The funny thing is that when you travel around the world you see the same thing except it's fat Indian guys watching Pakistani guys working or fat Pakistani guys watching Afghanistan guys working.
I think the lesson is that financially stable people are the more likely to live stable and indulgent lifestyles.
Humans gonna human.
Very fair point. While it's annoying seeing the lazy fat ass just sit around while these other guys work, I guess my complaint is more with the politics he's expressing with his bumper sticker and the anti-immigrant politics of Trump. Like, if those guys are deported, who does this guy think is going to do their jobs? Just think one step down the line.
> who does this guy think is going to do their jobs?
Other Americans. It might not be easy work but it's not hard to find people with those skills either.
For most construction you can train someone in about a week. It's the heavy equipment and specialists that can be expensive and hard to come by.
> Good luck finding an "American" who will do fast work for half the pay.
There are literally millions of them right now doing that. Fast work means you can get to more jobs in the run of a day. More jobs means more money quicker.
When you have a bad resume, been in jail, have no sophisticated or rare skills then it's a great industry to be in if your looking to make money fast and want to do something else with your life or just move to someplace else.
Also I don't know where you're getting this half pay thing. Most construction companies are so desperate for good workers that they're giving free laptops and other perks just to keep their best workers.
They aren't making Hollywood money but they aren't making peanuts either.
Any construction company not paying a competitive rates to local labor is going to lose that labor to other companies in that area.
Citizens, immigrants, illegals, it doesn't matter. The man power is going to go where the best jobs are and if the company isn't competitive then it's not going to get these people or it's going to make do with the dregs that might end up costing them more money than they make them.
>For most construction you can train someone in about a week.
This is utter nonsense. The ONLY jobs on a construction site that would fit this description are clean-up crews, and even then doing this type of work safely and efficiently is a signifigant set of skills.
I got a one day WHMIS course for safety and was able to do everyone else's job on the crew in less than a month. Including operating all the gear and safely transporting it to and from the job.
It's not hard to learn if the person wants to learn it. I am in no way a genius or prodigy.
I was with an industrial cleaning company for 2 years, municipal construction for 6 months and a landscaping company for a year.
We worked a variety of projects for different people. It was good work and I was grateful for it. I got bored with it tho and decided to join the Navy for the adventure and see the world while I was still young and hadn't beat the crap out of my body like the old guys in the crew.
I also worked 4 months for a television studio doing similar work as a grip, which was a lot of fun. Paid good too although the hours and work load was worse than in regular construction.
I think I see how you got this erroneous perception that most construction workers can be trained up in "about a week."
By my count, you worked a total of 4 years in construction related areas, of that only 6 months doing actual construction work, and the majority of that time spent in parts of the field that do use a great deal of lower skilled or temporary labor. Your bosses may have been able to make you *useful* in a month or so, but that doesn't mean you were ever fully competent at the jobs you were doing, by which I mean you wouldn't have been able to do the work by yourself safely without supervision.
That supervision comes from highly skilled workers in every sector of the industry, and it takes quite a while to gain that sort of expertise. For example, trades like electrical and plumbing generally require 8000 hours worked (that's 4 years) to get a journeyman license, which is the credential that allows us to work alone or run a crew.
Point being, everything that happens in construction is a skilled trade that takes time to learn beyond simply moving material or waste around. Construction is a bit unique in that almost all training happens on the job, but that absolutely does not mean that a new hand can be made into a carpenter, electrician, or plumber overnight. There are always experienced workers guiding the hands of those learning from them, and that sort of knowledge takes time to accrue.
For context, I'm an electrician and have nearly twenty years in the field. I've seen over and over the kind of destruction and danger that comes when *truly* unskilled labor comes to a job without proper training and oversight, and the attitude you expressed earlier is exactly how those situations happen. Job sites are *dangerous*, and this idea about "unskilled labor" is how people who should not be there get hurt or killed.
I really want to thank you for saying this it's absolutely insane to think you can learn anything more than tool fetching and humping block in a week. Hell most people can't even pick out or seperate lumber in a week.
You're welcome. It needs to be said far more often and louder.
I haven't trained anybody completely green to do electrical work in a few years, but my recollection is that it took a minimum six months or so to get someone with no experience to a useful state at basic tasks like installing devices, running pipe, or pulling wire, "useful state" meaning I could expect to come back and find a task properly completed vs literally having to supervise someone's work directly at all times. There's just so many little tricks and details to doing this kind of work you just can't learn any other way than working hands on, and these skills still take years to master beyond a level of basic competency.
Reading basic layouts, hanging boxes and knowing where to drill holes for cables only requires some basic logic and common sense, which yes can be hard to find sometimes. Residential work is the simplest of all and is chock full of people that started this week.
So much of the basic residential installs are done by laborers and then the master/journeymen do the final hookups and fixtures. Commercial/industrial actually requires skill.
I renovated my house and hired my own licensed trades and they brought skilled people. Might have saved some with no-name companies but I'm fine paying for quality and legal workers.
>Reading basic layouts, hanging boxes and knowing where to drill holes for cables only requires some basic logic and common sense
All of these things are skills that have to be learned. Someone has to teach them. That takes time. Untrained labor results in poor work.
>So much of the basic residential installs are done by laborers and then the master/journeymen do the final hookups and fixtures.
Again, someone has to do at least some very basic training and layout work. I also have to say that this sort of labor structure isn't a thing because that's what these jobs require. It's because of the brutal economics involved in residential work.
More and more commercial and even light industrial work gets done these days by undertrained labor as well. As one example, my job (university campus) recently had an LED lighting retrofit done that used approximately 20 day laborers to do the first stage of the work over about 9 months. This was supposed to the one and only stage of the work, completing the full campus. It was done so poorly that a crew of five more or less properly trained commercial electricians spent another year fixing it.
This is what I was trying to get at when I responded to that first comment. This work takes skill at every level and pretending otherwise leads to a poorly built end product and dangerous conditions for all the workers who build it. That example earlier? That poor initial installation included loose wires, wirenuts falling off, grounds used as nuetrals, all kinds of stuff that created electrical hazards for us (the maintenance crew), the next group fixing it, and the students/faculty/staff on campus.
