That is what the caste system is for in India. Different castes have different occupations. The sudras do working-class activities. Below them, there are untouchables. Maybe someone from India can explain where the line is drawn between what an untouchable does, and what a sudra does.
*Who picks the grapes in South Africa’s thriving vineyards? *Locals, mostly Coloureds who live on the farm…
*Who washes the dishes in fancy Capetonian restaurants? *African immigrants, and local Blacks. We don’t have busboys, waiters bus their own tables, and they’d be a mix of locals - White, Black, Coloured, with immigrants as well.
Who works at slaughterhouses in South Africa? - Varies by region, but locals, Coloured or Black.
*Who does the lousy jobs in YOUR country? *Locals, mostly. Illegal immigrants from the rest of Africa tend to run small stores or craft items, or sell shit at robots. But even domestic work needs paperwork, so it tends to be locals who do it. Or Zimbabweans.
Everytime I go skiing in Canada, it seems the resorts are almost entirely staffed by young Australians. I assume they go to Canada to work during their “summer” break.
From what I understand, in Mexico Guatemalans do the jobs Mexicans won’t do.
What about the married ones?
I think what is missing from the OP is that eventually, you reach a place where these jobs don’t exist. The poorest countries in the world don’t have (many) large commercial agricultural plantations. They will have small holder and sustenance farming, where a family works a small piece of land and trades what they do not eat locally at informal markets. Commercial farm labor basically does not exist.
They do not have many restaurants, especially outside of the large cities. “Eating out” in the village consists of going to informal home-run restaurant, where you pay a small fee for a portion out of the family soup pot, or where someone cooks up a pot of whatever at home and takes it to the side of the road selling small portions to people passing by. Even the occasional more formal restaurant will be managed by family labor, with the kids taking care of the menial tasks.
The slaughterhouse is not a full time job in these contexts. Few people can afford to eat meat regularly, and when they do it will probably be chickens or goats raised and slaughtered at home. Larger villages may slaughter a cow or two daily for sale at the market, and generally the meat vendor will round up a small group to do the butchering, giving them a small payment for their service on a day by day basis. Nobody “works in the slaughterhouse,” but they may provide day labor to the butcher.
So at this is where you will find the bottom of the labor pool- in places like Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, and Nepal. You’ll eventually find a place where the formal economy really doesn’t exist.
I also did this a few years ago- at which point the visa was one year, and you could work for up to 6 months for one employer (I actually have the terms and conditions print out still) but if you completed 3 months work in an agricultural capacity, you can apply for another year’s visa. However, a large amount of that work is also done by poor Aussies and groups from South East Asia, I stayed in quite a few working hostels.
New Zealand has a similar scheme, and in exchange, all the Kiwis and Aussies come over to the UK, and get jobs as barmen.
The UK does have some number of illegal immigrants who do agricultural work, though it’s hard to find accurate info on the numbers. It came into public attention a few years back after at least 21 illegal immigrants collecting cockles drowned, after which regulations were at least theoretically tightened up.
Actually this is true of the U.K. as well.
I have seen skilled tradesmen working as labourers and shop assistants, because we have a very large number of E.Europeans (Who are in the country legally) working for illegally low wages with fake qualifications.
We also have Africans and Chinese working here illegally .
The old chestnut about foreign workers doing the jobs we don’t want to do, not only isn’t true but hasn’t been true for a very, very long time.
In Spain (ten years ago), it was a mix of North Africans, sub-Saharan Africans, and South Americans. There was quite a problem with human trafficking between North Africa and Spain, with many people drowning attempts to cross the Mediterranean in rickety boats. Also, around that time, conflict was growing between African immigrants and the newer immigrants from Eastern Europe. African immigrants had been traditionally hired to pick crops, but farmers had started hiring the “whiter” Eastern Europeans instead, pushing out the Africans from their seasonal jobs.
In Ontario at least, seasonal fruit and vegetable picking is done by migrant workers from Mexico and the Caribbean. The janitorial jobs in the office buildings I’ve worked in seem to be done by immigrants from a variety of countries (in Latin America, Asia, etc.).
I think they hire the Australian students so they can be interpreters between the locals and Australian tourists. (But yes, there do seem to be a lot of Australians manning the lifts and bars in ski resorts.)
Canada, like the USA, has a lively immigrant culture, but nowhere near the level of illegal immigrants or exploitation for under minimum wage. That is not usually glossed over and can get the employer in serious trouble, something that does not seem to be a problems for exploitative US employers.
So you will often find that dishwashers, office cleaners, and other menial or minimum wage jobs are done by immigrants with poor english or problems with education qualifications… I.e. the office cleaners are the wives of immigrants; I have encountered in the last few years cleaners of east indian, chilean, ethiopian, Chinese and filipino origin. The cleaners in college 40 years ago were Portugese or Italian. You will see the same wide mix behind the counter at Tim Hortons or McDonalds. It`s a running joke that non-Pakistani taxi drivers are a rarity. The jobs that anyone can do, and English is optional, anyone will do.
(The Chileans, husband, wife, and brother-in-law, run a very successful small business cleaning a wide range of places; at least, she mentioned she went back to visit the folks back home; so did the Ethiopian. Nobody is barely ekeing out a living.).
But LC is right - server jobs are typically students or else local talent with no better prospects. This is because a better level of English is required, and tips are darned good, especially if you forget to report them. My wife complained that the servers often made more than her as a manager, and nobody wanted to reduce their tip time to take on assistant manager duties.
