I say something that said the labor supply dropped mostly because of early retirement, which makes some sense as the olds are more vulnerable to covid and more likely to have assets that appreciated these past few years. But after that it was lower Immigration.
I haven't seen any data on my theory that doordash etc has sucked up a meaningful percentage of fast food workers -- better pay, less bullshit -- but I haven't looked for any either.
Seasonal immigrant labor is pretty much invisible to me here -- our ag is mostly hay, so it's not like there is a huge need -- and I don't have the sense that construction involves a lot of immigrant labor here. Resorts have long employed foreigners brought in for the tourist season on whatever visa that is, and covid cut that off the last 2 summers. I guess we're also having a shortage of kids from Minnesota coming out for an adventure out west.
I'm making my last* filing in an Idaho case today -- it arises from a workplace injury at a potato packaging plant (my client made and installed the palletizer involved in the accident) and the all the non-managers are native speakers of Spanish, and I'm told that many don't speak English well enough to read the operators manual. I don't think of us having that type of outfit here in Missoula, but maybe I'm not looking in the right places.
* We won, and today's filing will be a draft judgment for the costs we were awarded. Appeal expected, so it's only 'last' in the lower court.
Oh, right, immigrants pick the cherries up around Flathead Lake. It's my sense that the white supremacists thereabouts are way too exercised about Indigenous people to get wound up about the immigrants coming in, a nice ironic twist. But I'll bet a whole lot of folks up there have strong opinions about sanctuary cities.
I knew a guy whose parents had a commercial cherry orchard in Montana.
He had housing for the workers. They were really good cherries.
4: I know they went after your client, probably because they have deeper pockets, but that sounds like a negligent employer too. Also, maybe it would be good practice going forward to have directions written in Spanish (and maybe Portuguese? - that would be around here).
This is in the US, Boston -- you can't 'go after' your employer hardly at all. Anyway, the injury wasn't because the employee couldn't read the manual, but because he reached into the machine without turning it off. OSHA cited the employer, which had disabled the safety locks, and both the employer and the employee sued my client and others involved in the palletizer transaction. His injuries were serious, and the remedy in Idaho for that is workers compensation. The question is whether my client is a contractor or subcontractor of the employer, which means it can't be sued, or a 'third-party' that can be sued.
Also, it's Idaho, so non-economic damages would be capped at 350k anyway. Not nothing, for the employee, obviously.
(One issue that the district court did not reach was employer negligence. In Idaho, even 1% employer negligence would cut off the employer's subrogation claim -- negligence isn't usually an appropriate subject for summary judgment, but I think our argument that no reasonable juror could tag them for 0% was fundamentally sound. I'll argue it as an alternative ground for affirmance as to the employer on appeal.)
Oh, right, immigrants pick the cherries up around Flathead Lake.
I think the Flathead pickers are almost all migrant. There's some more permanent resident types working potatoes around Dillon and I hear there's been an influx working dairy operations and timber in places like Libby.
9: I know you can't, but it does, based on your description, sound as though the employer contributed to the problem.
My co-worker got hit by a filing cabinet at work, and it sucked because she had a concussion for a while (still not 100%) and workmans' comp covers only 2/3 of salary. She's essentially a single mom (not divorced and no support from her absent husband), so it was rough.
And occ health kept contacting our boss to try to probe if she was the kind of person who would malinger.
You know, it would have been simpler if they were more careful.
I believe that the reason noone is discussing it, is a newly widespread recognition that immigration is as contentious as abortion in the US.
For example, imagine a world (not ours) where this completely matter of fact paper was made into an evening news segment: US demand for nurses improves outcomes in both the Phillipines and in the US.
Education is an investment in the future, worldwide, and more visas distribute that investment efficiently. Back to you Bob, how's voting on student loan forgiveness going?
I learn about changes in US policy relevant to the TPS (the policy that keeps all of the people around here who use restaurants at all fed, as well as keeping their houses inrepair leta lone building new ones) in my part central-american neighborhood by reading the free Spanish weeklies, one of which is Vatican-subsidized. Not a peep in either the good big paper or in the metro area weekly.