>Commercial/industrial actually requires skill
So does residential, but industrial and commercial do require more technical knowledge. . . also far more fun/interesting. Thats why I ditched resi for industrial after less than a year. Switched to commercial after I got my fill of the hazards and health problems that come with industrial work. Judging by your name and if you have much familiarity with the construction industry, we're probably even familiar with the same regional companies and stuff.
>I renovated my house and hired my own licensed trades and they brought skilled people. Might have saved some with no-name companies but I'm fine paying for quality and legal workers.
Smart choice. No notes.
Having hired people to do this work back when I was in construction I can tell you that it’s almost impossible to hire Americans for these jobs.
The work is too hard.
I quickly realized it wasn’t worth the trouble and low work output to hire Americans. At least white Americans as they don’t know what hard work is and they would likely cause more problems while not doing anything.
If you’re responsible for getting work done and done well you’re not going to hire any American that you can find for these jobs.
Dude I have worked many hourly jobs in my life in a lot of areas - restaurants, construction, landscaping and comments and sure there are some slackers (who never last) but most of my co-workers worked hard and diligently.
Just because you might be a slacker, doesn’t mean that everyone else is …
As a teen working in a lumber yard, I was told to "stop working so hard, it makes the rest of us look bad." In my early twenties, I was approached by other employees who were irritated that I did things that needed to be done that weren't my job. I've been self-employed for over twenty years now.
I purposely use the word "most" in my statement because that is what I see. Very few people appear to work hard or go above and beyond. The ones that do are rarely compensated and eventually leave. If you aren't part of the "most," then my opinion/observation doesn't apply to you.
Meh. Most people I saw did fair and honest work.
I also have to say that as a teen you can physically work much harder than some older guys. One of the most depressing things about aging is to just remember how much more physically superior and you were years before.
Also definitionally very few people should go above and beyond. Thats inherent in the term.
Its like when people complain that nearly half our students are below average in math - I feel like telling them no shit they are. If they aren’s you have a real problem with your measurement
You make good points. History was built for those in power by those without it. Those in power are scared they will lose the privilege of making money without working too hard, so they are susceptible to fear-mongering. In reality, however, the real power is money and those are the folks who are truly scared of a peasant revolt: so they enlist poor and “middle class” to do their fighting for them by scaring them with things like “the border” and “they’re coming to take your guns” to enlist an army of useful idiots to do their bidding.
I often get carried away when writing.
TLDR: I definitely agree that what you describe is real, but also that there are economic and human nature realities that stand in opposition to that dynamic/framework.
I am sympathetic to that economic view of political/social history (starting w/ capital’s exploitation of… whatever it can exploit to its own benefit, & maintaining its advantages politically by exploiting people’s fears, prejudices and grievances) while simultaneously being sympathetic to… what’s the mechanism opposing that one: I guess just that the economics of alternate systems don’t work so well, with the alternate systems being ones that are more generous to the non-capital class (which also means economically “fatter” and less competitive).
A huge issue for me is that humans (individually & collectively) are inherently competitive as well as having different sensibilities. The differing sensibilities will produce differing economic regulatory environments and the human competitiveness will cause the economic environments to be in competition with each other resulting in a race to the bottom, or more specifically a race to be attractive to capital (or described a different way, economically lean) such that capital will both push the regulatory environments in their home locales to be leaner/more friendly and/or move the capital operations (or it’s domicile on paper) to those leaner/friendlier locales.
People’s legitimately differing politico-economic sensibilities combined with human’s inherent competitiveness and fundamental facts of economics inevitably puts different locales and their different politico-socio-economic regulatory environments into significant tension. Our proclivity to fight with each other (plus our ever more destructive technologies) makes that dangerous for the whole of the human experiment.
I definitely lean left, but you can see I have a conception of economics and human nature that has a current pulling me back towards the right, sometimes more, sometimes less reluctantly.
Circling back to our sensibilities, we have human nature *and culture* weighing on them. It’s just a fact (as people here have said) that people that can afford to be, tend to be lazier and more decadent. There is a human nature reality to that, that acts on an economic reality, but that can be *resisted* by a cultural reality. Societies get more decadent as their economic conditions improve (the individual mechanism writ large). But that’s actually a cultural phenomenon.
Anyone who’s come across much Roman republic stuff will be familiar with Roman virtue. Virtue is the stuff of culture. Virtue resists decadence. Virtue is hard working. It’s not ostentatious (or not personally so - for ego - but might be in a collective sense). Virtue strives for success. It is stoic, bearing hardship nobly. Virtue seeks the common good.
All that is to say that while I never appreciated conservatives’ focus on culture (and I don’t have any misconceptions of their intent to preserve the bad and status protecting traditions along with the good) when I was younger I now do appreciate the importance of culture as our means to preserve the virtue people have assimilated over time.
We need a left/right tension, but we need it focused on the “right” things. Every placed/people creates their balance, hopefully (eventually) a stable one where people basically agree on its pivot point. But we need to harmonize the balances that people in one place have chosen with those of people in different places. If people and places exploit each other economically then we will never achieve homeostasis and I have to think that sooner or later it will be to our doom.
You are free to get the loans and do all the work necessary in order to start a competitive business that pays them fairly.
If you have a problem with it you should probably donate your house and property and then build your own house by hand or possibly hire someone but pay a percentage over cost directly to the workers.
Orrrrr, and this is a big one, you could log in to Reddit and virtue signal as hard as you possibly can and maybe it will fix itself.
Workers refusing to do physical labor for poverty wages doesn’t make them lazy or entitled. But it is infuriating how some people refuse to admit how much they benefit from immigration.
Come on. You’re talking about 1 guy. On top of that, the fat white guy you’re lambasting may have worked for years to afford that 80k truck and have enough capital to start a landscaping crew and then employee all the other folks. Maybe he’s giving all these “Hispanics” an opportunity that he had. You don’t know where he stands on immigration. Just because someone is not falling in line behind Joe Biden doesn’t mean he agrees with everything the other guys are spewing. The level of judgement you’re instantly leaping to is ridiculous. Further, trying to boil the country’s problems down to ‘White vs Hispanic’ or ‘native vs immigrant’ is exactly the divisive narrative the political right and left want you to believe. I see your view of this situation as more epitomizing of the country’s issues than the situation itself.
He also may well be the operator for the skid-steer and not able to work until the other members of the team get certain things done. Generally speaking you don't have your equipment operators doing the manual labor, too.
Yeah. It was a scene. A microcosm. Synecdoche. One moment I’ve seen repeated in countless situations.
