Maryland's crab industry suffers from Trump cutting temp foreign worker visas
43 replies, posted
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/08/17/feature/trump-changed-a-seasonal-worker-program-now-marylands-crab-houses-are-losing-business/
Another example of Americans being unwilling to do jobs that Mexicans on seasonal work permits always did. The same story is playing out at meat-packing plants, farms, and other manual labour jobs across the country. For all the yelling about immigrants "taking our jobs", Americans aren't jumping to take them now that they've been "reserved" for proper Americans.
And let's never mind that Trump is cutting and screwing around with the H-2B visa program while Mar-a-Lago doesn't even try to hire domestic workers before it applies for 50+ foreign worker permits. Truly, this is how you make America great again, right?
they're taking our jobs that we don't wanna do
those filthy fuckers
this is what happens when you play politics with the H2B visa program and release them one day before the AG season begins. These are normally released in january but the DHS waffled until almost june so everybody was behind staffing up
What if Trump comes up with the idea of "it was all a plot to show you how much you need immigrants" and gets away with it?
"I was just pretending to be a racist shit eel. vv "
Literally the exact same thing is happening here with fruit pickers, farmers can't get any seasonal work because they can't get locals to take the jobs that used to get taken by temp work from the EU.
There's this idealism that pervades neo-republican politics: that if we cut off foreign trade and foreign workers (a group of policies which we can simply call "anti-global"), then people will instead buy American commodities (steel, cars, for example) and hire American workers which will stimulate American growth.
The reality is that all they're doing is making like more expensive overall for everyone; making it harder to find labor, find resources, etc.
I honestly believe that the new republican party's ideal country is North Korea
What's ironic is that a lot of conservatives have historically been pro-free trade. Hell, publications like the National Review still are. Ever since Trump got in power, though, many Republican's positions have changed in order so that they can ally themselves with his xenophobic base.
Its because the pay is shit.
And who's ready to step in and pick up the slack? Why look, it's the for-profit prison industry with just the glut of slaves we need!
The article says the company in question is offering $9.60 per hour, I made more than that as a dishwasher in college and that was an actual year-round job. No shit these companies are having a hard time hiring Americans, nobody is going to take a job with low wages and no security.
This also highlights how industries take advantage of migrant workers too.
and physically demanding. these sort of jobs often require lots of lifting at a very fast pace which thanks to our lack of healthcare can really screw you over if you tear anything.
So, really, between shitty pay and rough conditions, it's almost like Americans aren't willing to pay what crab actually costs, and the market, to compensate, effectively abuses and neglects its workers by paying them less than fair wages.
Trust me I know. I work in a supermarket making 10.45 an hour. 30 to 50 pounds of chicken, ground beef, and pork go out every half hour for us and that doesn't even include the 20 pound wooden pallets. Pile ontop of that dealing with customers and doing things like having to cut and prep their food for them.
I should be making 20 to 25 dollars an hour, have my own place, and living comfortably. Instead I live in my parents house, in the converted porch to room while the foundation of said porch is collapsing into a sink hole. Fuck this shit. And half the problem is the American consumer absolutely hates the idea of actually paying an actual price for their god damn avarice.
So it's better that migrant workers are underpaid at near slave wages?
No, we're saying that those jobs should be paying decent wages. Then maybe they wouldn't have worker shortages.
9.65 is pitiful pay for crabbing. It's hard, HARD work. I know several people who do it or have done it out on the Chesapeake, and it's rough. No one is going to want to do it for that much when you can make 11/hr checking receipts at the door at WalMart. I've never heard of crabbers making so little.
If anything I'd say this is a sign of an industry or company that doesn't want to pay what the labor is worth. That, or being able to sorta soften the blow come payday by using people who would do it for scraps.
I kinda feel though for the family run farms and ranches that need them to get by though. A corporate farm by comparison will survive and thrive more under this administration as smaller ones fold.
Its consolidating more power to large groups, furthering a dystopian hellhold we're heading for.
$25 an hour for unskilled labor? you're fucking joking. there are 2 possible outcomes, either the company giving you that kind of pay for putting meat on a shelf goes out of business leaving you with no pay whatsoever, or the cost of living rises with it making $25 as good as $10 causing the cycle to repeat.
just look at australia for the exact scenario you're asking for.
