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Farmers Strain to Hire American in Place of Migrant Labor

Just checked the department of labor website, to see what they're offering in my state.
So far it's $9.12 an hour, which is a hair more a week than unemployment (like $34 give or take).

So who here wants to go plant and pull crops, in the heat and/or cold, getting filthy, all the while wearing your back out?
That's soooo much more attractive, than sitting on your duff collecting a check from the state. :doh
 
Business that cant find workers....either have horrific work conditions or just dont pay enough....PERIOD.....

Does anyone believe that big corporate farmers charge less at the wholesale levels market value for fruit and vegetables based on how much they saved underpaying illegal immigrants...it just puts more in thier pocket...doesnt lower the price of produce a dime
 
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Business that cant find workers....either have horrific work conditions or just dont pay enough....PERIOD.....

Does anyone believe that big corporate farmers charge less at the wholesale levels market value for fruit and vegetables based on how much they saved underpaying illegal immigrants...it just puts more in thier pocket...doesnt lower the price of produce a dime

Big corporate farmers have access to more capital to invest in super duper agricultural machinery that lessens the need for manual labourers.
 
Wouldn't those that hire illegals just find more illegals? One of the benefits to hiring illegals is that you can pay them substandard wages and, you do not have to provide them them benefits. Are you going to legalize every illegal that has hopped over the border or deliberately overstayed a visa?

Well, I wouldn't make them citizens in one fell swoop. If they are given some status as a legal resident alien that allows for employers to hire them legally, but without requiring them to provide benefits or pay taxes for having them on the books it would be a lot more practical to go after employers that still hire illegals. The point is to make it more expensive to hire illegal aliens than legal ones while dealing with the demographic facts on the ground.
 
Big corporate farmers have access to more capital to invest in super duper agricultural machinery that lessens the need for manual labourers.

True Jet...but whats your point ?
 
True Jet...but whats your point ?

You spoke of the big corporate farmers, their use of illegal workers is irellevent because of my statement overall, but their use of industrial machinary, combined with smaller time farmers using illegal workers does bring the cost down overall. Competition and all that. It is an unfortunate situation, people shouldn't have to work in **** conditions for long hours for **** all pay. But if I were a heartless bastard and spoke only economically, the corporate guys would gobble up the small timers if they were forced to hire Americans for a high wage who I garauntee the majority will not do the work anyway, they'll go work at Subway or Mcdicks to go home and jack off to Dancing With the Stars.

Oh wait they can't do that any more or they might turn transexual.
 
You spoke of the big corporate farmers, their use of illegal workers is irellevent because of my statement overall, but their use of industrial machinary, combined with smaller time farmers using illegal workers does bring the cost down overall. Competition and all that. It is an unfortunate situation, people shouldn't have to work in **** conditions for long hours for **** all pay. But if I were a heartless bastard and spoke only economically, the corporate guys would gobble up the small timers if they were forced to hire Americans for a high wage who I garauntee the majority will not do the work anyway, they'll go work at Subway or Mcdicks to go home and jack off to Dancing With the Stars.

Oh wait they can't do that any more or they might turn transexual.

I dont know enough about farming to agree or disagree lol
 
Sure, we need to make not working less attractive than working. Now that we are well along the path to reversing the illegal alien trends let's reverse the rest of the welfare state. In my state the indigent get cell phones paid for by others. They are given a wide variety of benefits paid for by others. It comes out to a significant amount of money. Let's start reducing the amount we give the generationally lazy.

There is work to be done. So let's make not working as unattractive as being an illegal alien in Alabama.
 
Folks, the answer to this is VERY simple... Here's the letter that fixes it all.....



Dear Mr. & Mrs. Smith of Worcester, MA,

Regarding the Federal Unemployment and Welfare benefits that you are currently receiving and have been for the last 42 weeks; those benefits are now contingent on your presence between the hours of 7am and 4pm Monday through Friday at Oak Hill Farm in Rutland, MA for the purposes of assisting the management of Oak Hill Farm in general farm work. You will be paid the minimum wage for all hours worked, and will receive the difference between that pay and your current benefits from this agency in the form of a monthly check. Failure to appear at Oak Hill Farm for this work, or unwillingness to do the work will void ALL CLAIM to any government assistance. Please see Mr. Frank Farmer at 7am on Monday, August 25th.

Sincerely,

The US Government.
 
Folks, the answer to this is VERY simple... Here's the letter that fixes it all.....



Dear Mr. & Mrs. Smith of Worcester, MA,

Regarding the Federal Unemployment and Welfare benefits that you are currently receiving and have been for the last 42 weeks; those benefits are now contingent on your presence between the hours of 7am and 4pm Monday through Friday at Oak Hill Farm in Rutland, MA for the purposes of assisting the management of Oak Hill Farm in general farm work. You will be paid the minimum wage for all hours worked, and will receive the difference between that pay and your current benefits from this agency in the form of a monthly check. Failure to appear at Oak Hill Farm for this work, or unwillingness to do the work will void ALL CLAIM to any government assistance. Please see Mr. Frank Farmer at 7am on Monday, August 25th.