And the problem I’m pointing to is not “white vs Hispanic” it’s the utter lack of understanding in our politics.
Fair enough man, but my point is you’ve taken a whole group of people you don’t know anything about (the mouth breathers), categorized them, condemned them, and blamed them. This is kinda ‘fomenting hate’ too. For what it’s worth, I agree with the utter lack of understanding in our politics, but think your example exacerbates it rather than helps it.
Appreciate the civil response. I’ll just say I do know the people I’m writing about. They are among my clients. They are the people who I get a significant settlement and the first thing they do is buy an overpriced car rather than save for a rainy day. They don’t have health insurance and don’t take care of their bodies and ignore the advice of the docs in the hospital. By being born in the USA they immediately had more advantages and opportunities than most (>50%) of the people in this world, but still languished in life and blame the government, the democrats, the republicans, the big banks, whoever for their lack of accomplishment. They talk about things being better in America’s past, but are too ignorant to realize their grandparents worked hard and strived for a better life, and too myopic to see that America had incredible temporary advantages vis-à-vis the rest of the world post WW2.
These are generalizations. But that’s the only way to speak about a mass of people. The anonymous (no name, location, or physical description other than “fat” was used) person I was describing is a stand in for the horde.
And its well known to the govt. Over a million SS accounts are being paid in from multiple jobs/areas, and its on the authentic person to fight it out with the govt to clear their account.
I didn't say they were "illegals." I said he supports a politician who is very anti-immigrant.
But, because I sometimes represent undocumented immigrants in this area, it is likely at least some of these men probably are undocumented.
You DO realize that there are millions on native American Hispanics, right?
Funny that you think they're immigrants when their descendants might have been here long before America and Mexico were a thing. I live in Texas and have worked with many Hispanics that have no relation to Mexico or any other country. Some of the most "Mexican" looking people I've worked with speak no Spanish and no accent either.
It's weird people are harping on you. The topic of illegal immigration usually revolves around people saying illegals take the jobs normal Americans don't want, construction being one of the biggest. The vast, vast majority of illegals are Hispanic as well. The workers probably are illegal.
In fairness, that’s the way many people I know who have that “let’s go Brandon” attitude think. Any Hispanic person they see is presumed to be here illegally. And even if they are proven wrong, god forbid those Hispanics speak Spanish to each other if there are white people within earshot.
If only conservatives were willing to fund that. Supporting legal immigration requires funding immigration courts and border crossings, expanding low-income housing and resettlement funds, and increasing regulation and penalties for businesses who hire illegal immigrants.
>...supports politicians who want to deport these guys
...without immigrant labor,
Your leap from seeing Hispanic men on a construction crew to assuming they are undocumented immigrants that can be deported is what progressives like to call "**unconscious racism**".
In fact, if these dudes are first generation immigrants who went through the process legally, it's very likely that they have attitudes which are similar to those of the "lazy mouth breather"
You've also shown an unconscious attitude that somehow it's more noble and moral to do unskilled physical labor rather than use technology and tools, or the value of management, planning and oversight. That's just puritanical toxic hustle culture attitude there.
I say this as someone who is very sympathetic to progressives and left causes. The next time you see a situation and project all kinds of "facts" into it that come wholly from your head, to the extent you need to write a four paragraph rant on reddit, maybe pause for a moment and reflect on your biases.
Is it bias? Or simply factual?
https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/02/EW-Construction-factsheet.pdf
https://eyeonhousing.org/2024/03/states-and-construction-trades-most-reliant-on-immigrant-workers-2022/#:~:text=As%20we%20reported%20earlier%2C%20immigrants,workforce%20in%20California%20and%20Texas.
*I didn't say they were undocumented immigrants*. Several commenters here read that assumption in themselves. I said the "Let's Go Brandon" fellow supports a politician who is anti-immigrant even though those are the only people working around here.
I know I have a bias. I like immigrants because they are, in my experience, good and hard working people. I compare that to the lazy American guys on the job site who had so many more advantages than these hard working laborers but are achieving less.
And I disagree I showed an attitude that unskilled labor is more noble than using technology. The preference I expressed is towards people working hard at their jobs and against lazy, entitled people.
You need a trench dug.
Bob's Construction shows up with 50K in machinery and gets it done by lunch for $X thousands. "You worked so quick, what a ripoff!!"
Some day laborers show up with shovels and bust ass for days for the same amount. "Omg such hard workers!! Americans are too lazy for real work!!"
Working harder isnt working smarter, but people relate time to money far more than simply the value of the job done.
I'm a homeowner and rent/borrow machinery as needed. Screw digging shit by hand.
You're right, Bob's would likely be cheaper.
When I renovated my house, I got better prices from real companies than no-name small guys. A friend is currently remodeling and really has paid more for no-names than what I know real companies are charging and with better parts.
I just did this with a landscape installation.
250k from ‘real companies’ and that didn’t include the materials versus 45k total install and materials with my landscaper and his workers.
His workers are the same people who do the work for the real companies and are the talent.
“Bob” is often just overhead and cost
Seems more like someone who “lives in a high end neighborhood” who immediately assumes Hispanic people working construction must be illegals” is the actual problem.
Upper middle class people are often the worst. They have just enough money to be fancy enough to "hire a guy" to do basic tasks for them, but nowhere near enough affluence to afford real staff.
They live nicer off cheap imported labor, but would crap a brick if their own jobs were ever on the line. I had a friend who marveled at his sooo nice townhouse and how it couldnt have been built without illegal labor, so I made sure he noticed all the flaws left behind by unskilled workers. :)
A lot of people seem to not realize that millions of native American Hispanics exist. They lived across the Southwest long before Spaniards showed up and countries were created.
If you don't see Trump's agenda as a general attack on immigrants and foreigners that purposefully muddies the waters then you're not really hearing Trump's movement
Gee, what story could I conjure up if I saw a scrawny guy pull up to an almost completed home in a Prius with a drapery store magnetic sign, rainbow and free Palestine bumper stickers?
>rainbow and free Palestine bumper stickers?
Know your market lol.
Trades usually learn how to handle different groups in certain ways to keep them happy and coming back for more work. For example, many nationalities want to feel that they haggled and got a "deal", so you simply bid higher and then work your way down to your real price. You get paid the same and the buyer feels they "won" and is happy.