Approaching the Friedman zone, but I had an interesting conversation last month with a young Iraqi uber driver who went to my high school after some time in a camp in Syria. If anyone's interested, I'll recount after running an errand.
I think it's pretty straightforward - labor can stand against immigration for parochial reasons, and it doesn't have to, and the evolving labor movement is creditably turning away from that. (Possibly related: the greater prominence within established unions of food and hospitality workers, esp. in Nevada.)
doordash etc has sucked up a meaningful percentage of fast food workers -- better pay, less bullshit
Less bullshit perhaps in the form of bosses getting on your case personally, as they subsume that into the app, but I rather doubt it's better pay; Uber and Lyft definitely aren't.
13.1: My suspicion is that the United States either reduces immigration now or goes fascist. I suspect lots of people have the same fear but nobody sees a benefit in having a public discussion on this.
|| It had to happen eventually, and probably sooner than later; but NMM to Betty White.
|>
Relevant here is Eric Kaufmann's book Whiteshift. He is slagged off as a fascist routinely because he writes about this stuff, but I don't think that's remotely fair, based both on the book and on pers. comm. as they say. But the brexit catastrophe would certainly never have happened without widespread resentment of immigration, and I don't suppose Trump would have done so either.
The other great mistake made by elements of the Left is to suppose that immigrants will themselves vote to the Left. Outside machine politics, that doesn't happen. I know from my own experience as an unskilled immigrant in Sweden that I was a long way further to the right there than I am and an imperialist middle class relic in this country.
At least she never lived to be too old to play with Legos.
I don't know what the left's mistake was. Mine was that people would recoil from transparent evil.
Estimates Show Slowest Growth on Record for the Nation's Population
DEC. 21, 2021 -- According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Vintage 2021 national and state population estimates and components of change released today, the population of the United States grew in the past year by 392,665, or 0.1%, the lowest rate since the nation's founding. The slow rate of growth can be attributed to decreased net international migration, decreased fertility, and increased mortality due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/2021-population-estimates.html
Yeah. The kids aren't left with enough money to raise a family the way they were raised.
A guy with a "Let's Go Brandon" hoodie picked up his dog's shit and put it in someone else's trash can.
Honestly, the fact that people are so possessive of their municipally-issued waste disposal bins is a bit odd to me. If the dog shit wasn't in a bag, though, that's less cool.
21: I just saw this article about housing and population decline, which is somehow not conclusive on whether to purchase a house in Toledo. Any thoughts?
(I myself have never put animal shit in a stranger's trash bin. I guess that's a special case.)
Seems like there is a wave of Afghan refugees that are likely to start impacting immigration numbers soon. I don't imagine they will pull politics to the left, but, despite what Tucker Carlson says, bringing in political allies is not actually the reason I support immigration.
They don't usually dump the whole trash can here, especially in this case where the can was too big for a single worker to lift if full. The trucks don't have a lift for a rolling can because too many houses have no way to use that kind of can. The workers take the bags out of the can and will leave the little bag of poop to fall to the bottom until the owner removes it.
Anyway, I'm all for encouraging young people to move to Toledo, but there's no way I'll do it.
26: My church had a visit from the resettlement agency near us. A lot are coming to MA, compared to normal numbers.
Shiv's snowboarding instructor bragged that he is working here instead of Colorado because there's no vaxx requirement.
The garbage trucks here have arms that come down and pick the trash cans up and up end them over the top of the truck. I think that makes it okay to put dog shit bags in anyone's trash can.
32:. That was my reasoning back when my dog was alive.
I'm aware of the technology. We just don't have it here.
Moby: "My suspicion is that the United States either reduces immigration now or goes fascist."
The US will never reduce immigration. Immigrants do all the dirty, low-paid jobs that native-born cannot and will not do. fruit&veg? immigrants. Abbatoirs? immigrants. Housing construction and renovation? The general contractor's a white guy, but the people who actually do the work? immigrants.
