Jobs that no one wants

On MSNBC today there was an article titled "Why Americans won't do dirty jobs".  The article was wondering why Americans won't perform jobs that require lots of "work" and then proceeds to focus on the number of farm laborer jobs that remain unfilled.  Many of these jobs are filled by immigrant workers, some of whom are here illegally.  Whether they are here legally or not the fact remains that the article points out that the men in the story can take home about $60 a day on a good day.  Maybe that has a lot to do with why Americans will not take these jobs, its pretty difficult to support a family on $60 per day.  I don't think that this is the only reason, though it is a major one, for why many Americans do not want to do this work.

For the last 20-30 years adults have been instilling in kids the idea that you have to go to college in order to be a successful person.  Along with hammering home this idea that a college degree alone will make you a success,  the idea that if you did not have one then you are a failure also crept in.  If you've bee hearing your entire life that the only way to be a success is to go to college, how likely are you to want to pick fruit, or muck out stalls, or work with your hands?

The bigger problem is not that people who have invested the time and money to attend college do not want to do manual labor, but the problem is that people are encouraged to attend college simply because they can get in.  If you've earned a college degree then by all means you should expect that you should work in job that makes use of all the time you spent earning that degree.  Last time I checked it did not require a degree to pick fruit.  Why should we expect someone to resort to working at a job for which they are poorly suited especially when it comes with low pay.

I'm certain that you could find Americans who would be willing to work as farm laborers if you paid them a wage that made it possible to earn a living in America.  The down side to paying more to farm laborers is that it makes the food they are harvesting cost more, which means that prices rise.  If prices rise then generally speaking people buy less, and when is the last time you saw a long line in the fresh produce section of the grocery store?

The current economic trouble in America won't be solved by insisting that Americans take jobs which will result in a drastically lower standard of living than we currently have.  Asking them to work at jobs that pay what current farm laborers make would be asking them to do just that.  As a country we may well have to give up some of the luxuries that we have enjoyed for a while as we work to fix our economy, the solution to the problem is not tell Americans to take jobs that pay impoverishing wages.