HOLA Delaware: How Latinos came to dominate chicken processing in Delaware

HOLA Delaware Latino population article about Georgetown and Sussex County Delaware Jody Hudson; Cutting Edge Realtor in Rehoboth Beach.: "The problem for poultry processors has been retention. Today, the companies have 3 percent monthly turnover in their workforce. This is a sea change. Two decades ago, a plant would lose 10 to 15 percent of its workers per month--that is, at any given moment, most of the workers in a plant would have been hired in the past four or five months. This is how immigrants wound up dominating the poultry industry. It is not that corporations sought to unload their local workers wholesale and replace them with cheaper and harder-working ones. It is that every time a local worker quit, he was replaced by a Guatemalan who didn't, and the job changed from a stopgap into the lifeline for a family."

I haven't been in America all that long - I was born here, but only a few decades ago. So my grasp on history may not be 100%, and I'll welcome correction from you old-timers who know better....

A long, long time ago, entire families performed the bulk of labor necessary to keep a family in food, shelter, and tools. A limited amount of barter provided the balance. Then job specialization came along and eventually morphed into an industrial revolution. Poor women, children, and the elderly worked in jobs that were considered "easy enough" for their limited strength and skills, and men worked the jobs that required "a real man". Wealthy men worked in jobs requiring education (which only the wealthy had) and capital to invest (which only the wealthy had). Wealthy women lived lives of comparable leisure, supervising servants, rearing children, and running the social scene. Eventually, a middle class developed in which non-wealthy men acquired sufficient education to perform "professional" work, and non-wealthy women could specialize in running a home (albeit without servants). During the World Wars, middle class women were encouraged to enter the workforce out of patriotism, to replace men. Poor women were always in the workforce, out of necessity.

Immigrants came to America and were resented as competitors for the "good" jobs that were available to the poor. They congregated in ghettos, and learned the language as quickly as possible. The critical skill for an immigrant was to assimilate. But that was easy - they came to America because of the greater freedom and opportunity it offered. No one immigrated to America to stay English or German or Argentinan; they came here to be Americans. Then we eased restrictions on Asian immigration, and we freed the slaves, and no one quite noticed that, say, a German who spoke excellent English and wore American-style clothing was soon an American, but a dark-skinned immigrant with the same traits was still an "Oriental" or "black."

Wherever they were born, America's poor, lacking capital to invest, professional contacts to obtain "plum" jobs, "education" in the sense of both book learning and social/linguistic skills, and high-paying professional skills, worked in crappy jobs. America, however, is the land of opportunity. Our middle class could obtain education to qualify them for desk jobs, and our poor could work their way up to foreman or other better-paying job. Eventually, the guy who started by picking up debris on the construction site could work his way up to s

winging a hammer, then supervising the crew, and the really talented folks - whose talent had been hidden and diminished by their poverty and lack of born-into opportunity - could work his way up to running a company. We had genuine upward mobility, but upward mobility always requires a starting point. For the poorest and least advantaged Americans, that starting point was the bottom, the worst jobs.

Now, we have welfare and jails for the poorest of the poor, and gentle justifications for their poverty. Middle class and above expect to finish college and take a "professional" job (not to be confused with professional trades). Since middle class and above are the primary consumers, our media focuses on their needs and expectations, and the poor see a lot more of the chasm between the haves and have nots, and a lot less of the ladder that can lift them into the "have somes". And immigrants take those entry-level jobs that really suck but get the employee a paycheck and a job reference and an opportunity to move on and move up. Where even a poor American used to be able to come home and tell the kids "I did something meaningful today, and I was paid poorly but it is better than I used to have, and you're going to stay in school so you do even better," now it is the immigrants that are taking those jobs, and setting that example for their children. The poorest of our poor no longer even see that ladder to upward mobility, and they give up without even climbing the first rung.

Employers benefit from a stable workforce, and reduced turnover generates a direct cost savings. Turnover costs the employer for advertising, recruiting, evaluating job applicants, paperwork, and training employees. If a Guatemalan is willing to do what Americans consider a crummy job, and stay with it for many years, the employer willingly shrugs and says "I guess this is one of those jobs Americans just won't do." Yet, when a poor young American comes of age and looks for a job, those first-rung jobs aren't in the want ads because they've been filled. The employee thinks there are no jobs for unskilled workers with poor English and math skills, the employer thinks that Americans won't do the jobs, and the immigrants think they are doing very well, indeed.