Many times, especially regarding farm fieldwork e.g. at harvest, certain industrial jobs like lumber mills, and childcare, we hear from prospective or current employers, something along the lines of “people don’t want to work” or “I can’t find the labor”. There are a number of critical reasons that this situation comes up, and so the below is documenting them.
There are jobs worth taking for which you can’t easily get people in industrialized countries to take, but those are the minority, and the below list will help to distinguish meaningful opportunities from the slavery-adjacent “opportunities”.
We recognize that being able to attract and keep a mate is a fundamental distinction between slavery and freedom. If you have to:
- Work in a rural area with very limited opportunities to find a mate in the first place
- Try to keep a mate who expects to send your children to a school of acceptable quality, and not bounce them around random teachers every six weeks during harvest season
- Make enough money to meet the financial standards of a woman worth marrying
- Not put your family in living conditions like fleas and cockroaches in the bed
your field labor job at $15/hr does not meet the requirements; accepting that as a way of life vs. 1-2 years, is not something that works in the Western world (vs. the poor countries where people are willing to persist in relationships based primarily on having a provider).
By contrast, if you are poor and remain in an urban area, though far more notionally expensive, you can:
- At least try to pick up a selection of women
- You might be able to send your children to a decent school
- You can draw on welfare to have somewhere to live, that could well be better than what you would get as a hobo
and so the field labor gig is already dominated by the urban situation.
As for the matter of income and career: there is no career progression in commodity manual labor. You can progress out of it, but you have to do training, management, all the things that take you away from doing the work with your hands. As tradespeople, you don’t have career progression: you do more work, you make more money. Your hourly rate is much closer to fixed. Even as a professional athlete, you have a short peak and then you are just trying to hang on. If your requirement is marriage to a decent woman, giving your kids a decent living, etc. you have to get out of a commodity low-paying manual labor job, not go into it. For example, you bust your butt at Wal-Mart and work your way up – which you can do in most urban, suburban, and even rural areas. It is not economically rational for a Western worker to do such labor for anything other than survival while they re-train and try to find a viable situation.
As for survival wages: survival is not even a question for women, who are in shortage around the world. At worst, they can do suburban childcare and just barely get by. But, the average woman can get a man to support her in exchange for sex, and if she has or wants to have children who can then go to decent schools because the man is supporting her, the economic costs of inferior schooling (e.g. by children misbehaving, by being able to get better jobs, etc.) already outweigh the hourly wages from rural labor. Survival wages only matter to men, especially responsible ones who won’t join organized crime.
At a more fundamental level: if you have low-paid immigrant labor of some sort, you can’t expect the market mechanism to raise wages/working/living conditions to a level that attracts domestic workers, because the marginal wage rate of worldwide labor is direct slavery. Thus, anything that offers a marginal advantage is acceptable to the global bulk manual labor pool; but the key point is that the marginal advantage may be significant in the context of their home countries, but not in their work countries. When you send remittances to poor countries, it gets you land, houses, etc. where you can accumulate capital or at least a decent living situation. In the money-inflated developed countries, you have to build up millions of dollars in wealth to do the same thing. If we followed this line of thinking, the only value proposition for Western workers in accepting such low-paying work, is for them to “retire” to poor countries, and accept a permanent loss of living standards, home, culture, etc. – and in the case of raising children, where people want to come to Europe, America, etc. – that is a grossly economically negative choice.
So, if you like your home country, or if you have or want to have children, all of these bad jobs are not even economically positive alternatives.