The US will not and cannot reduce immigration, without a fundamental restructuring of society that will entail a massive reduction in the profits of the wealthy. In a way, it's like how a big part of how inflation was so low, for so long, was that stuff got offshored to China and elsewhere: so Americans got to keep buying stuff for cheap. Make tomatoes actually cost what it'll cost, for native-born to pick 'em, and you'll get a revolution unless middle-class America sees a pay raise to pay for it.
And if the answer is to bring in immigrants to pick 'em under conditions where they cannot settle here, then .... well, that's gonna be functionally indistinguishable from a totalitarian state for those workers. We had some experience with that, back before 1861.
I don't think the wealthy are as in control of things as they think they are.
Agree with 36 and disagree with 35, look at Brexit.
My cousin did hiring for packing plant. I guess I could ask him who they hired and how.
He switched jobs. Not sure what he does now.
Unfoggetarian: It's still early days, but it sure looks like the UK suffering greatly from throttling immigration from the EU, and it didn't stop it from the rest of the world (e.g. Commonwealth). I will not be surprised to see freedom of movement come back in some form, b/c business will demand it.
Business did demand it, and the nutcases went ahead with a hard brexit anyway. When your voter base is retired people, why do you need to care about what business thinks?
We have a cunning plan.
Didn't we already massively restrict immigration? I thought numbers were way down.
Probably because of the covid recession.
Steve Perry is now Asian, so obviously the country is changing.
Did I know that already and forget it?
Chetan writes: The US will never reduce immigration. Immigrants do all the dirty, low-paid jobs that native-born cannot and will not do. fruit&veg? immigrants. Abbatoirs? immigrants. Housing construction and renovation? The general contractor's a white guy, but the people who actually do the work? immigrants.
This is so far as it goes true enough in the UK -- I don't know about abbatoirs. And it does leave out the role of immigration in women's work -- cleaning, caring, hospitality -- all of which were dependent on EU labour before Brexit and covid. We just don't know yet what will happen when the covid wave recedes and things like tourism resume with no one to do the jobs that tourists need done.
In fact I think it is the role of female immigrants that is going to turn out to be crucial in the UK. Agriculture seems to operate under different rules here: all the farmer who voted for Brexit are completely fucked, but no one cares about them and most of our food is anyway imported. But the NHS, the care homes, the rural tourism industries -- all those are dependent on women from abroad. When they stop working, things will get bitter and twisted.
But we're not threatened with fascism, or neo-fash, the way the US is. I'm hoping that Brexit will prove a prophylactic dose of xenophobia, that will strengthen our defences against the real thing.
True that we're not immediately threatened with fascism or neo-fash. But the Tories are so completely lacking in any kind of consistent principles that they'd go neo-fash in a heartbeat if they thought it would win them an election. Their elder statesmen/women wouldn't, but nobody cares about them anyway. This could happen by 2024 if Brexit really goes tits up.
without wishing to impute principles or competence to the Tories, who would be their glorious leader in the neofash future?
"Immigrants do all the dirty, low-paid jobs that native-born cannot and will not do. "
There is a market-clearing wage for everything. Also, the increase in labor activism is a direct consequence of workers knowing that they have leverage. When workers have leverage, they can negotiate to ensure that the necessary jobs are not as "dirty" or as "low-paid".
No need for a global reserve army of the unemployed.
I don't know what his politics are, but he's got to be looking for a way to improve his image.
"most of our food is anyway imported"
50% by value of food consumed in the UK is imported as of 2017. Less than I thought - and the UK also exports quite a lot, of course.
50: this https://theconversation.com/the-real-reasons-why-british-workers-wont-pick-fruit-80152 is quite a good explanation of why "just raise the wages dur" is not going to achieve results in this area. Basically because the UK is not a toy economy in which interchangeable labour units move in a frictionless vacuum.
Let me be the first to suggest that the people recruiting harvest labor stop referring to themselves as "gangmasters."
For what are probably obvious reasons, I've linked to this article before. There was no greenhouse when I lived in town.
