<p>I have to admire their resourcefullness.</p>
<p><a href=“Migrants Find a Gold Rush in New Orleans”>Migrants Find a Gold Rush in New Orleans;
<p>Yup, and at $16 an hour, American citizens STILL won’t do the work. Too hard.</p>
<p>Glad that they’re subsidizing my Social Security. God bless 'em!</p>
<p>Aren’t they simply responding to the finest mayor in the US quest to establish a chocolate milk city?</p>
<p>That says a lot about the other “workers”. First they were working for too little and taking jobs. Now what’s the excuse?</p>
<p>Just a minor note–The article says “It’s all illegals doing this work.”<br>
No. It may be MOSTLY illegals doing this work, but hundreds of college students, including my son, are doing some of it, like gutting houses, FOR NOTHING on their weekends. I am guessing that others are doing some of the work for money as well. (And not all Hispanics are here illegally. The word isn’t tattooed on their foreheads, after all.) Don’t believe everything you read, and don’t forget the positive sides to each aspect of the stories, please. We just got back from Parent/Family Weekened at Tulane, and the city is looking better every time we see it. If we have these workers to thank for that, then we should thank them all.</p>
<p>Make levees, not war.</p>
<p>Mexican workers are the most hard-working people I’ve ever seen. If you hire them and are good to them, there’s nothing they won’t do for you. They are the most appreciative bunch, but then I spoil mine. I have a crew coming next week to install windows and I’ll have coolers of drinks for them as well as lunch with their favorite fixings.</p>
<p>Leisure reading suggestion: Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation.”</p>
<p>Tookie, I find your post’s wording quite inappropriate. The use of the word “mine” and saying you “spoil them”- you sound like you are speaking of children or slaves.</p>
<p>Sorry, I didn’t mean to at all, just meant to be endearing. I would never feel that I was “above” anyone and certainly wouldn’t allude to a master/slave situation! I should have also added that my family has had worker/friends/maids that we’ve employed on and off for over 20 years, so when I mean’t “Mine”, I should say, my friend or friends.</p>
<p>frankly- I am done trying to be overly nice to help.
I have hired local men who live in a halfway house ( who approached me) to do some work- but i had to leave before they were done- so I paid them and gave them a tip just in case i wasn’t back before they were finished.
I had to return quicker than I thought because i forgot something- and they were already gone! plus the work wasn’t finished - (and what was- was done sloppily) :(</p>
<p>I chalked it up to being naive by paying them first- but the hilarious thing was they came back and wanted more work!
They must have thought i was born yesterday ;)</p>
<p>and mini $16 an hour is pretty good for unskilled labor that is about $33,000 a year.</p>
<p>Yes, it is $33K/yr assuming you can get work consistently year-round. That’s not a safe assumption, and when the work is done, what happens to the workers? </p>
<p>Those of us with even a little job security and benefits (I’m not speaking for myself on the latter count, as I receive none in my job.) really ought not to judge people who stand on street corners hoping for a day’s work. (Yes, that’s what at least some of them are doing in NOLA.)</p>
<p>“and mini $16 an hour is pretty good for unskilled labor that is about $33,000 a year.”</p>
<p>It’s VERY good (but don’t assume it is unskilled. You of all people should know what a union carpenter gets these days.)</p>
<p>"when the work is done, what happens to the workers? "</p>
<p>They will go on to the next job, and the one after that. Just like migrant farm laborers, who are virtually never without work. Saving money, sending a lot of it back to their families to build their own homes. Paying for my social security, and my workers comp (yours, too). Slowly learning English.</p>
<p>I don’t think folks appreciate what a national treasure these folks are.</p>
<p>Not mine, mini. I don’t get worker’s comp–or any other bennies, for that matter, and I DO pay soc sec. I also see many migrant workers where I live as I saw them in NOLA last week standing on street corners waiting for work. It’s oversimplifying to suggest that wanting work means having it when you do what they do. Life isn’t that easy for them. Not here, nor, I imagine, in many places, including where I grew up, in S Fla. We can salve our consciences by wishing it were, but that doesn’t make it so.</p>
<p>Life is very, very hard. (I used to be a state regulator of migrant labor camps, and resigned over the refusal of the state to actually regulate them.) But I’ve never met a migrant farm laborer who didn’t have a place they were working before, and didn’t know where they would be going for work next.</p>
<p>Clearly you see it from a perspective that differs from my original source–a father who worked as a deputy sheriff on a migrant camp circuit and brought a worker home to live with us for a year after a traumatic injury. So I guess there are two sides to any set of facts and we ought to learn from each other.</p>