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Then where exactly is this mass of currently non working American citizens with no employment prospects who are perfectly happy and able to start any work again, yet alone backbreaking labor like dealing with farms in the south, and how are they currently living without any pay? The main groups out of the work force are either old, in college (and thus entering soon!), disabled, or in between employment because layover/hiring cycles means there's always some left just like how housing vacancies will (and should) always exist.
Even if we want to discuss the relatively few working age NEETs or mentally ill homeless addicts or whatever, I don't think they're gonna start picking up a hoe because you pay them a little more.
Prime age male employment rate is only 86% now. It use to be 95% or higher doing economic expansions. So we have millions of men not working right now in America.
There are a lot of ways to live without pay today. Military disability (which is mostly fraud now), food stamps, housing vouchers etc. If you quit subsidizing unemployment you would get more workers.
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In the case that you are actually asking this question seriously, and not as a half-assed attempt at a rhetorical dunk, they're in the Appalachians. I have some family and old acquaintances in ${UNDISCLOSED}. One of the largest employers in the area has historically been a prepared food facility, which recently came under new management. This new executive team has been doing rolling waves of layoffs, and regularly furloughing workers who they retain an attempt to force them to quit. For the last year, both a relative and a friend have repeatedly noted that despite the rolling layoffs, the overall workforce at the plant has not decreased. It has, however, started to feature an increasingly large number of five foot tall Guatemalan men in their 20s who don't speak English, but present work papers claiming that they're John Billings from Madison, Wisconsin. It's agonizingly obvious that they're hiring people with stolen identities.
My cousin got laid off recently, and he's looking at trying to file some sort of suit against the company. I doubt it will go anywhere. He has placed upwards of thirty job applications in the fields of construction, municipal maintenance work, security, and HVAC. He hasn't heard a damned thing back from any of them. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that he has a felony drug charge on his record from 20 years ago, but in that area, that's not really uncommon.
You're welcome to pretend this is all about "jobs nobody wants to do", but believe me when I tell you it's climbing up the food chain.
As another commentator pointed out, unemployment rates don't match and if you go back historically they've never really matched, unemployment has never been all that high except for temporary disruptions with obvious causes like Covid or the recession. Maybe your family and old acquaintances are unlucky anecdotes, but they are absolutely not representative of the general economy in any way.
This ain't a conversation to be had with individual anecdotes but with data and statistics, and what those suggest is that there isn't some massive amount of capable American job seekers who are unable to find employment.
Maybe it is the drug charges, maybe it's more than just the drug charges. Sometimes terrible employees do exist and they will obviously lose out to better alternatives. It's what happens.
I will not hire a bad employee in my department simply because I feel bad for them, and no one else will either. Businesses want efficient and lean workplaces so we can compete for customers, we are not charities.
It’s impossible to get a job now. I had some business failings a few years ago. Tried to find a reasonable pivot to survive and not blow my savings. With 2 Ivy equivalent degrees I did the apply to anything on LinkedIn and think I submitted 5k applications. Maybe 3 interviews. Luckily business is now going well but it’s basically impossible to get a job.
It’s why there is a huge increase in left the labor market that isn’t showing up in the official statistics. I have no idea how to get a job in this environment especially if you need to do any kind of career pivot. It actually scares me a lot if business goes bad again that I would be able to find something to survive on. I guess I could work at McDonalds.
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Are you claiming that @birb_cromble's cousin is (or would be) a terrible employee, apropos of nothing besides the fact that he's sent out thirty job applications with no success?
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I know it's not the point of your post, but I just want to say that I've always found the whole "jobs nobody wants to do" argument infuriatingly obtuse and borderline offensive.
While nobody (that I am aware of) literally follows the argument up with "...and that's why the abolition of slavery was a bad thing" that is kind of what they are implying. What they are saying in effect is that people who do {dirty job} do not deserve to be compensated in such a way that someone would work {dirty job} voluntarily because {dirty job} is sub-human.
