Word: wages
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...Smith, despite her year’s stay with the school, doesn’t try to be a journalist. She invents annual dinners where professors and freshmen listen to a glee club while Haitians serve chicken for a $22 flat wage. There is the Bus Stop, a restaurant that serves the same as Cafe Algiers but is embellished with basement-shaking poetry performances...
...nationwide housing boom is responsible for much of the worker shortage. Field workers, mostly undocumented immigrants from Mexico, are increasingly ditching the minimum-wage, back-breaking temporary work offered in agriculture for more lucrative construction jobs, which pay from $11 to $15 an hour. An estimated 40% of the region's illegal agricultural workers have already migrated to the construction industry. The growers insist that their margins on produce are too small to offer higher wages, a claim that unions are challenging...
...wage competition isn't the only culprit. The United Farm Workers, a 27,000-member union in California, says workers are simply looking for better working conditions; this summer several California farm workers died from heat-related illness. A crackdown on illegal immigration by U.S. Border Patrol and vigilantes called "Minutemen" is also choking the supply of new workers...
When privileged people (that’s most of us here) talk about poverty, we often do so in economic terms: the poverty line, the living wage, the cost of living, the unemployment rate. And to the extent that poverty is an economic phenomenon, we’re not completely off base. But poverty is also about intolerance...
Weekends on the road have also deterred younger drivers from entering the field. But average weekly earnings for long-distance drivers were up 5.1%, to $725, in 2004, nearly closing the wage gap with construction, an industry fueled by the housing boom. And drivers can spend those weekends chugging alongside the Rockies. How can trucking help erase that stigma? "You can't go honking at people in four-wheelers," says Earl Sylvain, 69, a former high school teacher who has spent his retirement driving trucks. "Why would you curse at them? They're the ones using the stuff...