The People Pump

The Hard Job
of Tying Rebar

Posted on May 21, 2013

Bottom tier jobs are the non-heralded but necessary jobs that are quickly orphaned when more desirable work becomes available. Bottom tier jobs would include the handling and placing of rebar all day in the hot sun during the construction and repair of our highway system, mixing and delivering mortar for brick and stone masons, and the tedious and physically demanding farm work ranging from fruit and vegetable picking to animal maintenance. Yes, there are a lot of dirty and physically demanding jobs that are both low-paying, and unappreciated. Yet these low-end jobs are necessary to our way of life.

Just about anybody qualifies for our bottom-of-the-rung jobs. Most of these jobs require little to no training. A person with a strong back and a willingness to work is generally accepted as being qualified. Doing these less desirable jobs have an often overlooked advantage… upward mobility. From the bottom, a person can do one of three things:

1. Decide that the work is too hard and look for an easier way. (Welfare or possibly crime)
2. Be unreliable, drifting from job to job and stay at the bottom of the heap.
3. Take advantage of the opportunity, be reliable, no matter how crappy the job, and earn a good reputation.

Those who opt for being a reliable hard worker will get noticed. This is the pool of workers that get the promotions and some of the more motivated will form their own companies. There are many startup companies that began as side jobs to compliment wages.

Eventually, everybody engaged in these hard working and often nasty jobs will either drop out, get fired, or move up the ladder to better jobs.

What is important to note … these jobs do not go away. There is constant demand for unskilled laborers to do these demanding jobs. Keep in mind that most of these jobs are crappy and that nobody really wants to do them. Our home grown young people find these jobs so disagreeable that they would rather go on welfare or into crime to avoid them.

The fast food service is an example of the type jobs our young and inexperienced workers will do. The work is attractive because it is out of the weather (probably air-conditioned) and the work not physically hard – maybe frustrating, but not hard. They accept the low wage terms inherent in the fast food industry for the added benefits of job comfort.

So who is doing the low-pay, labor intensive work that we all depend on? We have to look no further than the swarms of humanity entering our country illegally. We really do depend on these people for a variety of manual tasks that are refused by our American entry-level workforce.

I call the present system a people pump. Why a people pump you ask? Simple, not even the undocumented workforce wants to do those crappy jobs forever. As soon as an opportunity for a better job comes along, they take it! But the crappy job they were doing is still there and needs a replacement for the person who just vacated it. Please try and understand the dynamics of why we have so many undocumented workers in America. Unless drastic changes are made to our present system, we will continue to inundate our country with undocumented labor. Even if we prevent all illegal border crossings by ‘closing the border’, the demand for willing labor will bring on a tidal wave of green-carded workers because we need them.

Economists will have to do the math, but one way for us to incentivize our entry level workforce would be to pay what the jobs are actually worth. We know that if the job paid fairly, an American workforce could be assembled. Our unemployed workforce would accept these jobs if the money was right. Just because a job is crappy doesn’t mean that the job doesn’t have value. But are the American people willing to accept the increase in prices for their groceries, yard care, highway systems, housing, and the many products that depend on cheap labor?

The cost may actually balance out – I’m no economist, but we spend a lot of money on the undocumented workforce through our healthcare, schools, tax losses, and welfare systems.

It is clear that without change in the way we are presently doing things; we will just have to prepare ourselves for being so foolish. Right now, both political parties, for different reasons, support the flow of undocumented workers. The Republicans like the idea of getting cheap labor, while the Democrats see opportunity by increasing their voting base.

Support Conservatism,

"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement." - Unknown, quoted by Jim Horning"

Cheers,
-Robert-

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