Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Don't High School kids and College kids in other cities work anymore? I go to a restaurant here in town and they are staffed pretty much by HS and College age workers. My first job was washing dishes at Big Boy while I was going to school. Granted, it's nothing that I would want to do as a career, but I needed the money to pay for school so I worked at whatever I could find.

Jeanf...Huntington is my town! Huntington Station is where the building for the day laborers is located. Does your brother live in Huntington.

Just today I got a 10" All Clad skillet in a local thrift shop for $3. It's been a long time since I found anything there.

Fran, tiny world. My brother's in Queens but worked for the city of Huntington for a while....which is why I know of the building.
I keep trying to get to the Penzey's there whenever we are in NY but for some reason it's never a priority for anyone but me!

WRT kids today, my dad taught a his union school for 6 years after retiring and taught about 300 people over those years on how to form bridges. He can count on one hand the number of students who actually went into construction after they finished the course. He had one student, 19 years old, go home from the first day of classes because he cut his finger...and nothing that required stitches. Like I said, it's not just the restaurants.

A small world indeed.

Don't mean to hijack the thread...but my mom was raised in Maspeth (at a time when there were cows there!) and my dad in Astoria. Lots of cousins still in Maspeth.

In my experience, restaurants don't hire students anymore. I can think of a variety of contributing factors:

• High school students aren't used to hard work as much as an earlier generation (for whom restaurant work was an alternative to hard manual labor of various sorts)
• high schools assign a LOT more homework than those of 30 years ago did, making it hard to work restaurant hours and still pass your classes
• safety regulations and insurance make it harder/more expensive to hire minors
• restaurants need people to work harder, more skillfully, and longer hours than they did 30 years ago.

Mostly when you see kids working in restaurants as a school job, it's their parents' restaurant.

Thirty human slaves? Maybe, maybe not. Some people live very frugally so they can send money home to their families. Thirty is a lot, to be sure, but I see stuff in SE Asia that has made me realize that what seems tough in the USA, maybe even horrible, is not all that different than where they come from.

I am against illegal aliens but I understand why they come and I wish there was an equitable work program that made it worthwhile for them and their employers to be on the legal side of things. We need people both in food preparation and growing/harvesting. We need their labor and a system that is balanced for "guest" workers.

For the native born kids, the "child protection" laws mean that kids can't deliver papers, pick strawberries and so forth that instilled something of a work ethic during their youth. But not every kid is the same. Some work and enjoy it. Others are aghast at the idea.

Steve, child labor laws do not prohibit any of those things. A kid can still mow people's lawns to make money if he so desires, pass papers, etc. The child labor laws, which of course vary by state, usually prohibit times of work, total number of hours worked, and the limits also vary by age. I think what Fuzzy pointed out is true, and I would add that given a choice of an experienced, dependable older person vs. a green, texting fiend 16-year-old, most employers will choose the older worker (age discrimination, but not against a protected class, so no recourse for the youngsters).

While Fuzzy's point about the Chipotle bust being big news in Minnesota but a blip elsewhere, I think that "illegal" aliens are a bigger issue here than one might think. (I put the word illegal in quotes because of yesterday's SC decision, in which Justice Kennedy said, “making criminals out of aliens engaged in unauthorized work—aliens who already face the possibil­ity of employer exploitation because of their removable status—would be inconsistent with federal policy and objectives.")

For people who grumble that people should come here legally, "like my ancestors did," I believe they do not understand the changes to immigration that have occurred over the last century or so. My great-grandparents arrived in the U.S. with no marketable skills, absolutely no understanding of English, and they were practically given land to farm (they were WASPs so they faced no barriers to entry, unlike some ethnicities). Even being white, I doubt that they would be allowed to emigrate here now with the skills they had then. I also believe people don't comprehend the terrible circumstances that Latinos are fleeing when they come to work here. I think they are escaping an untenable situation as much as, or even more than, they are seeking any sort of "promised land." America is the best and easiest place for them to escape to, and it still offers the most opportunity, even if that means toiling in restaurants or on farms for meager pay, leading a shadow existence, ever afraid of being deported.

Politicians don't want to address this unhappy state of affairs for a variety of reasons. Employers, who have the onus to not hire undocumented workers, only care about employment laws if they get caught because these workers are a cheap labor supply that doesn't demand anything and won't complain about working conditions. Therefore there is no pressure from employers to enforce or change the laws. Some politicians in southern borders states are hesitant to anger Latinos, who make up an increasingly large bloc of voters. Most of the solutions offered are expensive (building a fence, increased enforcement), and politicians don't want to be seen as spending all our tax dollars or increasing the size of government. Then there are the states, with more impetus to act, but which must tread carefully around federal laws.

However, this is a problem that needs to be addressed in a meaningful manner. I don't claim to have the solution, but I hope Congress can get its act together to pass immigration reform sooner rather than later.

Hi,

I find it ironic that two segments of food industry highers undocumented workers and have different experiences with immigration offficials.

Ethnic restaurants hire or enslave (The local Mongolian BBQ did not pay their workers.) immigrants and seem to get raided frequently.

The huge hog processing plant hires hundreds of workers and has no problems.

Tim

Then there is Major League Baseball, which has never had a problem getting legal status for any player they want to bring to the US,

Ilene,

The important difference is that Major League Baseball does obtain "legal status" for their immigrant players. Cargill does not!

Tim