culture Archive

The stories have been everywhere these last few weeks. These two happened to be featured today in Google News and MSN, respectively, but they all say essentially the same thing, which is that Alabama has royally¹ fucked itself with its new toughest-in-the-nation immigration law — definitely in the short-term and, assuming nothing is revised or repealed, perhaps for years to come.

The tl;dr of not only the articles above but the entire issue in general is that Americans don’t want to work their asses off (literally) doing back-breaking labor (again, literally) for minimum wage — “minimum,” in this case, being meant ironically, since illegals could only aspire to that threshold. And that doesn’t mean that Americans are too fat, soft, or lazy to hold these jobs; it means that, like you or I (aka, people with a reliable internet connection), the vast majority of unemployed Alabamians still have not faced true desperation. But more than that, it demonstrates how long-in-coming cultural shifts cannot be overcome by a single flourish of the executive pen. Jobs performed primarily by Americans through the first half of the last century have, perhaps irreversibly, become the domain of immigrant laborers, with Americans no longer willing to subject themselves to such strenous working conditions day after day for miniscule wages and non-existent benefits.

As is pointed out in the Bloomberg piece:

The notion of jobs in fields and food plants as “immigrant work” is relatively new. As late as the 1940s, most farm labor in Alabama and elsewhere was done by Americans. During World War II the U.S. signed an agreement with Mexico to import temporary workers to ease labor shortages. Four and a half million Mexican guest workers crossed the border. At first most went to farms and orchards in California; by the program’s completion in 1964 they were working in almost every state. Many braceros—the term translates to “strong-arm,” as in someone who works with his arms—were granted green cards, became permanent residents, and continued to work in agriculture. Native-born Americans never returned to the fields. “Agricultural labor is basically 100 percent an immigrant job category,” says Princeton University sociologist Doug Massey, who studies population migration. “Once an occupational category becomes dominated by immigrants, it becomes very difficult to erase the stigma.”

Massey says Americans didn’t turn away from the work merely because it was hard or because of the pay but because they had come to think of it as beneath them. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the job itself,” he says. In other countries, citizens refuse to take jobs that Americans compete for. In Europe, Massey says, “auto manufacturing is an immigrant job category. Whereas in the States, it’s a native category.”

But history is never as compelling as humanity, so let’s put a face to the story, shall we?

On a sunny October afternoon, Juan Castro leans over the back of a pickup truck parked in the middle of a field at Ellen Jenkins’s farm in northern Alabama. He sorts tomatoes rapidly into buckets by color and ripeness. Behind him his crew—his father, his cousin, and some friends—move expertly through the rows of plants that stretch out for acres in all directions, barely looking up as they pull the last tomatoes of the season off the tangled vines and place them in baskets. Since heading into the fields at 7 a.m., they haven’t stopped for more than the few seconds it takes to swig some water. They’ll work until 6 p.m., earning $2 for each 25-pound basket they fill. The men figure they’ll take home around $60 apiece.

Parse that ‘graf again: that’s an 11-hour work day doing the type of labor you and I would consider cruel and unsusual if forced to continue after the first hour, which these men undertake day after day for less than $5.50 an hour. I make that much on a longer-than-average bathroom break, and believe me, the only thing I’m rolling in is debt. Even the excessively fit bow down to the immigrant work ethic:

In the weeks since the immigration law took hold, several hundred Americans have answered farmers’ ads for tomato pickers. A field over from where Juan Castro and his friends muse about the sorry state of the U.S. workforce, 34-year-old Jesse Durr stands among the vines. An aspiring rapper from inner-city Birmingham, he wears big jeans and a do-rag to shield his head from the sun. He had lost his job prepping food at Applebee’s, and after spending a few months looking for work a friend told him about a Facebook posting for farm labor.

The money isn’t good—$2 per basket, plus $600 to clear the three acres when the vines were picked clean—but he figures it’s better than sitting around. Plus, the transportation is free, provided by Jerry Spencer, who runs a community-supported agriculture program in Birmingham. That helps, because the farm is an hour north of Birmingham and the gas money adds up.