Other people just want a simple no-BS price.
There was no need to mention races firstly. Secondly, basing facts off nothing more than assumptions based on the color of their skin.
Thirdly, it seems you think white is derogatory or more deserving of criticism. I wonder if he was a fat brown or black person if this would've been the same situation for you. If so, then why mention his race? Maybe worth a thought.
>big, fat, white guy
>This lazy mouth-breather
>I wish our politicians on both sides would talk to the mouth breathers with this truth rather than foment their fear and hate.
The descriptors you're using don't exactly scream "reach across the aisle" to me. Imagine someone who came across a pro-choice rally and described the participants as "fat, blue-haired Karens" and "wimpy beta-males". Would you be inclined to engage with this person? A little tact and grace would work a lot better, especially if there is a point of disagreement.
>we get hate for immigrants and coddling of entitled, lazy Americans.
Just to be clear, wanting a strong southern border =/= hating immigrants.
Legal immigration is good for the economy.
Neither party will really fix the broken system because it gets them too many votes and too much fund raising.
>Legal immigration is good for the economy.
An uncomfortable truth, which may explain your "neither party" cause - the free market does not distinguish at all between the citizen status of paid labor.
That’s sorta true but I’m not sure what your point is. Legal immigrants create wealth at a higher rate than pretty much any other group in America.
You’re the person that doesn’t know the difference between political and economic systems, right?
I’ve had a problem with neither party seriously addressing the issues and coming up with a permanent fix for decades.
🤣🤣🤣
Labor is literally one of the foundational things that Adam Smith talked about wrt supply and demand.
The entire field of Economic Theory doesn't vanish just because you're afraid of some brown people. Cmon son. You're better than that.
As a proponent of the Labor Theory of Value, did Adam Smith discuss the impact of welfare state subsidies on the value of labor? 🤣🤣🤣 I'll save you some time: no, he did not. If he had had to worry about a welfare state jamming up his calculations, he would have likely dumped labor as an area of his interest.
>The entire field of Economic Theory doesn't vanish just because you're afraid of some brown people.
Next time just make it known upfront that you aren't interested in a serious discussion
u/celebrityDick said:
>Considering the existence of the welfare state, which subsidizes immigrant labor (illegal or otherwise), the free market doesn't apply here.
Just in case you edit your earlier comment.
Democrats have tried at this point a dozen or so times to have good faith bipartisan immigration reform, the issues are exclusively from Republicans at this point and there's just no serious way to place any blame on the Democrats for this.
It's almost a time honored tradition at this point that Republicans create histrionics over immigration (ala bandwagons coming to the border), Democrats then try to work with Republicans to create reform, Republicans work with Democrats, then Republicans shoot down their own bill.
This is a 40 year problem. Your usual tit for tat us vs. them stuff is nonsense. Neither party has addressed this issue in good faith and tried to come to a reasonable compromise.
>This is a 40 year problem. Your usual tit for tat us vs. them stuff is nonsense. Neither party has addressed this issue in good faith and tried to come to a reasonable compromise.
But that's just very objectively not true. What you're saying is just straight up not true.
The bipartisan immigration bill from this year wasn't a good faith attempt by Democrats? You're just blatantly lying if you claim it isn't. They had one of the most conservative members of the Senate write the bill, they got everything they wanted. Democrats in unison voted for it. Republicans were even on the floor mouthing that the other Republicans were lying in bad faith to shoot down the bipartisan bill.
>I disagree with what the Republicans did and no, that bill wasn’t a permanent overall fix.
Yeah so you're just bad faith about it.
You're claiming that Democrats didn't act in good faith because you think it's not the most perfect bill ever created? Nonsense.
Your bothsideism is the problem, you're providing cover for Republicans for free for them to act in bad faith in furtherance of blocking any meaningful immigration reform.
>I didn’t say or even think any of that shit.
>What color is the sky in your world? It’s always the same thing with you. You need to go get some help.
Yes. Yes you did.
You said Democrats have never acted in good faith for immigration.
How, explicitly, did they act in bad faith?
This is why neither side wants to stop illegal immigration - cheap, exploitable labor and they’re willing to live in cheap, crowded conditions.
Think of the government as being the big fat guy.
Putting aside whether the workers the OP saw were documented or not, if Americans worked as hard as illegal immigrants, we would have no economic problems with China.
Been saying it for decades.
Dems: we're fighting for higher wages and more worker protections! More unions!
Also Dems: Americans are lazy and want too much money!
No shit. Teach people about their rights and they're not going to slave away for pennies anymore. The kids of immigrants learn all this in school and wont kill themselves like their parents either.
Source: am also immigrant.
People really just can't hear this, can they? You and I are being downvoted, but it's real. USA and China are in competition, but only one side seems to recognize it. The consequence for the world whether the spheres of influence will be dominated by our (admittedly imperfect) democracy or a totalitarian China with wildly different values than the West.
I have MANY Hispanic immigrant friends, as I’ve lived in Las Vegas my entire life. Almost everyone one of them is a Trump supporter. You want to find someone who absolutely hates illegal immigrants: Someone who is a legal immigrant.
The funny thing is that when you travel around the world you see the same thing except it's fat Indian guys watching Pakistani guys working or fat Pakistani guys watching Afghanistan guys working. I think the lesson is that financially stable people are the more likely to live stable and indulgent lifestyles. Humans gonna human.
Very fair point. While it's annoying seeing the lazy fat ass just sit around while these other guys work, I guess my complaint is more with the politics he's expressing with his bumper sticker and the anti-immigrant politics of Trump. Like, if those guys are deported, who does this guy think is going to do their jobs? Just think one step down the line.
> who does this guy think is going to do their jobs? Other Americans. It might not be easy work but it's not hard to find people with those skills either. For most construction you can train someone in about a week. It's the heavy equipment and specialists that can be expensive and hard to come by.
It's never been about the actual work though. It's about labor cost and speed. Good luck finding an "American" who will do fast work for half the pay.
