: you can work as an electrician on a mine site here in Australia on a fly-in, fly-out ("FIFO") basis. Typical rosters are 11/3 (days on/off), 2/1 (weeks on/off), etc. You work through weekends when you are on, and often do ~12-13 hour days. Food is good, beds aren't bad, Internet connectivity is 'passable' and the weather is extremely hot.
Many of these jobs pay (substantially!) more than what an electrical designer or electrical engineer may make - e.g. the ones providing a design, drawings or specifications to the electrical contractors. Many designers & engineers hold their relevant tickets or certs—or could quickly obtain one—in order to be an electrician on these sites.
So why would anyone still want to be a designer or engineer? Quality of life, quality of work (mental engagement), transport/commute, safety, overall career progression, etc.
It therefore does not surprise me that people aren't scrambling to pick fruit for hours per day.
Because the other, tough job, doesn't pay enough. People prefer the easy, fun job that pays enough.
edit: This is so obvious that everyone who makes the argument that Americans won't take jobs always elides over the exact number of the pay difference as if it isn't the most important factor. This article is pretty great because it doesn't. It makes clear that they're paying a pittance, which due to legislation has become a significantly larger pittance over the past 30 years, massively improving the lives of some of the most vulnerable people.
How many children got a winter coat because people paid an extra 50 cents for a bottle of wine?
---
To the downvoters, I meant no disrespect but it was a fact.
It was AIDS infested Africa. Entire villages were wiped out by a disease. That didn't matter because there was oil to be extracted.
We heard less if at all about it here. But we got the oil.
But by trying to have our cake and eat it too, we're placing illegal workers in a rather unpleasant situation (or motivating them to place themselves in such situations, if you prefer). They're ripe for all kinds of abuse, and lack the kinds of stability we all want.
I'm not sure what element of this story is supposed to be negative.
On top of that, it's a job with zero job security and basically no potential for advancement. It's no surprise that people take other options whenever possible.
*Yes I know it's a hypothetical number.
There's no amount you could pay me to be a farmer, just like there's no amount you could pay be to become a doctor, a salesman, a lawyer, etc. I'm in tech because I like what I do.
Medicine requires many years of your life in training, and going hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
Also, it is extremely competitive and I'd probably fail out of it. High risk for no guaranteed payout.
Finance also doesn't actually pay that much. I had friends working at banks right out of college making <100K for 80 hour weeks. That's bad compared to Tech. Maybe Traders make more? But I have no idea how I'd even get a job as a trader and what it entails.
Being a lawyer at a not top tier institute also sucks in terms of pay/requires debt and training .
Tech really is quite high paying and good for people at all levels. I know people who did bootcamps and are now making 100K with a couple months of training.
No other industry offers THAT.
The problem with your analogy is that cash crops tend to command higher margins than foodstuffs like those grown in California. Margins are very low in agriculture, and it's a lot of hard, backbreaking, thankless work. That's before factoring in losses from climate conditions, insects, malformed food that nobody will buy and has to be thrown away...
So it's no surprise that wages are pitiful and labor supply remains low or relegated to immigrants who find toiling in the California sunshine preferable to the dangers and destitution found south of the border.
Has he tried Craigslist? Or has his entire hiring strategy involved approaching random people on the street?
The impression I get from the article is that he's willing to pay more, but not willing to change how he approaches hiring. Assuming that is the case, it's hard to fault anyone but him.
When I was a kid the democrats were on the side of labor, like American citizens who work with their hands. It's a shame that now the leaders of both parties agree that cheap manual labor is a right that rich people and corporations have
Farm work is seasonal, physically exhausting, hazardous to health, requires long hours, offers no long-term advancement, and the job sites often vary and are far away.
One only need look at the EU, an advanced economy that (mostly) offers freedom of movement across its diverse constituent states, to see how legal workers from less prosperous areas travel to more prosperous areas to perform skilled manual labor. In the EU's case, the internal economic disparities are often severe enough that the marginal utility of increased income to be gained elsewhere is very high, therefore internal migration is commonplace for blue-collar work.
In the US, this (mal-)adaptation is largely absent and is relegated to a few high-risk, high-income categories of manual labor, e.g. oil field roughnecks, Alaskan fishing; and to the similarly time-intensive long-distance truck driving. The phenomenon of a family's primary income-earner relocating elsewhere, leaving the family behind to perform a standard day's shift of blue-collar work is commonplace elsewhere in the world, but among non-immigrant legal US residents.
I'm immediately skeptical. What has Trump even done on the border that would have any effect on this at all right now?
Trump has done almost nothing on this front. Even his controversial travel ban (which is completely unrelated to Mexican immigration) has been shot down three times.
The series of highly-publicized immigration raids and deportation actions targeting, in many cases, categories of persons who.were previously not deportation priorities.