Sincerely,

The US Government.


Not a bad idea at all
 
Not a bad idea at all

This isn't brain surgery. I'm no genius here. We also have a very large PRISON population in this country that needs to be put to work.
 
Folks, the answer to this is VERY simple... Here's the letter that fixes it all.....



Dear Mr. & Mrs. Smith of Worcester, MA,

Regarding the Federal Unemployment and Welfare benefits that you are currently receiving and have been for the last 42 weeks; those benefits are now contingent on your presence between the hours of 7am and 4pm Monday through Friday at Oak Hill Farm in Rutland, MA for the purposes of assisting the management of Oak Hill Farm in general farm work. You will be paid the minimum wage for all hours worked, and will receive the difference between that pay and your current benefits from this agency in the form of a monthly check. Failure to appear at Oak Hill Farm for this work, or unwillingness to do the work will void ALL CLAIM to any government assistance. Please see Mr. Frank Farmer at 7am on Monday, August 25th.

Sincerely,

The US Government.

Stop! You're killin' me! :rofl

Actually, though, in reality, it's a very bad idea. Do you have any idea what this would do to the Social Security fund?? All those people who would suddenly be suffering from agoraphobia? Back problems? Constant headaches? Depression?? Imagine the new disability claims!!
 
Stop! You're killin' me! :rofl

Actually, though, in reality, it's a very bad idea. Do you have any idea what this would do to the Social Security fund?? All those people who would suddenly be suffering from agoraphobia? Back problems? Constant headaches? Depression?? Imagine the new disability claims!!

Here's the answer to that, from my prior post.....

Tigger said:
Failure to appear at Oak Hill Farm for this work, or unwillingness to do the work will void ALL CLAIM to any government assistance.

That would clear up those back problems, headaches, heat stroke, very quickly. It would also push those people to get jobs they would prefer to do rather than standing out in the sun all day; which is the real purpose of it.
 
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Stop! You're killin' me! :rofl

Actually, though, in reality, it's a very bad idea. Do you have any idea what this would do to the Social Security fund?? All those people who would suddenly be suffering from agoraphobia? Back problems? Constant headaches? Depression?? Imagine the new disability claims!!

Actually, I agree with Tigger. We should make government assistance contingent on people doing stuff, even if the work is unpleasant. This sort of assistance should be a last ditch thing after other mitigation efforts for unemployment or underemployment have failed.

However, we should also be educating these peoples in new trades as well.
 
You won't pay more -- you'll just buy produce that was grown in South or Central America instead of Georgia or Alabama. Mission accomplished.

Wassup, CG? :2rofll:

Actually my wife buys most of our veggies from a GA farmer that hauls his product into ATL ands sells them from a truck in the parking lot of a posh Buckhead office building. There is a lot to be said about buying "local" produce.

Someone whispered in the internet you were over here tearing up the place. I stopped by to see what you were up to and decided to hang around for a while. It's an interesting group here, the entire political spectrum is covered. It appears there may be a few folks even more liberal than you. :mrgreen:
 
Except if hiring illegals to do work no American wants to do keeps prices low so consumers can spend more money elsewhere

Legal and illegal labor has little impact on prices. So the tomatoes will be 5 dollars a pounds is nothing more than fear mongering by pro-illegals.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003265139_imprices19.html
More than 7 million illegal immigrants work in the United States. They build houses, pick crops, slaughter cattle, stitch clothes, mow lawns, clean hotel rooms, cook restaurant meals and wash the dishes that come back.

You might assume that the plentiful supply of low-wage illegal workers would translate into significantly lower prices for the goods and services they produce. In fact, their impact on consumer prices — call it the "illegal-worker discount" — is surprisingly small.

The bag of Washington state apples you bought last weekend? Probably a few cents cheaper than it otherwise would have been, economists estimate. That steak dinner at a downtown restaurant? Maybe a buck off. Your new house in Subdivision Estates? Hard to say, but perhaps a few thousand dollars less expensive.

The underlying reason, economists say, is that for most goods the labor — whether legal or illegal, native- or foreign-born — represents only a sliver of the retail price.

Consider those apples — Washington's signature contribution to the American food basket.

At a local QFC, Red Delicious apples go for about 99 cents a pound. Of that, only about 7 cents represents the cost of labor, said Tom Schotzko, a recently retired extension economist at Washington State University. The rest represents the grower's other expenses, warehousing and shipping fees, and the retailer's markup.

