They still exist in all sorts of industries but have almost all been offshored to capitalize on lower wages.

The jobs left are largely just the ones where the finished product can't be put on a container ship for 2 months.

If globalization unravels due to rising geopolitical tensions and continent spanning supply chains buckle and break we will likely be quite surprised at how much unskilled labor is suddenly in demand at home.

Nope. Those jobs require trustworthy people too.

If I were running a meat processing plant, and there was:

- Sexual harassment

- Racism

- Violence

- Etc.

I'd have a huge liability on my hands. Unfortunately, prison convicts would be much more likely to expose me to those types of liability. If an employee catcalls another employee, that places a lot of burden lands on the employer.

This happened largely due to progressive reforms. I'm not claiming to have any solution here, or to even have a semblance of idea of cost/benefit. People need jobs. People deserve to be safe.

Yep. When I was a student I worked in a restaurant with an ex convict who described his previous job at the meat packing plant in precisely those terms. He told me it was a hard dangerous s*** job, and back of the house in the restaurant was a lot better. He said safety measures and equipment were inadequate, and some of the other guys that worked there wanted to kill him (his remarks on your other areas of concern would be ill suited to this forum).

That put things in perspective for me, because I had thought that the back of the restaurant was a hard dangerous s*** job - - in fact the hood fans and ac didn't and work, the food thermometer in my shirt pocket regularly read above 110F, and I was generally surrounded by sharp things, hot things, greasy floors and boiling oil, and the shift manager chest bumped me and screamed in my face. But for that guy it was a promotion.

That was in Texas, which is a "business friendly" state, so those progressive reforms might be more... incremental than the average hn reader might wish.

Why are you censoring yourself? If a job is a shit job, just fucking say it. Why pretend?

> his remarks on your other areas of concern would be ill suited to this forum

This isn't a kid's show. Your comment is really interesting to me, and I'd like to hear what he said about these issues.

(This won't make sense to anyone else but I don't care. I liked your response and I don't want mine to go to waste.)

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My apologies, that's hilarious.

Not sure what that word is that you don't want to say, but if it's a racial epithet then I have to admit I won't say any of that shit either. I try not to even think those words, lest they become part of my internal monologue that becomes not-so-internal when I get old and demented. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite when I accuse others of self-censoring.

Your friend sounds like trash. I have some super trashy friends and acquaintances, and I can just hear them talking through your description. Trash white people are a tribe, and there's hardly anything trashier than the kind of grifting that painter did to you.

I love that Johnson quote, and it seems ever more prescient now that trash whites are a distinct voting bloc.

That quote applies just as well to black trash. There seems to be a resurgence of black nationalism now, with multitudes of black revolutionaries talking pan-africanism, reparations, and utopian black socialism. Moors and whatever the fuck else. I was reading about a group of these characters that briefly set up shop down in the far corner of my state. Black Hammer, they call themselves. They got a bunch of suckers to gofundme them to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, saying they'd liberate some land and start some sort of black-supremacist commune. Surprisingly it didn't work out and the leaders have since moved on to more mainstream BLM-type activism. And they kept the money obviously.

The reality is that the margins are thin and it’s really hard to retain staff, so those problems are routinely swept under the rug in meat processing plants.

Maybe that would work with construction, but they also hire a lot of exconvicts due to turnover and pay.

>restaurant industry

A job for teenagers and aspiring actors.

>farm labor

Okay, but we specifically import people to work for low (often illegally low) wages. Work for an adult, maybe, but not much of a living.

>and other unsavory industries.

Same problem as with farm labor, except now it's "unsavory" instead of "honest work".

It's not right to have a bimodal distribution of "high class professional jobs" and "unsavory jobs with low trust requirements". You need a lower-end but respectable place for people to be that's better than criminality, and you certainly can't say "go work in one of those unsavory industries" if you want them to think its better than being a criminal. In American culture we GLORIFY criminality, and loathe low-class "unsavory" work. Why would anyone choose unsavory work over being a criminal in the current environment?

> unsavory industries such as meat processing.

I often wonder what the impact of these jobs is on the humans that are doing it. Half the reason I'm avoiding (supermarket) meat is that I feel bad about keeping these jobs alive. (The other reason is the animal suffering ofc.)

It's documented to be extremely traumatizing and physically disabling.