50: I do subscribe to the idea that if the wage were raised enough, Americans would (e.g.) pick tomatoes for a living. But that wage would be high enough as to make growing tomatoes in America completely uneconomic. Ditto for lots of agricultural products. And if prices for food rose significantly .... how are the vast majority of Americans, already not exactly affording their lives as it is, to afford these higher prices? Perhaps it can be done by shifting the income that got taken by the rich, but I doubt they'd agree to that.
NW is right to mention the role of women in this global migrant workforce. America doesn't train enough nurses (or doctors): where are we to get these nurses? Are we actually going to *invest* to train them? I'm an American because my family came here in 1969: my father was a doctor, trained in India, and came here as did many thousands (and they still do come) to the US. And the US still doesn't train enough doctors.
There's a solution to the above conundrum for low-skill workers: "guest worker programs". They exist already, and are sometimes closer to slave labor camps than temporary immigration. Just expand them: surely there are workers somewhere in the world so *desperate* they'll put up with awful oppression for a higher wage than back home. Surely. I'd class this as "goes fascist", if for no other reason than I cannot imagine how it could be done without bleeding over to affect many brown/black Americans. But even this won't work for the many skilled professions that have heavy immigrant representation. And that's basically every technical profession in the country. These people aren't by-and-large underpaid (ok, H1-B sure) so it's not about raising the wage enough for Americans to take those jobs.
It would take massive restructuring of the economy, of education, everything, to make our country work without masses of immigrants. You'd have to move a lot of wealth and income from the top decile to lower deciles, raise wages in all sorts of low-paid jobs, completely revamp education, etc, etc. From the point of view of The Owners (the rich) all of this is suicide. I can't imagine they'd permit it. So instead, they'll do what they've done all along (under GrOPer administrations, but also under Dems): allow immigrants to come in, but use random and brutal enforcement of Kafkaesque rules to ensure that they're scared and compliant and don't demand their rights. In short, Fascism.
Ajay: I read the article about the UK. I think it's correct. But what it misses is that there *is* a wage at which native UK workers would move to the countryside and become farm laborers. That wage is higher than it might otherwise be, because there are so many structural factors against such migration, sure. But there is a sufficiently high wage, that would cause them to move.
Problem is, that wage is so high that those farms would go out of business, or be out-competed by imports. So in that sense, you can't just "raise wages and the native-born workers will come".
I presume that the US doesn't train enough doctors because it lets doctors decide how many doctors to train, and they like to keep their wages at the current very high level.
I think nursing and rural tourism are pretty different, in that nursing is a year-round job while rural tourism is seasonal. A key part of migrant labor is that you work really hard for a season, and then you get to go home and enjoy that money with your family. This is one reason why locals don't want to do it, they'd rather work a normal amount all year round because they live where they're working. Or you work really hard most of the year and send that money home where it goes further and takes care of your extended family. You can't easily replace that with immigration from further away, because travel is more difficult and more expensive. Nursing, on the other hand, is appealing to permanent immigrants, and appealing to locals if you pay well enough. So some combination of increasing pay and increasing immigration from commonwealth countries could sort it out much more easily.
Is there anywhere in the world that has sorted out the "beautiful rural areas become all vacation properties and airbnbs and thus too expensive for anyone to live there year-round, causing problems for finding people to actually manage the properties" spiral? I see lots of complaining about it in lots of places, but I don't think I've ever seen a successful model. Something like the North Harris Trust is probably the kind of model I see mentioned most often, but it's not clear to me whether it really works.
I think "some wage" obscures more than it clarifies. Like I'd start considering it at rates of something like $1k/hour, but honestly that's probably not enough. Of course other people are going to have a lower price point, but the point is that you'd have to pay people a lot more than their current job.
Harvest labor is something you need either young people or people who have done that labor from a young age.
"And if prices for food rose significantly .... how are the vast majority of Americans, already not exactly affording their lives as it is, to afford these higher prices?"
