I remember seeing an interview with a strawberry farmer who said that, in 25 years of growing the crop, he had never had a single U.S. citizen approach him for a job working in his fields.
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About 40 years later, my uncle's son - who had a chiseled physique, spent many hours in the gym and once tried out for a professional football team - ventured into the fields to see what it was like. As my cousin tells it, he couldn't keep up with the Mexican workers and, after a while, was just trying not to pass out.

Recently, I heard a similar story from a reader who said he was a Marine. He and a buddy were home on leave and decided to go into the fields to make extra money. They were in excellent shape, he said. And yet, after a couple of hours, they were sucking wind and couldn't wait to get back to their base.

Consider: As of this year, U.S. gross domestic product is about 1 percent beneath its 2008 peak, compared to a drop of roughly 2 percent in France and Germany and 5 percent in Britain and Japan. But U.S. unemployment has increased roughly 5 percentage points since 2007, compared to just 1 point in France and Japan and 2 in Britain. In Germany, unemployment has actually dropped a point since the recession began.

No wonder Christina Romer confessed bewilderment at the scope of American job losses in her valedictory speech as head of the president's Council of Economic Advisers last week. American employers have responded to recession with far more layoffs than their counterparts in comparable or even worse situations in other nations.

One reason for this anomaly is that productivity has surged in the United States, enabling employers to maintain output with far fewer workers.
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A similar tale can be told about employers and health insurance, the costs of which have continued to rise. It's not the employers, however, who have borne those increases. A survey, released Thursday by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust, shows that employee premiums rose 13.7 percent over last year, while the amount that employers contributed dropped -- dropped! -- 0.9 percent.

Only a purblind ideologue could miss the pattern here. American employers -- more than employers in other nations and more than American employers in earlier downturns -- have imposed the costs of the recession and, increasingly, the costs of doing business, on their workers, and kept for themselves damn near all the proceeds from doing business