20-25 dollars an hour is 41-52K a year, which is absurd. You're working in an industry dominated by teenagers and people working a second job. Full-time at a grocery store is the realm of people living with their parents. The only people working in grocery stores with their own house are managers and higher or people living in incredibly low cost-of-living areas of the country. Cutting/stocking meat is unskilled. Unskilled means you can hire any joe off the street to do your job. You're easily replaceable, and therefore cheap.
Jobs you get 20-25 an hour for are skilled labor. Things that require apprenticeships or certifications or degrees to aquire. Things that make you much more difficult to replace. If you want 20-25 you need to do some self-improvement, and that may require moving someplace else if the opportunities just aren't there where you live. And if you're looking at making a career out of cutting and stocking meat, unless you start working for a proper butcher, you're gonna spend a lot of time living with your parents.
Just because a wage isn't livable within your standard of living doesn't mean it isn't fair.
Fuck these companies, if youre having a hard time finding non immigrant workers, maybe you should be paying more than peanuts.
You can get by on minimum wage in Australia fairly easily (by easily I mean you won't be starving or without a roof over your head; your social life will likely be fairly lackluster, but the necessities will be taken care of). And minimum wage here ain't far off $20 per hour. According to the Fair Work Ombudsman:
The national minimum wage is currently $18.93 per hour or $719.20 per 38 hour week (before tax).
At $719.20 per week, a 50 week working year would net you $35,960 total before tax. According to the Australian government website's tax calculator, you'll lose about $3,374.40 of that to tax. So your weekly earnings over the year (dividing the amount after tax over the full 52 week year because, y'know, you still need to pay rent and eat even on the weeks that your'e not working) are more like $626.64 (rounding down to the cent) per week.
You'd have to live frugally, but it's completely doable. Hell, I've done that more-or-less for a year or two (the scholarship I get doing my PhD is a little under that amount of money per week).
there's no way they can do what they do and afford to sell their products at a profit. these aren't factory farms or factory ships that are having trouble securing visas these are the eponymous small businesses the republicans are the supposed champions of. large corporations don't need h2b visas or have the legal means to secure more than enough workers every year.
you can live frugally on 10.40 an hour too in the majority of the united states.
i love when people defend paying peanuts because "otherwise business wont exist"
If you cant afford to operate on anything better than slave wages you shouldnt be open
Industry dominated by teenagers and people working a second job? Hey buddy boy, maybe you missed the big news but the majority of people working two jobs have two part time jobs now and days. Also why the fuck is this a zero sum game? If I was getting paid 20 to 25 for meat cutting, fish prep, cleaning both a service case, the machines in the back and the dishes, as well as stocking the shelves, helping customers with issues, helping older customers get shit to their cart, making up for missing people by working by myself, helping other departments that are understaffed even though I'm not trained, and work around heavy equipment all day I think I'm a little above unskilled labor, doucher.
The fact that you're calling 40-50k a year an absurd amount of money kinda makes me wonder
It only sounds like a lot of money but broken up into a whole year's worth of living that's really not that much
Mind you that's not forty to fifty thousand bucks cashed out all at once, it's a wage, it is the cumulative
40-50k a year paid out in twenty to twenty-five dollar chunks per hour and collected into a week's pay is gonna net about 750-950 bucks a week, remember?
That's putting our hypothetically absurdly paid worker at a grand total of $3300 to $4100 every month or week to exist on, depending on how their workplace does paychecks and, and this is very important, assuming the person works a full forty hour work week
Does anyone wanna help me sort of broaden this point out?
What could you do with that money in a week? In a month? How much would you have left over after bills and necessities? How much more livable a wage would that be?
Even if you just had five hundred bucks more every month, how much more could you do with your life?
How many more of you would have more time, energy, and money to go out and contribute more to the economy if you were just slightly less preoccupied with the business of keeping a roof over your head and food in the fridge?
How many of you can't currently "do some self-improvement" because you're too preoccupied keeping a roof over your head and food in the fridge? Working too many hours because you can't afford to work less? Can't afford school and can't afford to quit? Can't afford to move?
And can I just pay special attention to that for a minute, 'move to where the opportunities are'? Just to ask where exactly that is? And how exactly one is supposed to get the funding in order to go to there if they're already struggling to stay in one place as it is?
