(Staffing Talk) — The other day I had a conversation with my boss, Marty, the co-owner of the company, about the current labor market. As usual, no matter the overall economic situation, we seem to struggle to find good, qualified, willing people to fill our job orders. It’s a perplexing and frustrating problem. During our conversation, Marty started harking back to the late 70s and early 80s, when he was a teenager. Back then, he recalled, there really wasn’t an influx of Mexicans or other foreign workers to help the local farmers pick their crops.
I’ll be honest – I was shocked. How on earth did they manage? I mean, without imported foreign workers to do the ‘jobs Americans won’t do,’ we all know the crops would rot in the fields, grocery store shelves would be empty, and people would starve in the streets while trying to use their smartphones to order pizza that will never be delivered (hey, no farms, no ingredients!).
Yet, in the age before Internet and Wi-Fi, in a time as primitive to us in many ways as the horse and buggy days were to them, somehow the crops got picked, the shelves got stocked and, despite a slight hiccup during the Carter administration, the people generally went about their days with full bellies.