I don't think this is is quite a fair summary; the implication is that it is impossible to compensate someone enough that they will work {dirty job} - either literally impossible, or at the very least economically infeasible to do at scale.
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Slavery was economically inefficient, as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Bastiat, and many other early capitalist/capitalist aligned thinkers would point out. And therefore anyone who tried to argue "the economy is why the abolition of slavery is a bad thing" would be incorrect from the very start.
A free market of goods and labor however is economically efficient, and therefore any protectionist argument against that has to showcase why any claimed moral gains are worth the economic tradeoffs. There might be some things where that's true, but they aren't the same.
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They are doing it voluntarily. It's just that they are voluntarily doing it for wages that some people believe are too low. It's basically "the myth of consensual employment".
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You know what drives me apeshit? I've worked on a dairy farm, and an orchard. Sure, it's hot, dirty, and uncomfortable work, but it wasn't really any worse than a dinner rush in a commercial kitchen on a Friday night. I really get the impression that a lot of people assume manual labor is worse than the ninth circle of hell.
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I don't think that's what they are implying, they mostly see it as a way to imply white people are too lazy, and since those mean right wingers won't let them import hundreds of millions of better, hardworking brown people permanently and legally then they have to settle for bringing them illegally or temporarily. The lack of legal protections afforded to legal residents is only a feature in so far as it enables them to enlist the help of capital for this venture, they don't like it either.
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Unemployment in the US is currently at a historic low, but there doesn't need to be a mass of currently unemployed American citizens out there for immigration to depress wages.
As I argued in the comments of the linked post back in January, companies like Amazon and Tyson foods can easily weather things like Tariffs by simply passing the cost on to the consumer, but forcing them to pay American-level wages and provide American-level working conditions is much harder them to shrug off as it provides opportunities for other operators to start competing on cost and/or pick up market share.
It would seem to me that rule of supply and demand is the closest thing that economics has to a natural law. If the supply of labor is constrained relative to the demand, it stands to reason that the market price of labor (IE wages) will go up and vice versa.
Then historically there is a shortage of Americans who are willing to work but currently don't. Which is the claim being made here.
Of course it's classic supply and demand, more supply of labor (whether through automation or immigration or whatever) means cheaper labor costs. This also of course can mean products are cheaper and more available to buy as products become easier and cheaper to create. Immigration isn't as strong as automation since immigrants also consume (contribute to demand), but for very specific sectors where they cluster labor prices get driven down.
It's the inverse logic of why unions drive prices up and make stuff less affordable and less accessible to the average American. It's great for the union workers who get to hold the country hostage, it's bad for everyone else. Regulatorally enforced high labor costs benefits those who do labor by taking from those who need the labor done, like with elevators. Maybe it's a tradeoff we want to make, disabled people like the author, apartment dwellers, etc get less elevators in exchange for the elevator union having higher pay, but it is a tradeoff.
Same way that maybe we'd rather prefer American citizen construction workers get paid a lot of money over providing cheaper housing to our youth and our poor, we can make that tradeoff, but it is unavoidably one.
No, the claim being made here is that the labor shortage and associated rise in wages is a bad thing and I am disagreeing. I find it telling that the all the leisure-class liberals who claim to support labor and be all about "paying people a living wage" immediately change tack when it comes time to actually pay those wages.
Those things are bad and distortionary, any hypocrisy aside doesn't change it. This is a tautological statement: "Higher prices means higher prices". If you want labor to be paid more, then it means people who pay for the labor can afford it less easily.
It is unsolvable, just like the housing market or any other. It is literally impossible for the seller of labor/homes/etc to make more money and have the buyer pay less. You must make a tradeoff when meddling.
Yes, and?
Are you arguing that supporting labor is bad, or are you arguing that "paying people a living wage" is bad?
The second one, a "living wage" is a meaningless phrase. Especially in the US, where the only thing that can't be easily accessed even the poorest 10% of Americans, housing, is not because of a lack of pay but because of deliberate political decisions to restrict new supply.
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