Remember, this isn't just about money, it's also about time and energy, and moving takes a lot of both of those things. You need time to research places to move, time to look for housing, time to look for jobs, and of course doing all that takes energy too, which someone might not have when they've been preoccupied keeping their head above water
And y'know it's not like the money just disappears forever. It goes to people who turn around and spend it. It gets put right back in to the economy and every single person not struggling to make ends meet represents another potential contributor putting more money back into the system in more places than just their landlord and grocer
It's not like the biggest employers in the US can't afford it, either. Doug McMillion makes upwards of twenty million a year, and Walmart has done pretty well with him at the helm. For his salary alone, you could hire four hundred new full time workers for 25 bucks an hour, forty hours a week
Is there just something I'm not getting here? Because 40-50k doesn't seem like an absurd amount of money to me. In fact, it seems just barely a step above basic living wages to me, what with the economic realities of our time like things costing more and money being worth less and all
I was gonna start this off with asking why you're so hostile about this, but after rereading my post I see it may have come off as an attack. Wasn't meant that way, I was simply stating facts.
Unemployment may have exploded where you live, but where I live we've got a shortage of people and plenty of jobs to fill. It sounds like you ignored what may be the most important part of my post for you, which is the fact that you may just have to move someplace else to find better opportunities.
I never said apprenticeships paid well, I said you need an apprenticeship to get to the jobs that pay well. Also, your comment on butchers was the point I was implying. Maybe you should look at a different field, since this one is obviously dying.
I make 37K a year from my 50hr/wk entry-level job and an extra 300/mo from the National Guard, and own a house and 3 vehicles which i regularly spend money on to improve, and the only debt I have apart from the mortgage is some student loan debt. It's not hard to get by on, but I had to get certifications and network with people to get to this point, since what I do is considered "skilled" (IT/InfoSec).
You seem to have a mixed up definition of what "skilled labor" is. Skilled labor doesn't mean you do a lot of things and are good at your job. You can be skilled at unskilled labor. Skilled labor is labor that requires significant training and education. You seem desperate for a non-office job, so a great example of that would be welders, or mechanics. Not meat department clerks at a grocery.
And hey, if you're desperate for that type of job, have you considered the armed forces? I usually hate recruiting but you honestly sound like the type of person who would benefit from a quick 3-6yr stint. You can do those types of skilled-labor jobs and get paid to get the training for them. I know a lot of people who are making bank as fiber technicians or welders or diesel mechanics because of the training they received from the military.
I think it's a difference of perspective. Here, $500/mo gets you a studio apartment, and you can get some 1b1ba apartments for a hundred more. In one week, you've already paid rent and have $250-450 left over. Utilities usually run around $200/mo, so you've also paid utilities in your first week. Gas is usually somewhere from $50-$100 a month for me depending on how much you drive, so at the $20/hr rate you've finally tapped into your second week of work. I'll be generous and list $300/mo for groceries. We're sitting at $1100/mo to live here. that leaves at least 2200/mo for extra expenses, hobbies, going out, savings, or self improvement. And that's at 40hrs/wk. At $10/hr you're still looking at $400/mo to spare, and all of this is if you don't have a roommate. I worked 30hrs/wk at $8.50/hr and was able to split an apartment and have enough money for going out to the bar. I guess I'm less sympathetic to people struggling to get by because they live someplace that's hard to afford to live.
However, you make a good point. I have no idea how people do it (though I know of a few people in my area who moved here from california and are now living very comfortably for the same wage or less). All I can really contribute is that unemployment rate here is 3.3%, fareway is hiring meat clerks at $11/hr part time, aldi just had a hiring event for $14+/hr, and I know hy-vee, another grocer, is also is hiring meat department full and part time though I can't get a good link for it.
400 employees sounds like a lot, but let's look at this from Walmart's point of view for a second. They employ 2.1 million people. 400 employees is .02% of the people they employ. Let's take this further. Walmart had 11,695 stores in 2017. 400 employees are one new employee for every ~30 stores. Or if we disburse that across all employees? and extra $10 per year. Next to nothing. And with that 20mil gone, there's no incentive to effectively lead the largest employer in the US.
None of that is anything near skilled labor. That's all stuff you can teach a high school kid to do with a week of computer training in the back and shadowing a current employee.
Outside of a few weird examples, there aren't really skilled positions in retail. If your job doesn't require any unique skills, education, isn't dangerous, in demand, or very laborious, of course you're not going to make a lot of money doing it, because almost any semifunctioning 18 year old can do what you're doing.
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