1.) As I said, last time this topic was raised on Crooked Timber: most of the cost of food arises at the absolute end of the value chain. For example, a 40% increase in salary for tomato pickers amounts to a $15 yearly increase in family spending. Or nothing (e.g., Whole Foods did not pass this price increase on to its customers)
2.) Americans spend a minimal amount of money on food for consumption at home. And far less than they used to.
3.) Stating that farms cannot afford to raise prices or they will be driven out of business by imports is exactly equivalent to stating that exploitation of farmworkers is a consequence of free trade. And presumably the exploitation of workers in any sector exposed to such competition.
4.) As I also said last time on Crooked Timber - these arguments are exactly the same as the arguments cited in opposition to raising the minimum wage.
Unfoggetarian: "Is there anywhere in the world that has sorted out the "beautiful rural areas become all vacation properties and airbnbs and thus too expensive for anyone to live there year-round, causing problems for finding people to actually manage the properties" spiral?"
ha! you reminded me of the same problem in every big city with a dynamic and growing economy, where all the people who make it work and don't actually work in the dynamic sector (tech in the Bay Area, finance in NYC, etc) end up being priced-out of housing. So teachers and nurses have to live in Modesto and commute into Palo Alto.
In the end, I agree with you that we cannot replace immigrant labor in many unskilled jobs: they're just too hard on the body and native-born would require too high a wage. I mean, I worked full-time in fast-food for 2.5yr before college, almost all of it at the same place, and saw multiple cohorts of native-born workers come-and-go. I remember being told that turnover was about 400%/yr. The work was just too hard for the poor dears. Today, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of the workers there were immigrants.
nope @ 63: that HuffPo article cites a yearly wage of $12k-$15k/yr. Given how hard the work is, you'd have to do a lot more than a 40% increase, to attract native-born workers, I'd think. But that's not the real problem: it is monopsony in the buyers of farms' products, and we've been reading about that recently, right? How meat prices are going up, but ranchers aren't actually seeing any of that money? B/c of monopsony.
Look: we *can* increase wages for workers in all sorts of exploited sectors. But that money's gonna come outta somebody's hide, and the rich are going to make sure it isn't theirs.
I used to put up pig barns and grain bins. I was tougher back then.
"The work was just too hard for the poor dears. Today, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of the workers there were immigrants."
This is just contempt for the working class (who you presumably consider your political enemies).
"The work was just too hard for the poor dears. Today, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of the workers there were immigrants."
This is just contempt for the working class (who you presumably consider your political enemies).
65.2: But there I can think if successful models, Tokyo is the first that comes to mind. Basically you just need to build lots of housing (and to have built lots of housing 30 years ago).
nope @ 69: nope, contempt for the racist children I grew up with in lily-white East Incest, TX.
This was 1980: there were very few immigrants in that town, and, again, these kids seemed to not know the meaning of hard work.
1) Food distributor monopsonies strike me as a great target for anti-trust enforcement. Shouldn't that be the answer?
2) Food distributor monopsonies also mean that there is room to increase prices at the supplier level, without those prices increases being passed on to consumers. Just decrease the distributor's monopoly profits.
3) So what if the market clearing wage is 40K (more than the median wage for a high-school graduate)? The effect on the consumer's food budgets is minimal. And to the extent that some lower income Americans do need help with food expenditures - that is the point of food stamps.
4) The notion that Americans are too lazy to do farm work is absurd. I attended college in rural Iowa. All the native Iowans I knew had worked summers as corn detasselers as teenagers.
"these kids seemed to not know the meaning of hard work."
*harumphs and adjusts monocle*
It would be so great if we could progra robots to do the most back breaking ag work - like manually picking fruit.
My first conversation on Unfogged was on this same topic.
I think robots will harvest crops before Americans will do farm labor.
key part of migrant labor is that you work really hard for a season, and then you get to go home and enjoy that money with your family.
This used to be true, but now, for West Coast Mexican farm laborers, it is too hard and unsafe to go back and forth to family in Mexico. The new model is year-round, following the crops without one home base. If you follow the UFW twitter (which is a great account), you'll see appeal after appeal to let them go home and return without immigration hassle.