And that's for one of the most labor-intensive crops in the state: It takes 150 to 190 hours of labor to grow and harvest an acre of apples, Schotzko said, compared to four hours for an acre of potatoes and 1 ½ hours for an acre of wheat.

The labor-intensive nature of many crops is a key reason agriculture continues to rely on illegal workers. A report by Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center who has long studied immigration trends, estimates that 247,000 illegal immigrants were employed as "miscellaneous agricultural workers" last year — only 3.4 percent of the nation's 7.2 million illegal workers, according to Pew statistics, but 29 percent of all workers in that job category.

Eliminating illegal farmworkers, by shrinking the pool of available labor, likely would raise wages for those who remain. Philip Martin, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Davis, noted that two years after the old bracero program ended in 1964, the United Farm Workers union won a 40 percent increase for grape harvesters.

A decade ago, two Iowa State University agricultural economists estimated that removing all illegal farmworkers would raise wages for seasonal farmworkers by 30 percent in the first couple of years, and 15 percent in the medium term.

But supermarket prices of summer-fall fruits and vegetables, they concluded, would rise by just 6 percent in the short run — dropping to 3 percent over time, as imports took up some of the slack and some farmers mechanized their operations or shifted out of labor-intensive crops. (Winter-spring produce would be even less affected, they found, because so much already is imported.)

If illegal workers disappeared from the apple harvest and wages for the remaining legal workers rose by 40 percent in response — and that entire wage increase were passed on to the consumer — that still would add less than 3 cents to the retail price of a pound of apples.
and allows food to be produced in the United States and even forms part of your exports, then it would actually have the same effect as a... TAX CUT! :lamo


This does no good if Americans are not making those goods.
 
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Actually, I agree with Tigger. We should make government assistance contingent on people doing stuff, even if the work is unpleasant. This sort of assistance should be a last ditch thing after other mitigation efforts for unemployment or underemployment have failed.

I totally agree with that.

However, we should also be educating these peoples in new trades as well.

We need to be educating them more in the idea that there is no such thing as "A job I wouldn't do instead of taking government assistance."
 
Had a system been set up so that farmers could obtain visas for workers fairly easily and those hiring illegally had been facing prison time, this problem would not be occurring and immigrants would have been paying taxes while they were working here all along. They would have also had the protections that workers in the US are guaranteed.

I saw a clip on FoxNews (one of the things in front of treadmills at my gym) that was trying to make this shortage the Democrats fault. Failing to put in a system to allow farmers easier access to workers' visas before passing laws like the Tea Party has managed to get passed in several states has caused this problem. This inability to see potential problems and plan for solutions to those problems before implementing their austerity and immigration plans is the biggest reason I do not want the Tea Party to determine how cuts are made.

For those saying this is nothing more than lazy Americans not willing to work, go get a 40 pound (18.15 kg) kettle bell and lift it from the floor to a kitchen counter top for 12 hours then set it back on the floor and start over - and tell us how long you were actually able to do it.
 
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Just checked the department of labor website, to see what they're offering in my state.
So far it's $9.12 an hour, which is a hair more a week than unemployment (like $34 give or take).

So who here wants to go plant and pull crops, in the heat and/or cold, getting filthy, all the while wearing your back out?
That's soooo much more attractive, than sitting on your duff collecting a check from the state. :doh

You could probably find a job in the city that involves a lot less manual labor that pays close to $9.25 an hour.
 
Had a system been set up so that farmers could obtain visas for workers fairly easily and those hiring illegally had been facing prison time, this problem would not be occurring and immigrants would have been paying taxes while they were working here all along. They would have also had the protections that workers in the US are guaranteed.

Which would mostly end the reasons they were hired in the first place.
 
Had a system been set up so that farmers could obtain visas for workers fairly easily and those hiring illegally had been facing prison time, this problem would not be occurring and immigrants would have been paying taxes while they were working here all along. They would have also had the protections that workers in the US are guaranteed.

We don't need a system to bring in foreigners. We have plenty of people not doing anything right here in the United States.

For those saying this is nothing more than lazy Americans not willing to work, go get a 40 pound (18.15 kg) kettle bell and lift it from the floor to a kitchen counter top for 12 hours then set it back on the floor and start over - and tell us how long you were actually able to do it.

If it meant the difference between starving to death and eating, I'd get through it. So would most Americans, given that set of options. Maybe it's time for Americans to toughen back up again. We've become the fat, lazy, worthless slobs for long enough. Time to either put up or shut up again.
 
Pay more, it's that simple.
Is it? When the farmers pay more, they probably have to charge more. Which makes them less competitive with farmers in other states that use immigrant labor. An easy response to that (although a very difficult thing to actually achieve) is to pass similar legislation everywhere. But then you still have the problem of higher-priced farm goods. I guess if there are more people earning a fair wage that might not be a huge issue, but I certainly wouldn't describe the issue as "simple."
 
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