Durr thinks of himself as fit—he’s all chiseled muscle—but he is surprised at how hard the work is. “Not everyone is used to this. I ain’t used to it,” he says while taking a break in front of his truck. “But I’m getting used to it.”

Yet after three weeks in the fields, he is frustrated. His crew of seven has dropped down to two. “A lot of people look at this as slave work. I say, you do what you have to do,” Durr says. “My mission is to finish these acres. As long as I’m here, I’m striving for something.” In a neighboring field, Cedric Rayford is working a row. The 28-year-old came up with two friends from Gadsden, Ala., after hearing on the radio that farmers were hiring. The work is halfway complete when one member of their crew decides to quit. Rayford and crewmate Marvin Turner try to persuade their friend to stay and finish the job. Otherwise, no one will get paid. Turner even offers $20 out of his own pocket as a sweetener to no effect. “When a man’s mind is made up, there’s about nothing you can do,” he says.

Unsurprisingly, Alabama’s current governor, Robert Bentley² (R), is doubling down on the tough love rationale:

“If they [employers] are using illegal workers right now, will it hurt them? Possibly,” Bentley says. “Especially this first year or maybe the second year. But eventually, it will not hurt them, because we will get back to doing things the right way.”

Ah yes, the “right” way — aka, hiring legal residents at a fair wage commensurate with the difficulty of the job and the competitiveness of the market. Sounds great, right? Sure, if you can magically cut an equal amount of costs in other areas to avoid having to raise your prices. Cue cucumber farmer, Jerry Danford:

As we park and walk toward the fields, Danford talks about how many workers he needs to harvest all the cucumbers. Danford supplies a lot of the major pickle brand names you’d recognize. All those acres represent $20 million in retail pickle sales.

[...]

Since Danford doesn’t think a pool of labor, apart from immigrant workers, exists, he says he won’t be able to plant so much produce anymore.

But what if he paid a higher hourly wage?  The going rate now is $10 an hour.

“The [pickle] company wouldn’t buy it from you then,” he says.  They’d turn to suppliers in other states where labor is cheaper — states that allow undocumented immigrants to continue working under the radar.

Across Alabama we heard the same thing, from watermelon growers in the south to tomato farmers up north.

Whether cukes or catfish, the fundamental problem remains the same:

Skinning, gutting, and cutting up catfish is not easy or pleasant work. No one knows this better than Randy Rhodes, president of Harvest Select, which has a processing plant in impoverished Uniontown, Ala. For years, Rhodes has had trouble finding Americans willing to grab a knife and stand 10 or more hours a day in a cold, wet room for minimum wage and skimpy benefits.

[...]

Rhodes says he understands why Americans aren’t jumping at the chance to slice up catfish for minimum wage. He just doesn’t know what he can do about it. “I’m sorry, but I can’t pay those kids $13 an hour,” he says. Although the Uniontown plant, which processes about 850,000 pounds of fish a week, is the largest in Alabama and sells to big supermarket chains including Food Lion, Harris Teeter, and Sam’s Club (WMT), Rhodes says overseas competitors, which pay employees even lower wages, are squeezing the industry.

So what’s the solution? Jesus, who do I look like: Stephen Colbert?

Here’s an idea though. Why not return to our green card-granting ways, providing a path to citizenship for formerly illegal aliens willing to put in the blood, sweat, and tears required to help get the nicely packaged food we all take for granted from the fields and rivers to our grocery store shelves? Since we know they’re willing to do the work, we don’t have to pay them anything more than we were before (that’s called Capitalism!), and as long as they keep working, we’ll keep not-deporting them. Then we can turn an open eye — rather than our accustomed-to blind one — to more pressing matters: for example, teenagers using vodka-soaked tampons to get drunk! (Sneak preview: the ladies use ‘em how you’d expect, but the fellas…well, they had to get creative!)

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1. Fun fact: This is the only context in which you will ever see the word “royal” or its derivatives used to describe Alabama!
2. Are you kidding me? “Bentley”???