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People raised as rural peasants have a lot more stamina for doing hard agricultural labor than people raised in suburbs without a manual-labor background. Makin

People raised as rural peasants have a lot more stamina for doing hard agricultural labor than people raised in suburbs without a manual-labor background. Making this observation isn’t “racist”. If immigration were blocked, just raising agricultural workers’ pay wouldn’t be enough to fill all of those jobs. But raising those jobs’ pay (e.g. by raising the federal minimum wage and enforcing it) would be a good idea anyway. Immigrant farm workers should still be paid fair wages.

maxerickson 7y ago
Stamina is the wrong word though. It's willingness or grit or something, not an innate physical characteristic that they picked up from rural poverty. Fun that your edit added "willing" while I was writing this.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  A lot of it is stamina. Both physical and mental. Rural peasants are really tough in a way that is extremely foreign to suburbanites. My godfather (indigenous peasant in rural Mexico) spent some time in his youth carrying two 50-pound bottles of liquor on his back all day long up and down mountains over a rough trail. I get winded if I try to carry one of those bottles for a block of flat sidewalk. If someone asked me to strap two to a tumpline and hike up a mountain I would call them crazy. He spent other years working on coffee plantations under thieving brutal racist owners. And continued working on his own small plots of land every day up to maybe age 70, even as his body was thoroughly worn out. Now his grandchildren are white-collar professionals. This kind of hard manual labor is as demanding as any high-level sport. It takes years of (mental and physical) training to be able to handle it without falling apart.
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    Do it as much as you can for month and see how far you get. I'm 39 and for the last 6 months I've been doing a job that involves lots of manual labor, it's gotten easier, not harder. I guess I was in relatively decent condition at the start though, if you consider the US average.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  I think stamina is the correct word. I'm 54. My ex husband is the same age and was career military. At some point in his career, they changed the PT test standards for younger military members because young people growing up in front of TVs and computers didn't have the stamina his generation had at the same age. Meanwhile, they did not lower the test standards for him/his age group. He quite resented it. In other words, this is Federal policy acknowledging this change. Last I heard, the military is having increasing difficulty getting qualified applicants because young people today are simply out of shape compared to previous generations. I've also seen articles that say we increasingly import construction workers because middle and upper class young white males no longer take construction jobs during the summer in high school and college like they routinely did when I was that age.
perl4ever 7y ago
What you have "stamina" for is dependent on your perception of alternatives.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  I remember when darker brown people were considered to have a lot of "stamina" in the US. Now we've changed our focus to a lighter shade of brown I guess. Progress?
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    My memory of construction sites in urban Texas about 15 years ago, was that the day laborers I worked with were very nearly all African-American, and it was the skilled workers constructing the high rises who were Spanish speaking. No idea if that was representative or just the neighborhood or if it is different these days. I imagine that there is more grueling work though than cleaning up rebar and junk so I don't know what it says about stamina.

maxerickson 7y ago

Stamina is the wrong word though. It's willingness or grit or something, not an innate physical characteristic that they picked up from rural poverty. Fun that your edit added "willing" while I was writing this.

jacobolus 7y ago
A lot of it is stamina. Both physical and mental. Rural peasants are really tough in a way that is extremely foreign to suburbanites. My godfather (indigenous peasant in rural Mexico) spent some time in his youth carrying two 50-pound bottles of liquor on his back all day long up and down mountains over a rough trail. I get winded if I try to carry one of those bottles for a block of flat sidewalk. If someone asked me to strap two to a tumpline and hike up a mountain I would call them crazy. He spent other years working on coffee plantations under thieving brutal racist owners. And continued working on his own small plots of land every day up to maybe age 70, even as his body was thoroughly worn out. Now his grandchildren are white-collar professionals. This kind of hard manual labor is as demanding as any high-level sport. It takes years of (mental and physical) training to be able to handle it without falling apart.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  Do it as much as you can for month and see how far you get. I'm 39 and for the last 6 months I've been doing a job that involves lots of manual labor, it's gotten easier, not harder. I guess I was in relatively decent condition at the start though, if you consider the US average.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
I think stamina is the correct word. I'm 54. My ex husband is the same age and was career military. At some point in his career, they changed the PT test standards for younger military members because young people growing up in front of TVs and computers didn't have the stamina his generation had at the same age. Meanwhile, they did not lower the test standards for him/his age group. He quite resented it. In other words, this is Federal policy acknowledging this change. Last I heard, the military is having increasing difficulty getting qualified applicants because young people today are simply out of shape compared to previous generations. I've also seen articles that say we increasingly import construction workers because middle and upper class young white males no longer take construction jobs during the summer in high school and college like they routinely did when I was that age.

perl4ever 7y ago

What you have "stamina" for is dependent on your perception of alternatives.

Consultant32452 7y ago
I remember when darker brown people were considered to have a lot of "stamina" in the US. Now we've changed our focus to a lighter shade of brown I guess. Progress?
- perl4ever 7y ago
  My memory of construction sites in urban Texas about 15 years ago, was that the day laborers I worked with were very nearly all African-American, and it was the skilled workers constructing the high rises who were Spanish speaking. No idea if that was representative or just the neighborhood or if it is different these days. I imagine that there is more grueling work though than cleaning up rebar and junk so I don't know what it says about stamina.