Ultimately the jobs need to be replaced by machines or the cost of labor needs to get passed on to the consumer. It might be the end of two buck chuck.
No!
The average income for the USA in 2008 was $28K!
That's the average - meaning that for every person earning $75K (not that much) there are a dozen people earning $20K.
90% of people don't work as an 'aspiration'. The don't have 'careers' they have 'jobs'. And 90% of jobs in this world are not very exciting. Stocking shelves, pushing paper etc..
It's crazy to suggest that 'almost all of our jobs are crap and boring and nobody wants to do them but desperate illegal migrants who'll work for crap pay'.
If you pay reasonable wages, people will do regular jobs - that's how almost the entire world works.
If there as no negative social stigma doing things like 'stocking shelves' - and BTW it's a very new phenom - then things would work just fine.
> That's the average - meaning that for every person earning $75K (not that much) there are a dozen people earning $20K.
For all your emphasis, this is a pretty dramatic misunderstanding of how averages work. You'd need a histogram to make the claim you're making.
The population earning $75K can equal the population earning $20K, or have basically any other relation to it, without affecting the average income.
I am now offering $15k for a new BMW, up from $10k, but there are still no takers. Clearly, there is a "desperate shortage" of BMWs...
Does the LA Times seriously expect us to believe that immigrant labor is immune to the Law of Supply and Demand--that no wage or no combination of wage and benefits is enticing enough to persuade American citizens to work in agriculture, or that if the price is so high as to be unsustainable for most farms, that automation wouldn't come to be viewed as an increasingly viable, cost-effective alternative if cheap, illegal labor were denied to them?
The LA Times should be ashamed of itself for publishing this propaganda.
If anyone else wants data on this assertion (farming as one of the most dangerous jobs in the US). It certainly appears to be up there, in both gross and per capita numbers. Seems to largely (for agricultural workers) be associated with transportation (not equipment, so perhaps the way many workers travel around fields and all in the back of trucks and similar unsafe methods?).
At the same time, I think we should make an effort to ensure people are doing it legally and benefit from the same worker protections that make hiring citizens so expensive. And we should crack down on people who hire undocumented workers or off the books employees.
I think if we did that, it would dramatically cut down on immigration without imposing quotas because there won't be huge numbers of jobs for unskilled workers making slave wages.
Farmers that want to do that will have to move their operations to Mexico or some other country with lax labor laws.
What makes it 'unpleasant' is the destruction of the social contract that valued 'regular work', and the fulfillment of specific jobs by illegal migrants which creates a negative 'social class signalling' dynamic to the work.
It's socially destructive, and irreversible - and I believe it adds considerably to inequality.
And yeah, some of the jobs are very unpleasant (I've worked a few of them). The article's sly portrayal of toothless guys and drug addicts refusing cushy gigs picking grapes at vineyards is meant to give an impression without coming out and saying something that probably cannot be supported by the data: the jobs are good and the citizens are lazy.
Every argument that "we simply can't get American citizens to do it" seems to be an appeal to a broken system staying broken.
Most agricultural jobs pay a few more dollars an hour than the minimum wage, but they are much harder jobs than minimum wage jobs. It is one thing to wake up early morning to milk the cows if you own the farm, it is another thing to do it for other people's cows.
I don't know about Alaska and Hawaii, but illegal aliens are a big part of the agricultural workforce throughout the lower 48.
A few dollars an hour above the baseline isn't enough to compensate for the long term health and career advancement penalties you'll be taking. These are terminal career positions; they don't get better. Hauling apples and hay isn't going to get you a spot at a tractor design firm.
Pay people enough to make a decent, comfortable life and you'll have workers. The CoL/wage arbitrage between foreign and american workers is what makes these jobs work.
Of course not. This is a change in required qualifications and education, not just a move up the ladder.
I don't know about agriculture jobs, but in food service your career prospects were to go from flipping burgers to managing/supervising/leading others who are flipping burgers (at increasing scale - store, regional, national, etc). While it's not as nice as any kind of engineering there is a way forward there. Of course moving up like this gets competitive because of the sheer volume of people "at the bottom" hoping to move up.
There are quite a few young people who would like to own a farm, often not farmer's kids. It would be almost impossible to "make it" as a farmer without getting experience in the biz in one form or another.
Milk cows want to be milked, to relieve the pressure. So, given the freedom to use the robotic milkers any time they want, they get milked about three times a day. Milk production increases a bit. The cows are tagged and monitored, so any cow with a problem is quickly flagged.
I also don't have a problem with this guys vineyard failing. That's capitalism, sometimes (a lot of times) businesses fail.
Agreed, and add: it's actually the overwhelming majority.
After the fourth American cut the tip of their pinky off in the first couple of hours on the job and sued, they stopped trying.
I think I'm in the minority, though...
