[BionicBunny]

denmns denmns:

How many of you would give up your job, or if you are out of work, and go work in the fields picking fruits and vegetables? Take care of children and clean houses all day?

Somebody has to do it!!!

I had friends who spent time picking what you buy. For five years I cleaned houses. And the people I knew who also cleaned house, trust me, they were not migrant workers but the women and men you know next door to you.

Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.

[Bruce_the_vii]

I knew that cattle were raised in the Chicago area thirty years ago in large scale feed lots. I see that hogs are now also being raised in very large scale units. So my information was not so bad.

I also knew farms were becoming larger and larger. However this is not corporate farming. Even if the contract production they're still small businesses. My information is corporations have never been able to out price the family/small business operation.

However thanks for look all that up beaver.

[Bruce_the_vii]

Er BionicBunny are you saying corpations are exploitive and bad employers? You should try small business, they're worse.

My Mother didn't warning me about the work place. I grew up in the 50's and 60's and it wasn't such an issue then. However we all learned. The work place is a lesson in human nature. That's the way it is. If you are going to have kids you are going to be introducing them to the rat race.

[BeaverFever]

$1:

My information is corporations have never been able to out price the family/small business operation.

I would think that would depend on the particular business, but I assume you're still talking about farming. In that respect, I think any commercial farm that sells its product at the supermarket instead of the of local weekend farmer's market is in competition with produce being shipped in from Chile and Argentina and Mexico and Vietnam as well as domestic "corporatized" production and is probably at a disadvantage. The challege is not only cost per unit but overall production volume to fill large orders.

[BeaverFever]

$1:

the work place is a lesson in human nature. That's the way it is. If you are going to have kids you are going to be introducing them to the rat race.

I agree with you but in these days it seems there are more rats, more baited traps and the finish line is much further away than in the 50s and 60s. So now I question why is this "just the way it is" now? I am increasingly skeptical of the "natural evolution of the market" theory and believe it more likely that there has been a deliberate and organized effort on the part of certain interests to dismantle the safeguards we had in place to offset or discourage the darker side of human nature.

[Choban]

I'll weigh in for the transportation industry if I may.
I have been in transport for about 10 years now, at the height of Albertas economic boom a few years ago it was almost immpossable to find drivers.

Companies were paying huge signing bonuses and lucrative benifits packages to hire drivers, something like 80% of the drivers out there were baby boomers looking to retire and there was no young up and comming workforce as most were looking for well paying 9-5 jobs that brought them home safe every night.

D.O.T. was in process of changing hours of srvice laws and Tractor/Trailer safety regulations to make it more safe on the roads, but some of these rules were tying drivers to limited hours and thus limited miles and making it harder to earn the $.

Mexican and Indo drivers started flooding the market looking for jobs, and don't get me wrong, in my experience the majority of them were very hard working productive drivers, alot of the Indos in particular were entering the field as owner operators because their temples and religious organizations will fund their tractors and allow them to pay them off with no interest.

This is certainly a case of them taking the work BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE WANTED IT. They were willing to come here, work long isolated hours for good pay and accept government $ to do it because technically they were operating an independant business by owning their vehicles.

Take a look around next time your on the highway and count the caucasian Canadian born drivers you see, it's a minoriy and the bed was made by us

[herbie]

40 years ago students used to do this. Then they discovered even McD's pays better.

25 years ago Granpa and the relatives did it. 20 years ago Granpa and the clan had green cards, said this is goddam Canada and would rather deliver pizzas at minimum wage.
These are shit jobs run by mostly shit employers.

[Bruce_the_vii]

Choban Choban:

I'll weigh in for the transportation industry if I may.
I have been in transport for about 10 years now, at the height of Albertas economic boom a few years ago it was almost immpossable to find drivers.

Companies were paying huge signing bonuses and lucrative benifits packages to hire drivers, something like 80% of the drivers out there were baby boomers looking to retire and there was no young up and comming workforce as most were looking for well paying 9-5 jobs that brought them home safe every night.