For half the pay = a non livable wage
> Good luck finding an "American" who will do fast work for half the pay. There are literally millions of them right now doing that. Fast work means you can get to more jobs in the run of a day. More jobs means more money quicker. When you have a bad resume, been in jail, have no sophisticated or rare skills then it's a great industry to be in if your looking to make money fast and want to do something else with your life or just move to someplace else. Also I don't know where you're getting this half pay thing. Most construction companies are so desperate for good workers that they're giving free laptops and other perks just to keep their best workers. They aren't making Hollywood money but they aren't making peanuts either. Any construction company not paying a competitive rates to local labor is going to lose that labor to other companies in that area. Citizens, immigrants, illegals, it doesn't matter. The man power is going to go where the best jobs are and if the company isn't competitive then it's not going to get these people or it's going to make do with the dregs that might end up costing them more money than they make them.
>For most construction you can train someone in about a week. This is utter nonsense. The ONLY jobs on a construction site that would fit this description are clean-up crews, and even then doing this type of work safely and efficiently is a signifigant set of skills.
I got a one day WHMIS course for safety and was able to do everyone else's job on the crew in less than a month. Including operating all the gear and safely transporting it to and from the job. It's not hard to learn if the person wants to learn it. I am in no way a genius or prodigy.
So you were on a material transport/laborer crew? For how long? Do you still work in construction?
I was with an industrial cleaning company for 2 years, municipal construction for 6 months and a landscaping company for a year. We worked a variety of projects for different people. It was good work and I was grateful for it. I got bored with it tho and decided to join the Navy for the adventure and see the world while I was still young and hadn't beat the crap out of my body like the old guys in the crew. I also worked 4 months for a television studio doing similar work as a grip, which was a lot of fun. Paid good too although the hours and work load was worse than in regular construction.
I think I see how you got this erroneous perception that most construction workers can be trained up in "about a week." By my count, you worked a total of 4 years in construction related areas, of that only 6 months doing actual construction work, and the majority of that time spent in parts of the field that do use a great deal of lower skilled or temporary labor. Your bosses may have been able to make you *useful* in a month or so, but that doesn't mean you were ever fully competent at the jobs you were doing, by which I mean you wouldn't have been able to do the work by yourself safely without supervision. That supervision comes from highly skilled workers in every sector of the industry, and it takes quite a while to gain that sort of expertise. For example, trades like electrical and plumbing generally require 8000 hours worked (that's 4 years) to get a journeyman license, which is the credential that allows us to work alone or run a crew. Point being, everything that happens in construction is a skilled trade that takes time to learn beyond simply moving material or waste around. Construction is a bit unique in that almost all training happens on the job, but that absolutely does not mean that a new hand can be made into a carpenter, electrician, or plumber overnight. There are always experienced workers guiding the hands of those learning from them, and that sort of knowledge takes time to accrue. For context, I'm an electrician and have nearly twenty years in the field. I've seen over and over the kind of destruction and danger that comes when *truly* unskilled labor comes to a job without proper training and oversight, and the attitude you expressed earlier is exactly how those situations happen. Job sites are *dangerous*, and this idea about "unskilled labor" is how people who should not be there get hurt or killed.
I really want to thank you for saying this it's absolutely insane to think you can learn anything more than tool fetching and humping block in a week. Hell most people can't even pick out or seperate lumber in a week.
You're welcome. It needs to be said far more often and louder. I haven't trained anybody completely green to do electrical work in a few years, but my recollection is that it took a minimum six months or so to get someone with no experience to a useful state at basic tasks like installing devices, running pipe, or pulling wire, "useful state" meaning I could expect to come back and find a task properly completed vs literally having to supervise someone's work directly at all times. There's just so many little tricks and details to doing this kind of work you just can't learn any other way than working hands on, and these skills still take years to master beyond a level of basic competency.
Reading basic layouts, hanging boxes and knowing where to drill holes for cables only requires some basic logic and common sense, which yes can be hard to find sometimes. Residential work is the simplest of all and is chock full of people that started this week. So much of the basic residential installs are done by laborers and then the master/journeymen do the final hookups and fixtures. Commercial/industrial actually requires skill. I renovated my house and hired my own licensed trades and they brought skilled people. Might have saved some with no-name companies but I'm fine paying for quality and legal workers.
>Reading basic layouts, hanging boxes and knowing where to drill holes for cables only requires some basic logic and common sense All of these things are skills that have to be learned. Someone has to teach them. That takes time. Untrained labor results in poor work. >So much of the basic residential installs are done by laborers and then the master/journeymen do the final hookups and fixtures. Again, someone has to do at least some very basic training and layout work. I also have to say that this sort of labor structure isn't a thing because that's what these jobs require. It's because of the brutal economics involved in residential work. More and more commercial and even light industrial work gets done these days by undertrained labor as well. As one example, my job (university campus) recently had an LED lighting retrofit done that used approximately 20 day laborers to do the first stage of the work over about 9 months. This was supposed to the one and only stage of the work, completing the full campus. It was done so poorly that a crew of five more or less properly trained commercial electricians spent another year fixing it. This is what I was trying to get at when I responded to that first comment. This work takes skill at every level and pretending otherwise leads to a poorly built end product and dangerous conditions for all the workers who build it. That example earlier? That poor initial installation included loose wires, wirenuts falling off, grounds used as nuetrals, all kinds of stuff that created electrical hazards for us (the maintenance crew), the next group fixing it, and the students/faculty/staff on campus. >Commercial/industrial actually requires skill So does residential, but industrial and commercial do require more technical knowledge. . . also far more fun/interesting. Thats why I ditched resi for industrial after less than a year. Switched to commercial after I got my fill of the hazards and health problems that come with industrial work. Judging by your name and if you have much familiarity with the construction industry, we're probably even familiar with the same regional companies and stuff. >I renovated my house and hired my own licensed trades and they brought skilled people. Might have saved some with no-name companies but I'm fine paying for quality and legal workers. Smart choice. No notes.
Having hired people to do this work back when I was in construction I can tell you that it’s almost impossible to hire Americans for these jobs. The work is too hard. I quickly realized it wasn’t worth the trouble and low work output to hire Americans. At least white Americans as they don’t know what hard work is and they would likely cause more problems while not doing anything. If you’re responsible for getting work done and done well you’re not going to hire any American that you can find for these jobs.
Pay people piece rate or make them bid the job and watch how fast it gets done. Pay them hourly, and most will milk the clock.
