>>13418834Similar thing happened at a grocery store I worked for. There were three older black men that came in every night after the store closed and cleaned all the floors. Usually there would be two of them each night and they swapped shifts so all three would get the same amount of hours per pay period. They were brothers (literal, not soul) who shared a modest shotgun house in the black part of town.
These guys weren't rocket scientists but they knew how to get up any stain and would strip and re-wax aisles as needed. It was a big store so it was fulltime work for all three of them. The floors can get surprisingly dirty over the course of a single day and lots of different substances spilled in different areas only surfaced cleaned when the store is open. The were masters of their humble craft.
Then one day the store laid them off. Next night there was a whole crew of Mexicans cleaning the floor. They didn't do as good of a job and there were four of them each night. It was baffling until I found out that the grocery chain had outsourced the floor cleaning. No way the company doing the floors was able to undercut the cost of three close to minimum wage workers by bringing in more workers unless they were illegals getting paid under the table.
Those black guys were in their 50s. Cleaning floors was what they knew how to do and how they supported themselves. They're not going to learn how to be JavaScript developers. They're going to be on public assistance, probably until they die. For the grocery chain, it probably saved them a few bucks by being able to hire illegals without really hiring them since the outside company insulated them from that but society ended up a bit poorer as a result.