D.O.T. was in process of changing hours of srvice laws and Tractor/Trailer safety regulations to make it more safe on the roads, but some of these rules were tying drivers to limited hours and thus limited miles and making it harder to earn the $.

Mexican and Indo drivers started flooding the market looking for jobs, and don't get me wrong, in my experience the majority of them were very hard working productive drivers, alot of the Indos in particular were entering the field as owner operators because their temples and religious organizations will fund their tractors and allow them to pay them off with no interest.

This is certainly a case of them taking the work BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE WANTED IT. They were willing to come here, work long isolated hours for good pay and accept government $ to do it because technically they were operating an independant business by owning their vehicles.

Take a look around next time your on the highway and count the caucasian Canadian born drivers you see, it's a minoriy and the bed was made by us

Thanks for the excellent post Choban. I take an interest in labour market issues and have done so for 19 years now. Alberta's economy was pretty tight prior to the world recession so it's a high water mark and tarket for the rest of the country. Anecdotal information like yours is very telling. At the same time there is 7% to 9% of the work force over 20 years of age making less than $12 in Alberta. I know this because I paid Statistics Canada $500 to run the tapes. My interest is when does the free market dry up low wages? Truck driving is accessable by training so it's a good indicator. Currently I'm thinking it takes a bit of time to get people into better jobs, and Alberta's peak was only a few years.

[BionicBunny]

Bruce, I don't disagree that small businesses can dish out the same treatment. But what I am saying, in my experience from working both sides of the coin, I was treated worse and with more frequency by corporations than I was with small businesses. But maybe I have been lucky with small businesses thus far.

I do take note when dealing with small businesses and purchasing from them. If they treat me poorly, I walk out and never purchase again. I'm reasonable in expecting a certain level of customer care. A number of businesses fail however. When I wait paitently for someone to serve me, the employee notices I am there but serves someone else who comes in through the door once I am the only customer, I walk out. If a business has a sign advertising a price and then they purposefully change that price on me, I walk out.

Back to the subject of corporations. I had one corporation who cut my job, my hiring manager's job and 26 other people's job 4 days after I was hired. Then to make matters worse, they call me up a year later (my resume was still on file) and offered me the same job. The new hiring manager had not realized what I had gone through so I explained and all he could do was apologize.

Unfortunately for many companies in this day and age, all they can do is ride on Walmart's coattails. They use Walmart as their model of successful business (which may or may not be good). There was one company I heard of that lost it's uniqueness because they would monitor the walmart corporation. Any move Walmart made, they followed.

You can tell I am obsessed with this subject. One of my favourite things to do is sit around with a bunch of people, go over some companies (and small businesses) profiles and discuss the goods, the bads and the how to fix (at least in our opinion).

Bruce_the_vii Bruce_the_vii:

Er BionicBunny are you saying corpations are exploitive and bad employers? You should try small business, they're worse.

My Mother didn't warning me about the work place. I grew up in the 50's and 60's and it wasn't such an issue then. However we all learned. The work place is a lesson in human nature. That's the way it is. If you are going to have kids you are going to be introducing them to the rat race.

[Bruce_the_vii]

Thanks for the response BionicBunny. I went through six corporate jobs in fourteen months at one point but I won't go on about it here. I call myself a "jobs activist", been working on this for 19 years, and take an interest in stories about employee relations and the instability in corporations. Your story about getting hired for a job that doesn't exist, being let go after four days and then a year later being reviewed for the same job is something. I'll look forward to your posts in general.

[Yogi]

This is justification for higher education!

[Choban]

I can add also Bruce that working for the big multi national trucking company was the shits compared to the small local I work for now.
The big one tended to micro manage everything from head office in the east with no regard for the different sort of market we had here, they wanted an Ontario solution for a Western issue and it never worked.

[Bruce_the_vii]

What I'm getting Choban is your personal shtick is mocking how businesses work, especially large bureaucracies. Lots of material there.