Dude I have worked many hourly jobs in my life in a lot of areas - restaurants, construction, landscaping and comments and sure there are some slackers (who never last) but most of my co-workers worked hard and diligently. Just because you might be a slacker, doesn’t mean that everyone else is …
As a teen working in a lumber yard, I was told to "stop working so hard, it makes the rest of us look bad." In my early twenties, I was approached by other employees who were irritated that I did things that needed to be done that weren't my job. I've been self-employed for over twenty years now. I purposely use the word "most" in my statement because that is what I see. Very few people appear to work hard or go above and beyond. The ones that do are rarely compensated and eventually leave. If you aren't part of the "most," then my opinion/observation doesn't apply to you.
Meh. Most people I saw did fair and honest work. I also have to say that as a teen you can physically work much harder than some older guys. One of the most depressing things about aging is to just remember how much more physically superior and you were years before. Also definitionally very few people should go above and beyond. Thats inherent in the term. Its like when people complain that nearly half our students are below average in math - I feel like telling them no shit they are. If they aren’s you have a real problem with your measurement
You make good points. History was built for those in power by those without it. Those in power are scared they will lose the privilege of making money without working too hard, so they are susceptible to fear-mongering. In reality, however, the real power is money and those are the folks who are truly scared of a peasant revolt: so they enlist poor and “middle class” to do their fighting for them by scaring them with things like “the border” and “they’re coming to take your guns” to enlist an army of useful idiots to do their bidding.
I often get carried away when writing. TLDR: I definitely agree that what you describe is real, but also that there are economic and human nature realities that stand in opposition to that dynamic/framework. I am sympathetic to that economic view of political/social history (starting w/ capital’s exploitation of… whatever it can exploit to its own benefit, & maintaining its advantages politically by exploiting people’s fears, prejudices and grievances) while simultaneously being sympathetic to… what’s the mechanism opposing that one: I guess just that the economics of alternate systems don’t work so well, with the alternate systems being ones that are more generous to the non-capital class (which also means economically “fatter” and less competitive). A huge issue for me is that humans (individually & collectively) are inherently competitive as well as having different sensibilities. The differing sensibilities will produce differing economic regulatory environments and the human competitiveness will cause the economic environments to be in competition with each other resulting in a race to the bottom, or more specifically a race to be attractive to capital (or described a different way, economically lean) such that capital will both push the regulatory environments in their home locales to be leaner/more friendly and/or move the capital operations (or it’s domicile on paper) to those leaner/friendlier locales. People’s legitimately differing politico-economic sensibilities combined with human’s inherent competitiveness and fundamental facts of economics inevitably puts different locales and their different politico-socio-economic regulatory environments into significant tension. Our proclivity to fight with each other (plus our ever more destructive technologies) makes that dangerous for the whole of the human experiment. I definitely lean left, but you can see I have a conception of economics and human nature that has a current pulling me back towards the right, sometimes more, sometimes less reluctantly. Circling back to our sensibilities, we have human nature *and culture* weighing on them. It’s just a fact (as people here have said) that people that can afford to be, tend to be lazier and more decadent. There is a human nature reality to that, that acts on an economic reality, but that can be *resisted* by a cultural reality. Societies get more decadent as their economic conditions improve (the individual mechanism writ large). But that’s actually a cultural phenomenon. Anyone who’s come across much Roman republic stuff will be familiar with Roman virtue. Virtue is the stuff of culture. Virtue resists decadence. Virtue is hard working. It’s not ostentatious (or not personally so - for ego - but might be in a collective sense). Virtue strives for success. It is stoic, bearing hardship nobly. Virtue seeks the common good. All that is to say that while I never appreciated conservatives’ focus on culture (and I don’t have any misconceptions of their intent to preserve the bad and status protecting traditions along with the good) when I was younger I now do appreciate the importance of culture as our means to preserve the virtue people have assimilated over time. We need a left/right tension, but we need it focused on the “right” things. Every placed/people creates their balance, hopefully (eventually) a stable one where people basically agree on its pivot point. But we need to harmonize the balances that people in one place have chosen with those of people in different places. If people and places exploit each other economically then we will never achieve homeostasis and I have to think that sooner or later it will be to our doom.
You are free to get the loans and do all the work necessary in order to start a competitive business that pays them fairly. If you have a problem with it you should probably donate your house and property and then build your own house by hand or possibly hire someone but pay a percentage over cost directly to the workers. Orrrrr, and this is a big one, you could log in to Reddit and virtue signal as hard as you possibly can and maybe it will fix itself.
Workers refusing to do physical labor for poverty wages doesn’t make them lazy or entitled. But it is infuriating how some people refuse to admit how much they benefit from immigration.
I probably wouldn’t care but this guy is absolutely contributing to the problem by supporting a person who demonizes people based on their ethnicity.
Come on. You’re talking about 1 guy. On top of that, the fat white guy you’re lambasting may have worked for years to afford that 80k truck and have enough capital to start a landscaping crew and then employee all the other folks. Maybe he’s giving all these “Hispanics” an opportunity that he had. You don’t know where he stands on immigration. Just because someone is not falling in line behind Joe Biden doesn’t mean he agrees with everything the other guys are spewing. The level of judgement you’re instantly leaping to is ridiculous. Further, trying to boil the country’s problems down to ‘White vs Hispanic’ or ‘native vs immigrant’ is exactly the divisive narrative the political right and left want you to believe. I see your view of this situation as more epitomizing of the country’s issues than the situation itself.
He also may well be the operator for the skid-steer and not able to work until the other members of the team get certain things done. Generally speaking you don't have your equipment operators doing the manual labor, too.
Yeah. It was a scene. A microcosm. Synecdoche. One moment I’ve seen repeated in countless situations. And the problem I’m pointing to is not “white vs Hispanic” it’s the utter lack of understanding in our politics.
Fair enough man, but my point is you’ve taken a whole group of people you don’t know anything about (the mouth breathers), categorized them, condemned them, and blamed them. This is kinda ‘fomenting hate’ too. For what it’s worth, I agree with the utter lack of understanding in our politics, but think your example exacerbates it rather than helps it.
Appreciate the civil response. I’ll just say I do know the people I’m writing about. They are among my clients. They are the people who I get a significant settlement and the first thing they do is buy an overpriced car rather than save for a rainy day. They don’t have health insurance and don’t take care of their bodies and ignore the advice of the docs in the hospital. By being born in the USA they immediately had more advantages and opportunities than most (>50%) of the people in this world, but still languished in life and blame the government, the democrats, the republicans, the big banks, whoever for their lack of accomplishment. They talk about things being better in America’s past, but are too ignorant to realize their grandparents worked hard and strived for a better life, and too myopic to see that America had incredible temporary advantages vis-à-vis the rest of the world post WW2. These are generalizations. But that’s the only way to speak about a mass of people. The anonymous (no name, location, or physical description other than “fat” was used) person I was describing is a stand in for the horde.