In Spain there’s not much of a divide between legal and illegal immigrants or between immigrants and locals when it comes to “low-level” jobs; many of the locals looking for jobs as farmhands are students (summer only, in this case). There are greater divides in some regions or areas, but the death of Paro Agrario (unemployment pay for farmhands from our poorest regions; it wasn’t so much a pork barrel as a warehouse of them) has hit the most extreme ones very hard. Also, it’s very common for Spaniards to go to other countries looking for house-help or restaurant jobs: the target countries for this are usually English-speaking countries, with the notion to improve their English (and thus, their employability back home); German is also a target language.
Spaniards have this “do the Americas” mindset when it comes to emigration; so do many of our immigrants, most notably those from Latin America. The idea is to go somewhere, work like crazy, save as much as you can, perhaps learn things that you wouldn’t have been able to learn at home, and then go back home. Immigrants from China, Africa or Eastern Europe have a more permanent mindset; for many of them the reason is cultural or ideological as well as economic, or things back home are so fucked up economically that there simply isn’t much of a point in thinking of going back: sending home as much as they can yes, moving back to open a small business, no.
Not “traditionally” at all, but since Paro Agrario got implemented. Before that, it had been Andalusian farm workers. Spain had still been an emigrant country, and the sudden opening of the farmhand job market due to the Andalusians abandoning it since they didn’t need to work any more drew a lot of African immigrants; first from Morocco, then as the news spread from further and further away.
There are a lot of Burmese manual laborers in Thailand. And stories of Lao girls being horribly mistreated as maids by their Chinese-Thai employers are legion.
Pretty much true as far as it goes - in Oslo. But Swedes don’t go that low on the ladder and there’s a huge amount of them way up the ladder as well, running businesses, management positions, bank- and financial positions. For a Swede who doesn’t mind Norway or Norwegians, it’s a good deal.
For instance, the current tariff regulated minimum wage for a hotel clerk or breakfast cook in a hotel, with no previous experience, is 152,83 NOK. That’s about $26,5 per hour. In terms of the Swedish Krone (SEK) which is slightly weaker than the Norwegian one (NOK), it’s about 178,64 SEK per hour. I’m not an expert on the Swedish system, but this page makes it seem the equivalent over there is about 105-120 SEK per hour. And considering the significantly lower unemployment (About 3,2% in Norway compared to about 7,6% in Sweden) it can also be easier to get a job on this side of the border.
Most Norwegians are pretty stoked about having so many Swedes in Oslo, since they usually make for good customer service employees and fit in well. All the benefits of having a foreign workforce depress the prices, but who also speak an easily understood language and fit in perfectly with the established culture.
I think what the OP is interested in is jobs further down the ladder, though - in Norway, there’s a lot of guest laborers from Poland and Lithuania who do things like landscaping, trash pickup, construction work and so on. A lot of the same benefits are supposed to apply, with guaranteed minimum wage and healthcare benefits, but there’s a lot of shady businesses trying to get around those conditions. Like people being employed and paid by a company in Poland, with Polish wages, who come here to work, but the company made a bid for Norwegian prices and end up making money hand over fist, while the worker gets screwed by the Cost of Living differential between Norway and Poland.
In Japan:
They have underclasses (Burakumin) that do many ‘dirty’ jobs, that aren’t necessarily low-paid, but are nevertheless seen as jobs a Japanese national wouldn’t want to do. But those underclasses are Japanese nationals, not imported foreigners.
For other jobs, i.e, low paying/low skilled factory work, imported ethnic Japanese Brazilians filled the niche. They were willing to work for low pay, but they haven’t exactly been welcomed by society. In fact a few years ago the government offered them all free airfare to go back to Brazil.
Next up are the Chinese imports who, only just recently, work at the 7 elevens for minimum wage.
Oh I forgot the nursing situation in Japan. Not enough young Japanese are willing to enter the nursing profession, and with an aging population, they needed imports. So just a few years ago they tried to attract qualified nurses from the Philippines. But, because the imported nurses, regardless of their qualifications and experience, could never hope to progress in their field to positions of management, by law, even if they spoke Japanese, the whole system never really got started and just died in the ass.
The Philippine nurses association warned against Philippine nurses going to Japan right at the outset, for the reasons above.
There was also the farming laborer problem that, 4 years ago, the Japanese government hoped to solve by creating a new type of visa that was a ‘training’ visa. Under the new visa, small farms could take in ‘trainees’ from other countries (mostly China) and use them as very cheap labor.
The stated purpose of the programme was that the Japanese farmers would teach the [Chinese] how to farm, and in return the [Chinese] would get room, board and a living wage.
In fact they, the [Chinese], got their passports stolen, were locked up like slaves, and were extorted for money.
A lot of domestic helpers in Taiwan are Filipinas or Indonesians, while construction workers are Thais. Probably quite a few mainland Chinese being paid under the table as well, for . . . this and that.
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All the benefits of having a foreign workforce depress the prices, but who also speak an easily understood language and fit in perfectly with the established culture.
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Aside from the occasional amusing misunderstanding. For example, and very apropos, the swedish word for “beer” is the norwegian word for “poop”. Although, given the circumstances, I suppose the other way around would have been worse, given the the excellent swedish attitude to customer service.