Trump's policies created a huge farmworker shortage in CA. Wages went up to $20/hour. They haven't gone higher and farm labor is still short.
76: But isn't that exactly why there's big labor shortages? At any rate I was talking about the UK, where pre-Brexit there was literally no obstacle to moving between Poland and the UK.
But the point I was trying to make is that there's good reasons why jobs that attract migrant workers are more appealing to migrant workers than they are to locals. It's not just about wage level, if you increase the wage that's great because the migrant workers deserve fair wages, but it'll still be more appealing to people who are looking to work part of the year in another country than it will be to locals. If you're going to work long hours for part of the year, then in the rest of the year you want to live somewhere with a low cost of living and a high quality of life, not Bumfuck CA. Teenagers are of course another exception (ala 72.4) because they have extra time when school is not in session and because they can't just move somewhere better on their own.
@77 Probably because wages are sticky and the assumption was that once Biden was in office the supply of cheap labor would resume.
"Stating that farms cannot afford to raise prices or they will be driven out of business by imports is exactly equivalent to stating that exploitation of farmworkers is a consequence of free trade"
No, it isn't.
"As I said, last time this topic was raised on Crooked Timber"
Imagine my complete lack of surprise
nope @ 72: I think you've misunderstood my point. Sure, we can raise wages for farmworkers (and nurses, and hospital aides, home health aides, etc). Yes, we can do that. But that's going to cut into the wealth and income of the rich, and they're not going to accept that. When you stipulate that we can break apart monopsonies in farm products you're ..... assuming a spherical cow: no such thing can happen, not in These United States.
For a while during Obama's term, I thought America was a center-left nation. I don't believe it anymore.
I return again to the observation that if the choice is between ending immigration and Fascism, then America will choose Fascism. In Nazi Germany, most Good Germans knew they would never be targeted by the massive machinery of oppression: they were Good Germans after all. That machinery was aimed only at undesirables, race enemies, race traitors. IIRC E.A. Johnson's "What We Knew" covered this well. s/Good Germans/White People/ and s/race enemies/immigrants/ and you've got the blueprint for America. America can't function without immigrants, and both at the low-end and the high-end.
79: oh yes. I'm in agreement with you. Moving seasonally for farm labor with no fixed home is awful and no one with a choice would do it. I was only saying that it is worse than you may think.
I saw somewhere that cheap food is the underpining for low wages. (And cheap food is only created by extracting quality of life from everything involved in producing it.)
Low wages, cheap food: might be stable for a long time. Sucks for the actual food makers.
High wages, expensive food: stable if there's no rush to the bottom, can be nice for actual food makers.
High wages, cheap food: even better
Low wages, expensive food wakes up the guillotines.
There is another complication wrt agricultural labour in particular, which is that the immigrants in Östra Rövknull are by definition enterprising and ambitious types who have travelled a long way in search of work. The natives left behind in rural areas are almost exactly the opposite. If they had as much drive and energy as the people competing for their jobs, they'd be competing somewhere else in their own country, more glamorous and better paid.
I think it's more likely that the type of food we eat and where it is raised will change. Switching to fruits and vegetables that are imported or require less labor, shipping animals abroad for processing, moving hog confinement and chicken-whatevers abroad.
The natives left behind in rural areas are almost exactly the opposite.
So much of not saying that aloud in my life.
Or, to put the matter in a Texan context, when Chetan was growing up in East Bumfuck, the sons of a native Texan doctor would not have stuck around in the places where he had to look for work.
NW: funny you mention that. My entire childhood, the pattern was that kids would graduate high school and go to work in the local butchery, or oil patch, or what have you. The "smart" ones would go off to Texas Tech, or UT Austin, and most would flunk out after a year-or-two, come back and finish their associates' degrees at "Harvard on the Hill" (aka Weatherford Community College) and again get blue-collar jobs. A number of my high school "friends" did that. It was a pretty terrible high school.