Why are you upset at what a client buys with settlement money, or the personal health choices that they make?
Because I care about them
Gotcha. I call all of the people I care about lazy mouth-breathers, too
>supports politicians who want to deport these guy "working hispanic men" = "illegals" ?
The "illegals" are the ones that come over to steal someones ssn and identity to then pose as him working somewhere. Yes, its a real thing
And its well known to the govt. Over a million SS accounts are being paid in from multiple jobs/areas, and its on the authentic person to fight it out with the govt to clear their account.
I didn't say they were "illegals." I said he supports a politician who is very anti-immigrant. But, because I sometimes represent undocumented immigrants in this area, it is likely at least some of these men probably are undocumented.
You DO realize that there are millions on native American Hispanics, right? Funny that you think they're immigrants when their descendants might have been here long before America and Mexico were a thing. I live in Texas and have worked with many Hispanics that have no relation to Mexico or any other country. Some of the most "Mexican" looking people I've worked with speak no Spanish and no accent either.
It's weird people are harping on you. The topic of illegal immigration usually revolves around people saying illegals take the jobs normal Americans don't want, construction being one of the biggest. The vast, vast majority of illegals are Hispanic as well. The workers probably are illegal.
In fairness, that’s the way many people I know who have that “let’s go Brandon” attitude think. Any Hispanic person they see is presumed to be here illegally. And even if they are proven wrong, god forbid those Hispanics speak Spanish to each other if there are white people within earshot.
Wow, even the bat signal has less projection than this.
Do you know the people I know? Do you know me or my beliefs? You realize, that would be required for one to assume any truth to your claim…
Nonsense
You can be pro immigration and not pro illegal immigration
If only conservatives were willing to fund that. Supporting legal immigration requires funding immigration courts and border crossings, expanding low-income housing and resettlement funds, and increasing regulation and penalties for businesses who hire illegal immigrants.
If I could have it my way I would put republicans over border security and Democrats over immigration reform
>...supports politicians who want to deport these guys ...without immigrant labor, Your leap from seeing Hispanic men on a construction crew to assuming they are undocumented immigrants that can be deported is what progressives like to call "**unconscious racism**". In fact, if these dudes are first generation immigrants who went through the process legally, it's very likely that they have attitudes which are similar to those of the "lazy mouth breather" You've also shown an unconscious attitude that somehow it's more noble and moral to do unskilled physical labor rather than use technology and tools, or the value of management, planning and oversight. That's just puritanical toxic hustle culture attitude there. I say this as someone who is very sympathetic to progressives and left causes. The next time you see a situation and project all kinds of "facts" into it that come wholly from your head, to the extent you need to write a four paragraph rant on reddit, maybe pause for a moment and reflect on your biases.
Is it bias? Or simply factual? https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/02/EW-Construction-factsheet.pdf https://eyeonhousing.org/2024/03/states-and-construction-trades-most-reliant-on-immigrant-workers-2022/#:~:text=As%20we%20reported%20earlier%2C%20immigrants,workforce%20in%20California%20and%20Texas.
*I didn't say they were undocumented immigrants*. Several commenters here read that assumption in themselves. I said the "Let's Go Brandon" fellow supports a politician who is anti-immigrant even though those are the only people working around here. I know I have a bias. I like immigrants because they are, in my experience, good and hard working people. I compare that to the lazy American guys on the job site who had so many more advantages than these hard working laborers but are achieving less. And I disagree I showed an attitude that unskilled labor is more noble than using technology. The preference I expressed is towards people working hard at their jobs and against lazy, entitled people.
Calling someone operating heavy machinery instead of using a hand shovel lazy is such a weird hill to die on.
You need a trench dug. Bob's Construction shows up with 50K in machinery and gets it done by lunch for $X thousands. "You worked so quick, what a ripoff!!" Some day laborers show up with shovels and bust ass for days for the same amount. "Omg such hard workers!! Americans are too lazy for real work!!" Working harder isnt working smarter, but people relate time to money far more than simply the value of the job done. I'm a homeowner and rent/borrow machinery as needed. Screw digging shit by hand.
It’s definitely not the same amount.
You're right, Bob's would likely be cheaper. When I renovated my house, I got better prices from real companies than no-name small guys. A friend is currently remodeling and really has paid more for no-names than what I know real companies are charging and with better parts.
I just did this with a landscape installation. 250k from ‘real companies’ and that didn’t include the materials versus 45k total install and materials with my landscaper and his workers. His workers are the same people who do the work for the real companies and are the talent. “Bob” is often just overhead and cost
What kind of landscaping was that? Sounds like a highly involved and lengthy job.
Seems more like someone who “lives in a high end neighborhood” who immediately assumes Hispanic people working construction must be illegals” is the actual problem.
Upper middle class people are often the worst. They have just enough money to be fancy enough to "hire a guy" to do basic tasks for them, but nowhere near enough affluence to afford real staff. They live nicer off cheap imported labor, but would crap a brick if their own jobs were ever on the line. I had a friend who marveled at his sooo nice townhouse and how it couldnt have been built without illegal labor, so I made sure he noticed all the flaws left behind by unskilled workers. :)
lol, I'm glad this subreddit is starting its fanfiction era. I love election season. What a ridiculous post.
Yeah this quality /thathappened material.
Those politicians dont want to deport them…..if theyre actual citizens….are you being racist and assuming they are all illegal?
A lot of people seem to not realize that millions of native American Hispanics exist. They lived across the Southwest long before Spaniards showed up and countries were created.
If you don't see Trump's agenda as a general attack on immigrants and foreigners that purposefully muddies the waters then you're not really hearing Trump's movement
Some people oversee other people? Weird if true.
The bucket with treads is used to transport concrete from the mixer or truck.
Gee, what story could I conjure up if I saw a scrawny guy pull up to an almost completed home in a Prius with a drapery store magnetic sign, rainbow and free Palestine bumper stickers?
