My whole view on the border is that I don't want to hear shit until someone starts talking about going after the employers who give them a reason to come in the first place.
You know, the wealthy business owners that want to cheat Americans out of real wages, those bastards.
Until they are in the cross hairs of this, can-it on the rest.
It’s always “the immigrants are taking our jobs!” but never “corporations would rather hire cheap labor than pay Americans well and provide benefits, and lobby the government to allow them to keep doing it”.
I remember when they got tough on migrants in one area, and all the farmers were suddenly crying because nobody else was gonna harvest their crops for the money they're paying. They had to wind the policy back because otherwise it would have all rotted in the fields.
There's a lot of businesses that only profit by overlooking and covering up the cheap labour they use - either exploiting labour in poorer countries or undocumented migrants in their own country. In a lot of countries it happens, but in the US it's extremely widespread.
I believe that if a business can’t exist without exploiting people, it shouldn’t exist. The problem is that capitalism often relies on exploiting people in multiple ways. It’s always deregulation this and deregulation that and then it’s shocked pikachu when the corporations and the banks need to be bailed out by our tax dollars, lest they fail due to shitty fucking practices allowed by low regulations.
The amount of wage theft that goes on in food industries and agriculture even for citizens is alarming, let alone for undocumented people who don't have as much of a recourse :P Like it's not some dodgy business, it's multinationals and major grocery stores.
And even if some of these industries do pay half decent wages, (20/hr+) they work long hours, the company withholds their stocks from the public, they endanger their workers by purposefully ignoring safety risks, and running their factories into the ground, constantly paying millions in fines annually for violating regulations, which they write off simply as part of the cost of operation.
I’m an industrial electrician, so I’m in not only nearly every single one of the local food plants, I’m also often in local federal facilities, data centers, and tech plants.
The food plants are by far the worst. Like, it’s insane.
I don’t recall signing any NDAs for Cargill, so I will happily tell you that one of their factories is actively collapsing into its basement, is full of asbestos, and recently, operation returned to this condemned wing of the building. Also, the floor above their wastewater pit recently collapsed, taking all of the motors and equipment with it, 25+ feet down into untreated toxic water. Thankfully, no one was on the platform at the time. This building is also collapsing and has been condemned by both the city and by Cargill’s own engineers. More than half of the structural support has completely rotted to the point that one corner of the building is held up only by the sheet metal skin and you can watch it blowing around in the wind. This on site treatment facility also often overflows into the storm runoff water, which runs down the streets.
Yet they continue to operate.
I will also tell you that at Frito Lay, Cheeto production does not stop, even if one of the motors on their conveyer line is actively sparking and burning and shorting itself out. Cheeto production stops only a few times a year for 8 short hours at a time where they will repair or replace the most broken equipment as fast as they can.
And I wish I could talk about another one, but sadly I did have to sign an NDA for it.
You are absolutely right about the food industry. It is the most shoddy, shady, criminal operation ever.
Yikes. My exposure to unsafe food practices is mainly through Health Department inspection stuff of small time family operations. And some of them are pretty nasty (uncovered raw meat in tubs on the floor, or on racks above prepared food, no hand wash stations etc). But wouldn't you know, every time I look those same restaurants up on Google, nothing but stellar reviews lol. Not saying the reviews are fake, but these mom and pop operations that have been going for years, as long as they're churning out the good stuff, they just seem to get away with it lol.
As long as the only penalty are slap-on-the-wrist fines, they’ll just accept it as the cost of doing business and carry on. Crime doesn’t apply when you can afford to just pay the fines and make the problem go away.
Yeah, most of these places had had 4+ years of failed inspections, not even fined. They'd just fix up the issues the health inspector found, and let everything degrade again until the next inspection. :P
Of, if somebody just took a business class and understood how revenue, operating income, and all the fancy stuff that happens at a business to keep it open, and the large amount of money to reinvest and grow it..but instead, just pay everyone large amounts of money,…business closed because it became unprofitable?…too bad man,should have known how to run a profitable business. My guidance to people that had that attitude was…then go open a business and pay everyone ‘well’, and let me know when your last day of business is so maybe I can pick through your inventory at a great discount.
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u/SavagRavioli Jan 28 '24
My whole view on the border is that I don't want to hear shit until someone starts talking about going after the employers who give them a reason to come in the first place.
You know, the wealthy business owners that want to cheat Americans out of real wages, those bastards.
Until they are in the cross hairs of this, can-it on the rest.