Reference no: EM132225098

Few Line Up for Jobs Abandoned by Immigrants

Randy Rhodes, the company president of Harvest Select, a food processing plant in Uniontown, Alabama, thought he was just having a nightmare. He simply could not believe it when he showed up at his plant one day only to find that all of his 160 workers were missing. He had 850,000 pounds of catfish that had to be skinned, gutted, and trimmed for sale, and it would not be a pretty sight (or smell) if he were unable to get that work done. Unfortunately this was not just a bad dream and this experience was not limited to his company. In plants, fields, hotels, and restaurants across the state of Alabama, chickens were going unprocessed, tomatoes were going unpicked, hotel beds were going unmade, and dishes were going unwashed as thousands of workers vanished, almost overnight.

The cause of this mass worker exodus was the passage of Alabama House Bill 56, which required police to question people they suspect might be in the country illegally and punish any business that hires them. The goal of this legislation was to free up jobs that Governor Robert Bentley said illegal immigrants “had stolen from Page 217recession-battered Americans,” and it was true that the unemployment rate in Perry County where Harvest Select was located was just under 20%. Unfortunately, none of these unemployed native Alabamians had any interest in any of these jobs, and thus whereas the new law failed to put even a tiny dent in the unemployment rate, it totally devastated employers in the region. Indeed, the results in Alabama pretty much reflected what has been found in large-scale research studies from other regions of the country, where the presence of immigrant labor has had almost no effect on employment levels and wages. For the most part, few Americans compete for the jobs that are taken by immigrant workers due to the undesirable nature of those jobs.

It is easy to see why most people would be uninterested in the jobs at Harvest Select. People working at the plant perform manually difficult work slicing up smelly fish for ten hours a day in a cold, wet room for $7.25 an hour with virtually no benefits. Of course, the comeback to this argument is why anyone would think they should be able to get away with creating such terribly dissatisfying jobs in the first place, and then expect to be entitled to an endless supply of cheap labor. For example, Alabama’s director of industrial relations, Tom Surtees, struck back at some of the local employers countering with “Don’t tell me an Alabamian can’t work out in the field picking produce because it’s hot. Go into a steel mill. Go into a foundry. Go into numerous other occupations and tell them Alabamians won’t do work where it’s hot or requires manual labor. The difference being, jobs in Alabama’s foundries and steel mills pay better and offer better benefits.” The stakes of this battle are high in the sense that this is a fight over the basic business model that has been in these industries for decades. As Surtees notes, “Whether an employer in agriculture used migrant workers or whether it’s another industry that used illegal immigrants, they had a business model and that business model is going to have to change.”

Rhodes and other local employers claim they are stuck with the business model that they have now due to foreign competition that pays their workers even lower wages. Rhodes counters, “I’m sorry, but I can’t pay those kids $13.00 per hour and then sell my product at a competitive price—it is just not realistic.” Although it is difficult to predict how this conflict will all play out in the future, it is interesting to note that one of the major adaptations that employers made in the short term was to bring in refugee labor from war-torn countries of Africa and weather-devastated Haiti. Ironically, people admitted to the country as refugees are legally allowed to work the day they arrive, and hence, are not affected by House Bill 56. Republican State Senator Scott Beason, who sponsored the law, is very unhappy with this most recent development, but his hands are tied. He states, “We would prefer that the companies hire native Alabamians,” but it is unclear that this is ever going to happen.

QUESTIONS

1. Is the inability to find traditional workers willing to perform the types of jobs described here a sign that the business model in some of these industries has to change?

2. Why do the laws of supply and demand not seem to hold within these industries when it comes to labor markets?

Pleas show effectiveness in identifying and analyzing issues in the case, the adequacy of and support for the recommendations made, and the identification of potential downsides to your solutions. Include clarity and technical quality to your writing for this case. Also, please use and cite all references.

(Noe 216-217)

Noe, Raymond, John Hollenbeck, Barry Gerhart, Patrick Wright. Human Resource Management, 10th Edition. McGraw-Hill Learning Solutions, 02/2016. VitalBook file.