Quote:Demographics also play a part in wages...Where I live now, the majority of work available is retail...We all know that retail is a very low paying industry...The community and surrounding communities are very old...The median income of the area is only somewhere around $26,000 per year...In my area, if you make $10 an hour or more, you are considered to be doing very well...

 

There are only a handful of companies around that pay $10 an hour or more...I am situated almost in the center of Pa about 26 miles south of Penn State which is on the other side of "Seven Mountains"... Once you get over the mountian into the State College area, the wages increase dramatically, as do they if you go 60 miles to the capitol Harrisburg...

 

Most of towns here in Pa are townships / villages located inside Boroughs ( not talking about the big cities such as Philly or Pittsburgh) where the wages once again are very low...

 

The point to this post is to show that demographics help shape the local economy and workforce infrastructure, so where you said teenagers might be willing to work for $10 an hour, here that is a wage that most grown men would jump to have...

 

I work for a company HQ in another state, so my pay is close to what you would expect in Jacksonville, but to the locals here, it's HUGE money...$10 an hour is considered very good, $teens is excellant, and $20 + is HUGE...

 

Housing is CHEAP, groceries are expensive

Quote:All the laborers he hires do is load 50 lb square bales from the field onto a flat bed truck, then transfer them from the truck into a hay loft of a barn. There is equipment that will mostly automate these tasks, but his operation is not big enough to warrant the investment. The Mexican laborers range in age from 18 - 30ish, the locals he's tried to hire are usually teenagers or young adults. My county is the poorest in Tennessee, and one of the poorest in the country, yet he cannot find reliable workers locally.