Agricultural jobs like these are strictly seasonal, require transportation to the job site, are physically exhausting, have very long days, and have no prospects for advancement.
Now compare that to refusing the offer and instead looking for a low-ranking job in construction, which requires transportation to the job site, is physically exhausting, and has very long days, but has work available year-round and has very real prospects for on-the-job training and career advancement.
I still think the answer to all of this is to call the Republican bluff, and just continually push E-verify any time anti-immigration nonsense comes up. Demand universal E-verify use, hit recalcitrant employers really hard (jail time, or at least business-crippling fines), and send the ICE thugs currently tormenting immigrants who try to speak out after the employers.
If nothing else, it would be amusing to listen to Ryan explain why he's suddenly soft on "illegals"[2].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/us/california-farmers-bac...
[2] There is no such thing as an illegal human.
You wouldn't work for what is about 20% above the national wage, to feed yourself, put a roof over your head?
If most people share your sentiment - then America is finished. You're done. It's over. I hope that's not the case.
Seriously, you were just joking, were you?
How does that saying go? "If you can't pay your employees a living wage, your business shouldn't exist"?
And maybe it's about time consumers learned the true cost of the goods they buy, without the artificial price suppression of abundant, cheap labor.
You know when there was a bug in the codebase so hard to fix and for so many years that developers started building on top of that and considered the bug to be 'not really a bug' but more of a design decision.
And then some new hire comes along and fixes it without a deep understanding of the dependencies and breaks existing functionality. And then the dev budget for 'fixing' everything goes sky high?
Guess what will happen to the price of produce?
Law is the foundation a society is built on. If breaking the law becomes the norm, a society will slowly disintegrate. If laws create more problems then they solve, but are enforced, they are eventually changed. This should be the norm, not breaking them.
Very little, because it's a highly competitive global market and much of what is in supermarkets is already imported. There's a few crops where CA is dominant and where prices would be affected significantly, but the main question would be "what happens to the jobs, and the companies, when labor costs make it impossible to sell their product at a profit".
Jobs aren't a fixed quantity for which wages will rise without limit given a labor supply constraint.
No. Californians don't want the jobs. Americans live in more than just CA, I know a lot of people in CA find this hard to believe but there is a whole world outside of Sillycon Valley.
We lived in a house in an extremely rural area. I made good money doing high tech work at the nearby WalMart Stores, Inc., home office.
Most of our neighbors, for miles in every direction, were pretty poor. Many of them lived in broken down trailers on properties handed down generation after generation. Unemployment was very high.
A kindly, law abiding man who went to our church ran one of the many chicken farms, and had for decades.
The only people he could find to work on his chicken farms were Latinos, many or most of them were probably illegal. They did provide proper documentation, so he wasn't breaking the law by employing them.
I asked him how he ran his farm before the Latinos started arriving 15 or so years earlier. He said that in that time, it wasn't hard to find young people who were happy to do the hard, unpleasant work associated with a chicken farm. He said he hadn't raised his wages past minimum wage since the very beginning.
In fact, he said, the Latinos worked a lot harder than the native locals had.
> Americans live in more than just CA, I know a lot of people in CA find this hard to believe but there is a whole world outside of Sillycon Valley.
While not adding much of anything to this conversation, and being needlessly snarky, I understand the fundamental sentiment here. I live in 'Sillycon Valley'. In many ways, it is quite silly here, and a lot of folks have a rather insular mindset, one that I personally try hard to keep clear of.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/alabama-law-drives-out-...
Maybe they can get those senior citizens living high on the hog of Meals On Wheels to get out there and pick crops?
That's because you're biased. Its a small trend over a long period of time that doesn't outpace the cost of living. There is also a massive shortage of farmers thanks to big agriculture killing them all off.
Most farmers want to own the land they work. Good luck with that in CA
Yes, but if they wanted the jobs, they'd come to CA for them.
> I know a lot of people in CA find this hard to believe but there is a whole world outside of Sillycon Valley.
Most people in California—who are, after all, themsleves outside of Silicon Valley, which is a small piece of the state—are well aware of that.
CA is facing a mass exodus right now. Why on Earth would anyone willingly move there with costs being what they are?
I left 10 years ago and will never go back. I can earn just as much with a cost of living being half of that in any number of states.
> Most people in California—who are, after all, themsleves outside of Silicon Valley, which is a small piece of the state—are well aware of that.
I grew up there and no they aren't aware of it. SV isn't a small part of the state. Its the entire middle of it since hardly anyone who works there can live there. They have to commute for hours from all around.
The other half is in LA county with the same delusions. The populace out side of those areas is tiny in comparison.
Just a thought:
Government loans with low interest, delayed and income-contingent repayment, and forgiveness after a set period of on-time payments for relocation expenses for unemployed adults with job offers outside of their own immediate area. Getting people to where the work is good for the public fisc, good for employers, and good for the people involved.