Excellent article that tells the truth about what has happened to the job market in this country, and how it has affected every aspect of American life. The entire article is available at the link, below.
‘Jobs Americans Won’t Do’
[. . .] politicians, pundits, and corporate lobbyists kept repeating the same line: “Americans just won’t do these jobs.” That phrase infuriated me from the first time I heard it. I knew it was a lie. I had done the tobacco work myself. My brothers had. Every teenager we knew had. Every adult performed the hard labor that kept the region alive. Americans didn’t suddenly lose their work ethic. The jobs were taken from them — not by immigrants directly, but by American employers who built a business model on illegal labor and by a federal government that looked the other way for forty years.
What Americans “won’t do” are jobs that have been made illegal in everything but name — jobs where wages have collapsed to exploit desperation, where safety standards are ignored, where workers are paid off the books, where insurance and taxes are bypassed, and where living conditions violate every regulation on the books. When the floor is lowered that far, legal workers cannot enter the market at all. That isn’t laziness. That’s math.
Kentuckians know this dynamic intimately because our parents and grandparents lived through the company-store era, when the coal companies controlled the whole lives of their employees and paid in scrip instead of dollars to maintain economic power. Kentuckians recognize exploitation when they see it. When elites say “jobs Americans won’t do,” we hear the truth hiding underneath: “jobs Americans won’t do under company-store conditions.” And no one should.
[. . .]
We cannot build a stable nation on a labor force that evaporates as soon as the law is enforced. We cannot restore dignity to working-class Americans while preserving the very system that destroyed their livelihoods. And we cannot keep lying to ourselves about the consequences of a labor model built on illegality, exploitation, and displacement.
Illegal labor isn’t a solution. It’s a dependency — one that corrodes wages, destroys skill pipelines, hollows out communities, and leaves entire sectors vulnerable to collapse. If we want a strong and resilient country, we must confront that reality now. The alternative is more Charlottes, more hollowed-out towns, and more lost generations, all sacrificed on the altar of a system that was never sustainable in the first place.
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