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It's dawned on me that a number of the jobs where companies dont want to pay illegals a living wage are the jobs that used to be done by your neighbor's kid for you... In the 1960-70's, Girls babysat and cleaned house... Boys did yardwork. We were paid less than working at a store or sub shop. We werent depending on this income for a living just extra pocket money. It was thought that a little job taught good discipline and work ethic. Grown ups took these jobs to earn a little extra money for a luxury or to catch up on bills. No one made a living off this.
Now we are paying agencies much more to do the same things. Workers get a fraction of what we are paying the agencies. In order to meet their profit margin, the companies must underpay the workers.
Outsourcing textiles and food have not brought the prices down. I paid $20-40 for a sweater or a pair of pants twenty years ago and I am still paying that much at a department store even though the cost of producing that garment has gone down. Somehow we could afford to pay a union worker, give him a pension and health benefits and now we cant. Fish is very strange: I used to pay between $1.50 - 3.00/lb for fish and now I am looking at $5 -10/lb even though much of the fish is coming from the 3rd world. Since the cost of producing these goods has gone down, shouldn't the prices? Also, the goods are not comparable to what they used to be: shoes used to run 5 widths from A-E. Now they dont or at best they are normal to wide. Fabrication is very poor. The stuff looks the same but it doesnt wear the same. If you really get to know what a nice garment feels like, you will notice a big difference between the material used in that garment and what goes into many of the name brands in the department stores (where you will pay a premium price aka $100/jeans). Remember what the old Levi Strauss jeans felt like... really thick,strong cotton? The sewing is not well finished with threads hanging and seams not knotted off. The patterns are very simple ones -- like the ones I learned to sew with. The cut is all wrong.. I cant tell you how many times I see men in suits with shirts that just dont fit. The fish in the supermarkets is just not fresh... I remember being able to occasionally luck out with really fresh fish every so often in a supermarket -- not a specialty market. Same with fruits and vegetables... no wonder kids arent eating them .... they are bland and tasteless... Ick...
We have forgotten what goes into fabrication and are amused by a color and design. Big business knows that people arent amused by thread count and the boring details that go into making nice cloth so they can peddle their crap.
Watch and see ... we will end up looking like the Third World. We already have in one regard. You know the big red, white and blue flimsy shopping bags from China? When I first saw them 15 years ago in China, I thought, my God, we are so far ahead of these people -- even our shopping bags are better made! Now I see people in this country using them. I saw the very flimsy material people used to cloth themselves in the third world and I see real crap showing up in our low end Department stores like Walmart. Soon we will look just the same as the workers. As our wages go down, so will our tastes and what we can afford. Of course, we will have ditched health care and retirement along the way -- that way we are truly equal. There will be a globalized leveling of wages and a globalized leveling of tastes.
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