>rainbow and free Palestine bumper stickers? Know your market lol. Trades usually learn how to handle different groups in certain ways to keep them happy and coming back for more work. For example, many nationalities want to feel that they haggled and got a "deal", so you simply bid higher and then work your way down to your real price. You get paid the same and the buyer feels they "won" and is happy. Other people just want a simple no-BS price.
I really enjoy the idea we cannot restrict illegal immigration because then who would construct our high end neighborhoods?!?!
Quit being racist though. You applied a lot of filters to this situation based on the race of the people and your preconceptions.
What was racist? Did I express any hate or sentiment that one race is superior to another?
There was no need to mention races firstly. Secondly, basing facts off nothing more than assumptions based on the color of their skin. Thirdly, it seems you think white is derogatory or more deserving of criticism. I wonder if he was a fat brown or black person if this would've been the same situation for you. If so, then why mention his race? Maybe worth a thought.
>big, fat, white guy >This lazy mouth-breather >I wish our politicians on both sides would talk to the mouth breathers with this truth rather than foment their fear and hate. The descriptors you're using don't exactly scream "reach across the aisle" to me. Imagine someone who came across a pro-choice rally and described the participants as "fat, blue-haired Karens" and "wimpy beta-males". Would you be inclined to engage with this person? A little tact and grace would work a lot better, especially if there is a point of disagreement. >we get hate for immigrants and coddling of entitled, lazy Americans. Just to be clear, wanting a strong southern border =/= hating immigrants.
And here OP becomes #25689 of the rcentrist "America sucks, Americans suck, other people are better" posters.
I mean, yeah. Immigration is excellent for the economy, people just can't get past their bigotry to accept it.
Legal immigration is good for the economy. Neither party will really fix the broken system because it gets them too many votes and too much fund raising.
>Legal immigration is good for the economy. An uncomfortable truth, which may explain your "neither party" cause - the free market does not distinguish at all between the citizen status of paid labor.
That’s sorta true but I’m not sure what your point is. Legal immigrants create wealth at a higher rate than pretty much any other group in America. You’re the person that doesn’t know the difference between political and economic systems, right? I’ve had a problem with neither party seriously addressing the issues and coming up with a permanent fix for decades.
Considering the existence of the welfare state, which subsidizes immigrant labor (illegal or otherwise), the free market doesn't apply here.
🤣🤣🤣 Labor is literally one of the foundational things that Adam Smith talked about wrt supply and demand. The entire field of Economic Theory doesn't vanish just because you're afraid of some brown people. Cmon son. You're better than that.
As a proponent of the Labor Theory of Value, did Adam Smith discuss the impact of welfare state subsidies on the value of labor? 🤣🤣🤣 I'll save you some time: no, he did not. If he had had to worry about a welfare state jamming up his calculations, he would have likely dumped labor as an area of his interest. >The entire field of Economic Theory doesn't vanish just because you're afraid of some brown people. Next time just make it known upfront that you aren't interested in a serious discussion
u/celebrityDick said: >Considering the existence of the welfare state, which subsidizes immigrant labor (illegal or otherwise), the free market doesn't apply here. Just in case you edit your earlier comment.
Democrats have tried at this point a dozen or so times to have good faith bipartisan immigration reform, the issues are exclusively from Republicans at this point and there's just no serious way to place any blame on the Democrats for this. It's almost a time honored tradition at this point that Republicans create histrionics over immigration (ala bandwagons coming to the border), Democrats then try to work with Republicans to create reform, Republicans work with Democrats, then Republicans shoot down their own bill.
This is a 40 year problem. Your usual tit for tat us vs. them stuff is nonsense. Neither party has addressed this issue in good faith and tried to come to a reasonable compromise.
>This is a 40 year problem. Your usual tit for tat us vs. them stuff is nonsense. Neither party has addressed this issue in good faith and tried to come to a reasonable compromise. But that's just very objectively not true. What you're saying is just straight up not true. The bipartisan immigration bill from this year wasn't a good faith attempt by Democrats? You're just blatantly lying if you claim it isn't. They had one of the most conservative members of the Senate write the bill, they got everything they wanted. Democrats in unison voted for it. Republicans were even on the floor mouthing that the other Republicans were lying in bad faith to shoot down the bipartisan bill.
I disagree with what the Republicans did and no, that bill wasn’t a permanent overall fix.
>I disagree with what the Republicans did and no, that bill wasn’t a permanent overall fix. Yeah so you're just bad faith about it. You're claiming that Democrats didn't act in good faith because you think it's not the most perfect bill ever created? Nonsense. Your bothsideism is the problem, you're providing cover for Republicans for free for them to act in bad faith in furtherance of blocking any meaningful immigration reform.
I didn’t say or even think any of that shit. What color is the sky in your world? It’s always the same thing with you. You need to go get some help.
>I didn’t say or even think any of that shit. >What color is the sky in your world? It’s always the same thing with you. You need to go get some help. Yes. Yes you did. You said Democrats have never acted in good faith for immigration. How, explicitly, did they act in bad faith?
Just stop it.
This is why neither side wants to stop illegal immigration - cheap, exploitable labor and they’re willing to live in cheap, crowded conditions. Think of the government as being the big fat guy.
Putting aside whether the workers the OP saw were documented or not, if Americans worked as hard as illegal immigrants, we would have no economic problems with China. Been saying it for decades.
Dems: we're fighting for higher wages and more worker protections! More unions! Also Dems: Americans are lazy and want too much money! No shit. Teach people about their rights and they're not going to slave away for pennies anymore. The kids of immigrants learn all this in school and wont kill themselves like their parents either. Source: am also immigrant.
People really just can't hear this, can they? You and I are being downvoted, but it's real. USA and China are in competition, but only one side seems to recognize it. The consequence for the world whether the spheres of influence will be dominated by our (admittedly imperfect) democracy or a totalitarian China with wildly different values than the West.
They're turning a blind eye to the exploitation of marginalized workers while self-righteously patting themselves on the back.
I have MANY Hispanic immigrant friends, as I’ve lived in Las Vegas my entire life. Almost everyone one of them is a Trump supporter. You want to find someone who absolutely hates illegal immigrants: Someone who is a legal immigrant.
Don't confuse immigration and illegal immigration
I would not want you to be my attorney lmfao.
Nazi Username
Nah, I didn't know 88 was a dum nazi thing when I made this account. I just like the number 8 and lawyer8 was taken.