Methland, agribusiness, illegal aliens, and the right to earn a living wage

I recently read Nicholas Reding's Methland, an account of the toll that methamphetamine abuse has taken on Oelwein, Iowa - with Oelwein pretty much serving as a proxy for the hundreds of other rural towns where meth has become a way of life, or, for that matter, a way of death.

Even though the book was pretty sloppily edited, I did enjoy - if that's the right word for a topic that is profoundly depressing -  reading it. (Are copy editing and fact checking lost arts? I know that a lot is thrown back on writers these days, but, let's face it, after the author's finished the darned book, it's pretty hard for him or her to fine tooth comb it. Still, I wish that someone had. And so did the Iowans who went nuts on Reding's having confused Cedar Rapids with Cedar Falls. I hate when that happens. Or would have, if I'd noticed. I did notice some date and name inconsistencies. Grrrrr.) But I won't let the little mistakes take away from the book itself, which tells quite a tale.

Reding traces the ascendancy of meth in Oelwein, and similar towns, to the rise of Big Ag.

As he tells it, in the early 1990's, Iowa Ham, the small, unionized meat processor in town, was swallowed up whole by Gillette*. Gillette promptly shaved pay from a modest but living wage of $18 to the bare minimum ($6.20). Benefits were pretty much eliminated.

In Oelwein, Iowa - a small town in the middle of nowhere with not a whole heck of a lot going for it except its work ethic and Midwest nice - this was, unfortunately,  "the best a man could get".

But it didn't take long for workers to do the math and figure out that doing boring, smelly, dangerous, nauseating, exhausting work for a modest but living wage was one thing. Doing it for next to nothing was another. Doing the math quickly became doing the meth.

Of course, there was a ready supply of workers who would take these jobs for next to nothing, and they were largely illegal Mexican workers who were fleeing such impoverished conditions that living eight to a van was a better alternative than whatever was available at home.  Sure, $6.20 an hour might not support an Oelwein man's family, but it could support a Mexican man's family if he scraped by on a few bucks a week and sent the rest home.

And so, some of the folks in Oelwein - those who were not particularly well educated, those who pretty much lacked ambition and were content to stay put, as long as they could find okay work for okay pay (no longer available at Iowa Ham) - turned to meth - some cooked up in their own homes, some ported in by Mexican drug gangs taking advantage of the illegal alien pipeline.

Repeat this scenario all over small town, rural America, and you have an awful lot of unemployed druggies cooking up batches of recipes that called for sudafed in their kitchen meth labs. (Interesting, I was interviewing a customer for a client of mine the other day, and he mentioned that it was so quiet in his town in the middle-of-nowhere Missouri, the only noise he ever heard was from an exploding meth lab.)

You can get the recipe for meth online, I suppose, but the real recipe that interests me here is the one that combines Big Ag with illegal aliens to provide American consumers with cheaper bacon, yielding a drug-addled permanent underclass.  Cool before frosting. Serves 4.

Okay, it's not as cause and effect simplistic as this. Still...

So the next time I hear someone complaining about illegal aliens taking American jobs, I will no longer automatically tell myself, 'That's ridiculous: no Americans would take those jobs.'  Because the truth is that, while it may be correct that Americans won't take those jobs, it's that Americans won't take those jobs at those wages.

All so that we can pay a few cents less for a pound of baloney at Walmart.

Yippee.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

*Yes, Gillette - Nicholas Reding may not have checked his facts, but I checked the book and Gillette it was.  Sure I'm just a blogger, but I'm also a bit of a fact checker, and when I googled Gillette and Iowa Ham, I came up empty. But I'll take Nick's word for it. Who knew they did ham?