Left Behind
I was putting together two things I’d read or heard in the last day. One was a story on NPR about El Centro California, “The Worst Job Market In America”.. The essence of that story is that El Centro, the biggest town in Imperial County, has an unemployment rate nearly 5 times the national average. It looked into the Why and the Who.
“Why” is largely because Imperial County’s economy is comprised almost entirely of agriculture, and therefore much of the work is seasonal farm work. This causes two problems. One is that, when not needed to pick vegetables, workers don’t have a job. The other is that the nature of farm labor is that it is hard, stoop labor in a place where the summer average high temp is 103. It uses people up, leaving them unable to do that job, or indeed many others.
That leads to the “Who”. Many are older former farmworkers. They never got paid much, so they have little or no savings, plus the seasonal nature of the work means when you’re not employed during the year you have to spend any money you might have earned when you were.
The jobs that are left, that they might do, are service and retail jobs. But retail jobs are also leaving, just like everywhere else. So you have a poor population with unsteady employment and a shrinking job base, unable to move anywhere else, while the local economy dies around them. If their children are bright enough and lucky enough to go to college, they leave the county and don’t come back.
Which brings me to the other thing I read, this Twitter thread by Chris Arnade, responding to Bret Stephens’ NYT op-ed about Obama => Trump voters and why the Dems were not appealing to them.
If goal of that NYT’s op-ed was to channel Obama to Trump voters, I am not sure where the writer got his understanding of “what those want” from
In working on my book on addiction/poverty I spent a lot of time in counties that flipped from Obama to Trump (some featured in book)
— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) June 30, 2019
Arnade talks about people in the counties that went from voting for Obama to voting for Trump. The thing that struck me is that he’s talking about the same phenomenon - people living in places where there are more people than jobs, and WAY more people than genuine opportunity. They get desperate and just want change. I suspect Arnade underappreciates the xenophobia, but then Stephens probably overestimates it.
The takeaway from these two stories is that the nature and location of employment keeps changing, and it leaves areas filled with the most vulnerable families, who can’t afford to move and who can barely afford to stay. People in this situation get desperate and as evidenced in the 2016 election, they do stupid, self-destructive things.
I don’t think we owe everyone a high paying job in their hometown. I had to move 2500 miles to find a job in my field. But I have advantages they don’t. I don’t think we can force companies to site their facilities in small towns, because they depend on things that small towns don’t provide.
I don’t know what the answer is. But, you know, we as a society would be better if we could figure out something. I believe this is one of those things that requires a radical rethinking of the nature of employment and compensation; how we as a society adjust to change; and what we all owe to one another.