>In my many years I have yet to find “Americans” doing roofing jobs for example.
Landscaping, too.
I never understood this from an economic perspective. The USA has rules in place for hiring non-citizens to come the country and fill jobs in landscaping. There are X slots a year.
Locally, the landscaping companies were complaining they couldn't do the work without those slots since they couldn't find workers due to the administration cutting the available non-citizen slots. They would come on the radio, complain to a host about hiring college kids to work, but they would leave after a few days.
The landscaping companies weren't raising the wage paid to attract and keep the people who would stay, though. They did raise the wage slightly, but not enough to move the needle.
Shouldn't the wage raise until you attract those people willing to do the work and stay? In turn, the cost of landscaping would rise to the customers.
> Shouldn't the wage raise until you attract those people willing to do the work and stay? In turn, the cost of landscaping would rise to the customers.
Utterances like "Americans won't take these jobs," "We can't find people for this req," are incomplete. The complete characterization is "Americans won't take these job FOR THIS PAY." I did think that for a time, that if everyone was willing to pay a premium for, say, landscaping service, any kind of service really, the premium would pay for the value-added, and the entire industry would slowly be pulled up. I was willing to pay a premium for landscaping, to a company that paid good wages, that hired ethically, and purportedly did excellent work. I paid the premium and got shitty service all the same. This has happened so frequently (tried to be a conscientious consumer, paid the premium, got shitty work that engendered more work for me to fix) it eroded this thinking in me. How do I adequately price X when X+premium still gets me substandard X? The safe action is to default to market price, and the gig economy wage is sliding downward. I don't know how I can individually influence this.
> I never understood this from an economic perspective. The USA has rules in place for hiring non-citizens to come the country and fill jobs in landscaping. There are X slots a year.
"X" is effectively zero. A few people get in legally via refugee status or family relationships, but in practice the number of green cards issued is a tiny, tiny fraction the number of jobs that are actually done by immigrant workers.
And it seems like covid isn't adjusting this much. Newly-unemployed legal workers are not rushing into fill gaps in, say, farm worker employment that were previously held by undocumented people. The "Americans won't do these jobs" theory seems to be holding.
Why would they? The wages are shit and the living conditions are terrible. It’s way worse than working on the oil rigs but the pay is like 1/4. Of course legal workers arent running towards these jobs. Like literally any other job will pay better and cause less damage to you body and health.
If farm workers payed fair wages and provided good living conditions and proper safety and ergonomic tools then sure more workers work be citizens but the disconnect is so large farms would have to double or triple wage costs so it’s easy to claim that they raised wages a buck or 2 and there were still no takers.
Landscaping, too.
I never understood this from an economic perspective. The USA has rules in place for hiring non-citizens to come the country and fill jobs in landscaping. There are X slots a year.
Locally, the landscaping companies were complaining they couldn't do the work without those slots since they couldn't find workers due to the administration cutting the available non-citizen slots. They would come on the radio, complain to a host about hiring college kids to work, but they would leave after a few days.
The landscaping companies weren't raising the wage paid to attract and keep the people who would stay, though. They did raise the wage slightly, but not enough to move the needle.
Shouldn't the wage raise until you attract those people willing to do the work and stay? In turn, the cost of landscaping would rise to the customers.