If you can read this sign and want manual labor, you're probably not welcome. (photo: J. Stephen Conn via Flickr)

Today’s issue of Louisville, Kentucky’s Courier-Journal has a front page article that helpfully explains many jobs in the area must be filled by illegal immigrants because no American has applied for them.

The story appears to be spawned out of the fears expressed by employers like the area’s horse farms that the state’s legislature may crack down on hiring illegal immigrants, cutting off their last source of labor.

Employers say they have little choice but to bring on immigrant workers when filling positions.

“All of us are in a position of needing employees. We don’t want to hire illegals,” said David L. Switzer, executive director of the Kentucky Thoroughbred Association. Based in Lexington, the KTA represents the $4 billion annual horse breeding industry and 52,000 employees, according to the nonprofit’s website.

Asked how pervasive the presence of undocumented workers is in the horse racing industry, Switzer declined to comment. But he added that openings for stable hands, grooms and night watchmen are extremely difficult to fill.

“A significant number of foreign born are working in our industry,” Switzer said. “At some of our farms, they have not had a Caucasian or African American apply for a job in eight years. Nobody applies. What are we supposed to do?”

What a crock of potted baloney.

Try this yourself: browse through some of the job posting sites like Monster.com, Indeed.com, and SimplyHired.com and look for jobs with the keyword “horse” in the “Lexington, KY” area.

You’ll find nothing in the way of stable hands, grooms, watchmen or “equine staff” advertised for folks without a degree; you might find one job for a nonprofit equine advocacy manager, but that’s about it.

I went to the Courier-Journal.com’s website for the paper which carried this story and clicked on their Jobs listing. Apparently they use CareerBuilder.com to run their jobs page. Guess what? One job listing for keyword “horse” and location “Louisville, KY” — a sous chef position at The Blue Horse.

If I spread a slightly wider net, I can pull up a job listing under a category called “equine staff”; there’s a posting for a “driving stable assistant” which appears to be in Germany, IN. But that’s not in the neighboring state of Indiana; the posting is for an international job, location: Germany.

That’s why no Caucasian or African American has applied for their jobs: they aren’t advertising openings, and for a reason.  . . . Read the rest of this entry →

photo: spike55151 via Flickr

If you read dakine01′s reaction to economist Casey Mulligan’s post at The New York Times Economix blog, you’ve read only part of the reality check.

dakine01 points out that Mulligan’s uninformed advocacy of a reduced minimum wage does not necessarily lead to more employment; it only means more stress on already strained household economics for anyone trying to subsist on minimum wage.

Realistically, full-time employment compensated at the current federal minimum wage means that one may not be able to afford a car, life insurance, health or dental care, put any money into savings — assuming they are lucky enough to have a full-time job.

The numbers on the employer’s side of the desk put the lie to Mulligan’s suggestion as well. They make it clear that Mulligan has never really had to deal with the real world task of creating actual jobs and keeping people employed and productive while making a profit.

For every new hire employee a company brings on board, there is a baseline expense. There’s advertising and recruiting fees, there’s the cost of screening and testing, there’s the loss of money due to time invested by management and workers in the interview process. There’s the cost of training workers to get up to full productivity; even seasoned white collar professionals and experienced blue collar journeymen will require some amount of investment in getting comfortable with their new environment.

The last Fortune 100 company for which I worked estimated the average cost to bring on board a new employee was $50,000. That’s a big chunk of cash sunk into a worker — and not all workers pan out during their first year. Granted, not all jobs will require such an investment; this particular company required a lot of safety training because of the work environment. Hiring a burger flipper at a fast food place will incur much less expense per new hire, but turn over is very high because the wages are low and benefits virtually non-existent. It’s still a hurdle to bringing workers on board.  . . . Read the rest of this entry →

The data used in this presentation by journalist LaToya Egwuekwe reflects U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics through August 2010, but we all know this data hasn’t changed much since then and the results shown in this dramatic video have not changed, either.

It boggles the mind that both this administration and the Democrats in both houses of Congress don’t see the magnitude of the problem with unemployment and how it is dramatically impacting the public’s opinion of them and their performance going into the coming midterm elections.

How much more clear and obvious does the picture have to get before they clue in?

See this nifty chart? Long-time FDL community member ValleyGirl sent it to me last night after she spent considerable time and effort pulling Gallup’s presidential approval rating data together to create it.

The intriguing bit is right there in the most recent data on the 19-to-30 year-old voters. There’s a very sharp drop, not like anything else in the preceding data. Could it be just an anomaly? Perhaps another couple weeks of data will tell us if this is just an outlier.

On the other hand, it might not be. I thought I’d ask a couple of young people their opinions about President Obama and his performance, and why there might be such a precipitous drop in his ratings if it wasn’t an anomaly. Granted, these young folks can’t speak for the entirety of the 19-to-30 year-old voter age group as a whole. Heck, they can’t even vote. But they were handy and they are easy to talk with and I know them well enough to trust they aren’t scamming me when I ask them for an opinion.

I asked my 16-year-old what she thought about the graph; was there something in particular that she thought might explain such a drop?

She said she felt she didn’t know enough about current events to have an opinion on this. Okay, honest response. (Obviously Mom needs to incentivize reading about current affairs for the rest of the summer.)

But this past week, after BP’s Macondo well had been “killed” and government flacks said that most of the oil in the gulf was gone, she’d told me, “That’s bullshit.”

I was taken aback at the time; I expect this kind of bluntness and vulgar terminology from my younger child (who talks a little too much like his mother), but not from my more cautious and reticent 16-year-old. She elaborated, though, saying, “There’s no way that all that oil could simply disappear.”

Not a chance; somebody was lying, according my teenaged science major planning on going into pathology. . . . Read the rest of this entry →