Crops rotting in Ga. without immigrant workers

[Point of Order]

If I could invent a machine that would dig up the farmland en masse so that it could be placed in shipping containers and sent to China for picking I could make a billion dollars.

 

[qtlaw]

If I could invent a machine that would dig up the farmland en masse so that it could be placed in shipping containers and sent to China for picking I could make a billion dollars.

Schwarzenegger tried to ship our prisoners to Mexico but sadly that plan was nixed and we could not save on labor costs; stupid laws, something about prisoner's rights.

 

[YankeeFan]

Feature story on nytimes.com:

How can there be a labor shortage when nearly one out of every 11 people in the nation are unemployed?

That’s the question John Harold asked himself last winter when he was trying to figure out how much help he would need to harvest the corn and onions on his 1,000-acre farm here in western Colorado.

The simple-sounding plan that resulted — hire more local people and fewer foreign workers — left Mr. Harold and others who took a similar path adrift in a predicament worthy of Kafka.

The more they tried to do something concrete to address immigration and joblessness, the worse off they found themselves.

“It’s absolutely true that people who have played by the rules are having the toughest time of all,” said Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado.

Mr. Harold, a 71-year-old Vietnam War veteran who drifted here in the late ’60s, has participated for about a decade in a federal program called H-2A that allows seasonal foreign workers into the country to make up the gap where willing and able American workers are few in number. He typically has brought in about 90 people from Mexico each year from July through October.

This year, though, with tough times lingering and a big jump in the minimum wage under the program, to nearly $10.50 hour, Mr. Harold brought in only two-thirds of his usual contingent. The other positions, he figured, would be snapped up by jobless local residents wanting some extra summer cash.

“It didn’t take me six hours to realize I’d made a heck of a mistake,” Mr. Harold said, standing in his onion field on a recent afternoon as a crew of workers from Mexico cut the tops off yellow onions and bagged them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us/farmers-strain-to-hire-american-workers-in-place-of-migrant-labor.html?_r=1&hp

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

“They wanted that $10.50 an hour without doing very much,” he said. “I know people with college degrees, working for the school system and only making 11 bucks.”

Sounds more like the free market is telling him he is paying too little for the work he wants done.

 

[novelist_wannabe]

“They wanted that $10.50 an hour without doing very much,” he said. “I know people with college degrees, working for the school system and only making 11 bucks.”

Sounds more like the free market is telling him he is paying too little for the work he wants done.

That's an oversimplification. The pay is a small part of this equation, and you can't take that quote about the pay without the context of this graph:

Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard.

Are they more likely to stay if you pay them $12 per hour instead of $10.50? Maybe. But the truth of the matter is no matter what the pay is, they still have to be able to do the work. The vast majority of American workers cannot.

 

[Point of Order]

$13.50 & a meth stipend and you'd get some takers. Too hard to pick crops and play on phone at the same time.

 

[Azrael]

The vast majority of American workers cannot.

Will not.

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

“They wanted that $10.50 an hour without doing very much,” he said. “I know people with college degrees, working for the school system and only making 11 bucks.”

Sounds more like the free market is telling him he is paying too little for the work he wants done.

That's an oversimplification. The pay is a small part of this equation, and you can't take that quote about the pay without the context of this graph:

Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard.

Are they more likely to stay if you pay them $12 per hour instead of $10.50? Maybe. But the truth of the matter is no matter what the pay is, they still have to be able to do the work. The vast majority of American workers cannot.

They are more likely to stay if you pay them $20 an hour.

 

[cranberry]

Who knew you couldn't get people to do filthy, repetitive, back-breaking labor on the cheap?

 

[Stitch]

“They wanted that $10.50 an hour without doing very much,” he said. “I know people with college degrees, working for the school system and only making 11 bucks.”

Sounds more like the free market is telling him he is paying too little for the work he wants done.

You hear this all the time from employers when they get people who don't want to work. It's always about lazy workers, when the real problem is not valuing employees. Does the employer have good benefits, sick leave, offers work clothes so workers don't have to use their own? Oh, it can't be the poor boss, who is just trying to do his part to help America.

 

[novelist_wannabe]

The vast majority of American workers cannot.

Will not.

Really it's both. Me, I'm not seperating will from ability. To do this work, a person has to have both.

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

The vast majority of American workers cannot.

Will not.

Really it's both. Me, I'm not seperating will from ability. To do this work, a person has to have both.

A decent salary buys a lot of will.

 

[PCLoadLetter]

I don't think people appreciate how hard the work is. I read a terrific book excerpt a couple of years ago -- a guy spent time working the fields picking lettuce to see what it was like. It was absolutely brutal.

The other issue, of course, is that if you pay the wage you would need to pay to put those unemployed Americans back to work, your next salad would cost you $30.

 

[Boom_70]

Interesting that The Times seems to be making concerted effort to show the other side of immigration reform.

 

[imjustagirl]

Yeah, they could pay $40 an hour and I wouldn't do that ****.

 

[Armchair_QB]

The vast majority of American workers cannot.

Will not.

Really it's both. Me, I'm not seperating will from ability. To do this work, a person has to have both.

A decent salary buys a lot of will.

But it doesn't buy physical ability. Crop work is extremely demanding physically. You may have the desire to earn $10.00 an hour picking crops but if you can't handle it physically you won't last long.

 

[Bob Cook]

Yeah, they could pay $40 an hour and I wouldn't do that ****.

Thanks to allergies, I got out of a rite of passage for many Indiana teens -- detasseling corn. A bus would pull up to my high school to take a bunch of kids to a farm to rip the tassels off, because if they don't come off, it'll gum up the combine. My brother did it, and every day he came back burnt, with cuts all over his arms. To detassel, you sit in the back of a moving truck and yank the tassel. For eight hours.

 

[Greenhorn]

Things haven't changed much since Edward R. Murrow's "Harvest of Shame."

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

The vast majority of American workers cannot.

Will not.

Really it's both. Me, I'm not seperating will from ability. To do this work, a person has to have both.

A decent salary buys a lot of will.

But it doesn't buy physical ability. Crop work is extremely demanding physically. You may have the desire to earn $10.00 an hour picking crops but if you can't handle it physically you won't last long.

They'll be able to buy from a much larger pool of willing and able people if they were willing to pay what the work is worth.

 

[cranberry]

http://tinyurl.com/3epsmxb