There was a decided attitude among even the "smart" kids (and this sort of thing is learned from parents) that "book learning" was to be frowned-upon and especially the idea of going away to some Eastern college was absolutely wrong -- you might pick up the wrong ideas.
These people, in the words of DJ Khaled [I only know him from the meme] have played themselves. The kids I grew up with are now the late-middle-aged town stalwarts, a population that went 80% for TFG, and really, what can you say for them? They hated nonwhites forty years ago, thought the deserved the standard of living they were getting, and systematically voted to destroy that standard of living, only getting by with more and more nonwhite and underpaid labor. And now that game is up.
Sure, they can fatten calves in Mexico just fine, but when they masturbate the bulls for the semen needed to artificially inseminate the cows, it won't be with love.
Anyway, my whole high school class left town, most for a university. Only one still lives in the area and only two others still live in a rural aree, unless you count all of South Dakota as a rural area.
"I return again to the observation that if the choice is between ending immigration and Fascism, then America will choose Fascism. In Nazi Germany, most Good Germans knew they would never be targeted by the massive machinery of oppression: they were Good Germans after all. That machinery was aimed only at undesirables, race enemies, race traitors. IIRC E.A. Johnson's "What We Knew" covered this well. s/Good Germans/White People/ and s/race enemies/immigrants/ and you've got the blueprint for America. America can't function without immigrants, and both at the low-end and the high-end."
This is a very convenient line of thinking. It allows you to hate the people you want to hate anyway. It removes them from your circle of empathy. It is also an utter dead-end for the left.
nope @ 91: Oooh, tell us all about how they're driven by economic anxiety, Unka Pat.
I looked it up. My home county was 86% for Trump, the same as 2016.
<more lighthearted>Okay, so, we switch to single-sex schooling ages 12-21, BUT it's normal for students to spend vacations/quarters off doing stoop labor, and there's sexual health and LOTS of birth control available at the transhumant trailers.
Treeplanting is not totally unlike this for a slice of outdoorsy people near me. And we can have sex at home even!
</ lighthearted>
NB *not* joking obligatory: there should be health care and decent housing whoever does the stoop labor, even if it makes us admit that the food costs more. But, like some of the "either bad A or bad B" analysis above, I can more easily imagine a cultural will to provide it if nearly-everyone does a term in ag at some point than if we have classes of people expected to do it their whole lives.
Unskilled child labour made our country what it is today!
(My parents' generation had this. The school holidays were timed so that the children could work the harvest. I dont really think they want it back.)
Throughout school. Children were in the fields from about the age of 8. You don't need to be very big to be a useful labourer.
why is it everybody, but everybody, at some point has the idea of forcing the youngs to do farm labour?
It's because they spent too much time watching videos where assholes give video game tips.
I think it's an easy thing to think of as cheerful and fun and character-building? Hard physical labor is the sort of thing that people who've never had to do much of it (like me!) remember fondly when they've done bits and pieces here and there. So you envision it as sending all the teenagers off to get tan and muscular and wholesomely tired before they come back to school in the fall refreshed and ready to learn. I don't think this is realistic, but it's an easy story to tell.
Actually, that was my strategy in grad/law school. I was so burnt out in June that the only thing that would make me willing to go back to class in the fall was a summer of manual labor. (Short summer. Law school started in August on semester and grad school ended in June on quarter system.) So I did field research for two summers at the end. After six weeks of field research I was ready for a desk again.
Because it does make for vivid memories and people who don't have to do it their whole life are likely glad they had that experience afterward. So they think others would be better off for it as well, even if they wouldn't choose it in the moment.
FWIW, I wouldn't only pick farm labor for the Youngs. There's tons of nature restoration to be done as well.
Pig barns and the inside of grain bins are really unpleasant places to be, but I don't suppose that's what people are thinking of.
Naw. They're thinking of orchards with flowering cover crops.
I've done some similar work and enjoyed it. But I'm not suggesting making farm labour compulsory for all children because I'm not a complete lunatic. People who do should be ashamed of themselves.
