We voted for Trump to fix the border, now we are milking cows alone at 4am."

[markodochartaigh]

67. I don't think that most young people today

would work the manual labor jobs that immigrants do. When I graduated high school in 1975 I needed to make money for college. I worked at the factory slaughterhouse (IBP) for a year and a half. It was 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. Most of the positions were grueling. I boned chucks, removing the spine from a 50 lb piece of meat. You had to be able to do it consistently, and up to standard, every twenty seconds. My crapal tunnel still hurts every single day. You could bid on the few better jobs, but competition was intense. One lady got a permanent job as a secretary when her arm got cut off on a boning saw. The jobs paid $5-7/hr. With the overtime (this was one of the only union jobs in town) you could easily make $15,000 a year. There were many people in Amarillo with bachelors degrees who didn't make $15,000 a year.

There were two starting groups a week. Most US citizens quit the first week, probably about one quarter quit before lunch the first day. This was literally the only job available that paid more than minimum wage that was available without education or connections without moving 350 miles away. Failing here meant a difficult move or accepting that would likely never escape the lower class. I stayed a year and a half. I only know of one other US citizen who didn’t go into management who stayed as long as I did. More than two thirds of the employees were Viet Namese or Laotian refugees or from México.
From what I see of today's TikTok generation I can't imagine that they would last even a few hours in most manual labor jobs.