On the shortage of (white?) folks willing to do "lower-rung American jobs"

In my dozen years studying law and rural livelihoods and with my most recent focus on the white working class (whether rural or not), I have often stumbled onto this question:  Why is there a shortage of working class whites willing to do working class labor--or, more precisely, the sort of work long associated with the working class, whatever color?  Is there literally a shortage of working class whites?  Whites without skills to facilitate their engagement in the higher end labor market?  or have the folks we've traditionally thought of as the white working class simply decided they are no longer willing to do such work?  Have they had enough?  Opted out of the labor market altogether?  Gone soft?  We know their numbers are shrinking because they are dying from what we now call deaths of despair?  Read more here and here. 

Incidentally, there was an apparent link noted between work and these deaths--having a job was a protective factor, that is--when the media first began to report on this phenomenon, but I've heard nothing of it lately. Indeed, I've seen contrary suggestions--like the one here--that the work that working class folks do often leaves them in pain, which in turn leaves them addicted to opioids.  Further, this recent analysis from the New York Times refutes the notion that requiring people to work makes the healthier.  It was prompted by the Trump administration's recent announcement that it may impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. 

I come to this question as one raised in a white working-class family where work was everything--not just your livelihood, but your reputation.  Work was what kept families like mine from being condemned as "white trash."  It's what made us the "worthy poor "rather than the "unworthy poor" or--more precisely--the settled working class as opposed to the "hard living" working class.  (Read more about these distinctions here).  My family literally never took a vacation, and I recall my father working literally seven days a week.  He was a deeply, deeply flawed individual, but/and he was nothing if not industrious.  To this day, I am dogged by the work ethic with which I was raised.  This means, among other things, that I struggle with guilt when I engage in leisure activities.  It's also a big factor--but not the only one--underlying my drive to achieve.  Maybe I'm not really that ambitious; I just can't stop working.

With that background, I read Chico Harlan's fascinating--and to me, depressing--story in the Washington Post on New Year's Day:  "U.S. Companies See Opportunity in Exodus from Storm-Ravaged Puerto Rico."  There's lots in this story to preoccupy a ruralist like me, and I wrote a post about it over at Legal Ruralism.  But for purposes of thinking about the white working class, I want to use this story to start a conversation about the demise/fate/disappearance--not sure what word to use--of the white working class.  This is a question that I expect to be a recurring theme this semester in our White Working Class and the Law Seminar, so let's get it on the table early on. 

The story is about how a turkey processing plant in Huron, South Dakota, is recruiting folks from Puerto Rico to come work there because in this town of about 12,000, the employer struggles to recruit an adequate workforce to fill its 1000 jobs.  Take this sentence for starters:

By some counts, nearly 2,000 Puerto Ricans were leaving every day, and in that exodus, some mainland U.S. companies were starting to see an opportunity of their own — a new answer in their ever-evolving struggle to find workers who would perform lower-rung American jobs.  (emphasis added)

Huron was 87% white and about 10% Hispanic or Latino in the 2010 Census.   Based on the Washington Post story, I'm guessing the Latinx influx came in the 2000s, after Dakota Provisions, the industrial turkey processor, opened its doors there.

Working class whites--among others--used to perform "lower-rung American jobs," and they clearly still do to some extent.  But this is not the first mention I've read in the media and in scholarly papers suggesting that whites are no longer willing to do the sort of work they used to do.  (Lots of posts over at Legal Ruralism talk about this phenomenon, mostly in the context of agricultural labor shortages and the need for comprehensive immigration reform).  Because low-skilled whites--and by some accounts, also low-skilled blacks--are no longer willing to do distasteful, back-breaking work, there is a shortage of such labor.  (Here's a story suggesting that employers favor immigrant labor over both black and white workers).  This is one of the reasons we have become so reliant on immigrant labor, as this Washington Post story suggests.  Indeed, get a load of this paragraph about the character of the work force at the turkey processing plant in South Dakota :

Only a handful seemed to be local. The people hanging the birds were from Burma. Some of the people trimming the breasts were from Puerto Rico. Deeper in the factory, cutting skin, removing organs, there were people from Cuba and Guatemala and Vietnam. More than a dozen were from Chuuk, an island chain in Micronesia.

This is consistent with stories like this one, and with my own academic work about Latinx immigration into rural destinations in the South.  It also reminds me of a tour I took of a massive dairy farm back in 2011 in Idaho's "Magic Valley," a field trip sponsored by the Rural Sociological Society's Annual Meeting in Boise.  One of the siblings who owned the farm (the woman who gave us the tour) talked about the unreliability of local white labor, and she blatantly implored that she needed "my Mexicans," though she acknowledged that the occasional Burmese refugee did good work, too. 

Is it possible that white folks are turning up their noses and turning away from this sort of labor because the work is getting crappier?  Is it possible that working in a poultry processing facility that processes 19,000 turkeys a day (as the one in South Dakota does) is harder, more demeaning labor than working at predecessor facilities that butchered and processed poultry?  Or is it that the white working class isn't made of the same tough stock it used to be?  And if today's white working class has just gotten lazier or more picky about what it it up for, what it is willing to do for a buck, then I'd like to know what forces have begotten that transition?  Poorer labor protections and fewer benefits?  Failure of working class wages to keep up with inflation?  A culture of laziness that has spread from those small factions of low-income whites who have been historically known as "white trash" into the ranks of the previously settled, respectable white working class.  (By the way, J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy suggests something akin to this latter explanation).  

Finally, what is the relationship between this phenomenon of whites effectively opting out of the labor force and the "deaths of despair," which have afflicted middle-aged, poorly educated white  folks to a greater degree than other demographic slices?  

These are among the questions I hope we'll get a better handle on answering during our semester.   To that end, here are some more resources.

The Wall Street Journal in September 2017 published this op-ed titled, "Bring Back the Work Ethic."

The Washington Post in August 2017 published this piece titled, "Rise of the machines" on how automation is replacing workers. It includes this provocative paragraph:

The line was intended for 12 workers, but two were no-shows. One had just been jailed for drug possession and violating probation. Three other spots were empty because the company hadn’t found anybody to do the work. That left six people on the line jumping from spot to spot, snapping parts into place and building metal containers by hand, too busy to look up as the forklift now came to a stop beside them.

And don't miss Terrence McCoy's compelling series on disability and work, which appeared over the course of last year in the Washington Post.  Here's just one entry from it, headlined, "I am a hard worker."