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Posted on 07/24/2006 5:01:24 PM PDT by SJackson
My wife, Nettie, and I could not believe what we were seeing. Roberto, our favorite Mexican employee for four years, had sent the money he made back to Mexico to build a bakery. We had no idea he had done that.
We knew he, like most Mexican workers in the United States, sent a significant portion of his earnings home once a month. He must have sent more than the 40 percent that is typical. His family took the money and built a bakery so he would have a business to go home to in his village of Tepanzacoalco in the Sierra Madre Mountains, above Orizaba in the Mexican state of Vera Cruz.
We had arrived on Dec. 5, 2003, with a program called Puentes, Spanish for "bridges." It was the brainchild of Shaun Duvall, a high school Spanish teacher, and Carl Duley, a UW-Extension agent, from Alma. They saw a new phenomenon in Buffalo County of Mexicans working on dairy farms and only speaking Spanish. Puentes was formed to teach us farmers Spanish and to educate us about the culture of our new work force by taking us to Mexico. The program also evolved to include visits to the villages where our workers' families lived.
This was my second visit and my wife's first. When we walked into the village of Tepanzacoalco, they told us we were the first white people ever in that 5,000-year-old village of about 100 people. Next to Roberto's house stood this cement block building, in contrast to the wood structures all around it. Roberto's wife had taken the money Roberto sent home and hired a contractor from Orizaba to construct this building with a large concrete oven inside.
Roberto told us he wanted to be able to make a good living without having to travel all the way to Wisconsin. He wanted to be with his family if at all possible. I was deeply moved at what I saw. I assumed that he was working to make money to send home and when that was gone he would come back to work for us again. It also made me feel like a failure for my inability to understand this and provide him with some business training to operate his bakery successfully. It seemed that the more I began to understand, the more I needed to learn.
I have farmed for 35 years and milked cows all my life. It is in my blood. Our farm has been in the family since 1857 and has been a dairy farm since the early 1900s. My wife and I started dairying as soon as we finished college at UW-River Falls. We farmed with my parents and brother over that period and provided all the labor that was required. In 1989, our dairy barn burned in the middle of the night with half of our cows dying in the fire. We decided to continue our careers and built a new facility for 300 cows and in 1997 added another barn. Today we milk 550 cows, sell composted cow manure and no longer provide all the labor. Eighteen employees help us get the work done. Eight are Mexicans.
Hiring Mexicans was not an easy decision. We wanted to hire local people who lived like us, spoke our language and had dairying in their blood. This worked for a while, but the pool of people to employ dwindled to almost nothing by 1998 as unemployment dropped to less than 4 percent in our area. We were working 96-hour weeks for 50 weeks a year to get everything done.
Applicants for our openings were people who could not work for anyone else because of myriad problems. One day when an employee came and said he could no longer milk cows, I called a friend who was employing Mexicans. He showed me where to locate a man to work for us. His name was Manuel. He worked 54 days in a row because he did not want a day off. I thought it was too good to be true. He worked like we did. Soon I hired more Mexican workers, and my good American workers began to once again have regular hours and time for vacations.
There were names such as Roberto, Jesus, Severo, Gregorio and many others who would work three to four years and then return home. My biggest business problem, labor, became my biggest strength. We now work less than 70 hours per week and are more profitable than ever.
Iwant to be the best employer any employee could want. Thus, I need to know my employees and to satisfy their wants and needs. This means to whatever extent necessary. One employee's mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was living in New York at the time. I helped my employee bring her here for treatment at the Mayo Clinic. This was the most important thing I could do for that employee at that time.
The same needs and wants exist with my employees from Mexico. I have to be able to communicate in order to understand what those needs and wants are. An interpreter like Duvall helps a lot. She comes every Monday and teaches all of us Spanish or English for four hours. As I learn about the wants and needs of my Mexican employees, it has become obvious that what I learned in Roberto's village was where I needed to focus.
Ilinked up with Duvall and her Puentes program to go to the next level with my employees, just as I would with my American employees. This Wednesday, five of us are going to the Zongolita region to research areas of wants and needs that include a coffee cooperative, an English corps to teach the language of commerce, and a book documenting the history and culture of these people, validating and possibly empowering them.
Going to Mexico seems to me to be the right thing to do.
Ahhh the never ending line of White guilt is parading in front of our very eyes once more.
Further more since when a Dairy Farmer can give a Baker advise as to how to run a business?
Me thinks this story is fabricated (albeit some threads of truth)to soften the American stance towards the Mexican invasion of our country.
We are going to get bucolic threads as riotous as Crevo/Civil War/Cooking threads? ;)
With a little luck.
..a mere two day donkey ride
Doogle
Somehow, I doubt any of those swingers is much of a catch... ;)
susie
Yeah, my BS-o-meter went off about three sentences into this toodling little self-congratulatory essay...
"> When they legalize the millions of illegal immigrants here we will need another 20 or 30 additional million illegals because once a legal citizen, why should they want to do the jobs that current legal citizens won't do? The government wants to screw the American worker...These illegals will find that out if they ever become legal American workers,
They are already demanding higher wages...and when they aren't paid those wages....it's racism.
John and Nettie Rosenow,
Rosenholm-Wolfe Dairy, Cochrane, WI
I expect INS to pay John and Nettie a little visit.
They aren't.
We now work less than 70 hours per week and [we] are more profitable than ever.70 hour work week?
I presume overtime is paid.
"We" refers to the owners of the farm. Who exactly do you expect to pay them overtime? The tooth fairy?"more profitable than ever" covers it if anything does - but without Mexican labor they were working more than 70 hours, and getting less money.
"Profit" is of course the difference between "revenue" and "expenses." Each dollar of savings in expenses is a dollar earned in profit. But in the typical business "profit" is much smaller than "expenses." That means that it doesn't make much of a percentage savings in "expenses" to double the profit - or even change a loss into a profit.
Which is probably how businessmen get tempted to act like Ebenezer Scrooge . . .
And you're intellectually dishonest---which is worse???
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