In answer to 99, it's because people persist in regarding the biggest problem facing society as the existence of teenagers, and will suggest literally anything as a solution to the Jugendfrage. Conscription, compulsory sports, compulsory farm labour, boarding schools, corporal punishment, etc.
Allergies are worse than pigs. Anyway, I worked fifty hours weeks doing farm construction for two summers and I've never been in better shape in my life.
What if some teenager wrongly decided they didn't want to do that?
Obviously, they could build my cob cabin.
My versions of youthful character-building were restaurant work, Catholic school and waking up at 4 a.m. to deliver newspapers for a couple of hours before school and on weekends. I would never put my kids in a Catholic school, and I don't encourage restaurant work. Newspaper delivery, to the extent that it happens at all, is done by automobile rather than by a kid with a bag and a red wagon.
It's easy to imagine that I was shaped by these experiences -- and indeed, dropping out of school to support myself with restaurant work taught me something important: I needed to find a way to get a degree. But I have a lot of friends from my generation who managed just fine without having to do any of that. It's a bit early to tell how my lax, permissive attitude is going to work out for my kids, but so far it seems to be going okay.
The kids aren't the ones causing the problem.s in the modern world. if there's any character building to be done it should probably be done to people in their forties and fifties.
I'm in way too much hip pain to build character.
Anyway, I blame the Boomers but it's probably too late for any of them that don't have character yet.
112. The ones causing problems in the modern world were kids once, after all.
Off topic, but we're past 100. Is Australia really stopping Djokovic at the boarder? What drama.
They are, but only because they've decided he's really a cane toad.
115: Yes, if only I had done some character-building in my youth, I might have some character now, but as it is it's too late, so I should probably continue to be as lazy and coddled as I can get away with.
The kids on Antiwork seem justifiably angry about many things but I don't know if they can use the labor shortage to get a better deal.
What's going to happen if tennis fans won't stop booing during points?
I really want one tennis tournament to decide they're going to play it like a normal sport with normal crowd noise, instead of some weird version of the opera.
Apparently Novax isn't just anti-vaccine but is basically against all medicine and felt guilty and sad for months because he was so weak that he needed elbow surgery.
I guess I'm part of the problem, but knowing the fans are going to boo loudly is about the only reason I'd watch a men's tennis match.
An update! https://twitter.com/paulsakkal/status/1478801484137447424
"At 5.30am, 6 hours after Novak Djokovic landed in Melbourne, he's still being questioned by Border Force officials in an airport room."
shiv grew up doing farm labor because his grandparents had a farm and the way you get work done is to make the kids do it. He also got paid to shoot gophers.
I get that it's difficult, but stabbing is a better fit with the name.
Unbelievable. What a bizarre situation. I'm guessing what happened here is that the government decided to see if they could find a problem with his paperwork to deny the visa. I wonder what's going on with the other 5 people who got medical exceptions.
On the one had I'm glad Djokovic got his comeupance, but on the other hand what a bush league way to run a country.
"I don't know how the feds will [address the fact that] several tennis players are already in the country with the same exemption granted to Novak," the source said.
128.2 -- I read something like that too somewhere. But I don't think it's publicly known exactly what exemption Djokovic had been given, so it's not possible to ascertain how reliable that claim is. And anyway, wasn't he turned away because he didn't have the paperwork to verify his eligibility for the exemption, or something?
Regardless, I'm dying of schadenfreude. How delightful.
My guess is that the problem with the paperwork was found after they decided they didn't want to let him in and that the other players with exceptions already entered the country on the same visa. It is possible that they all correctly found the right visa and Djokovic didn't, but that strikes me as extremely unlikely. Much much more likely with an election coming up that the government said "find us some pretext that we can reject his visa over."
One bit of evidence towards the claim that there wasn't a real problem is that the feds were more than happy to let him in if they could blame the Victoria (Labor) government for it.
Djokovic and Serbia generally continuing to demonstrate the established connection between believing in unscientific woo and supporting genocide.