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Economy

'Jobs Americans Won't Do': The Lie That Broke a Nation and the Economic and Social Devastation It Hid

2025-11-21

[PJ] Charlotte, N.C., is making headlines this week because dozens of construction sites have gone silent. ICE swept through the region, and the labor force evaporated almost instantly. A major American city discovered, in real time, that its building boom was being held together by workers who couldn’t legally be there. Watching that footage hit me hard, because I’ve seen it before — not on the evening news, but in the slow collapse of my own childhood community.

I grew up forty miles north of Louisville, Ky., in a one-stoplight town held together by tobacco, construction, and the kinds of gritty jobs that built the region’s character. My dad ran a small construction contracting business and held a small tobacco base, which gives you the legal right to grow a certain weight of tobacco. My brothers and I worked tobacco as teenagers, starting at 12 or 13, and my brothers did construction with Dad as soon as we were old enough to hold a hammer.

Those jobs weren’t easy. Tobacco paid around $10 an hour in the early-to-mid 1980s, the equivalent of $30 today, and you earned every penny. The work was filthy, exhausting, and dangerous: Sticky sap soaked into your skin, July sun cooked you alive, and harvest season meant hatchets, long metal spikes, and dark, dusty barn lofts where one bad step could break a leg. But we did it gladly because the pay was good and the work meant something. Every kid I knew in high school worked tobacco, along with a good share of the adults. It was the backbone of the community.

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Posted by: Abu Uluque 2025-11-21 12:42

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Posted by: Super Hose 2025-11-21 06:01

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