Posted on 06/18/2011 7:18:07 PM PDT by Cardhu
Contractor Don Pedro — like farmers across Georgia — is worried that the state's tough new immigration law is scaring away an illegal immigrant workforce.
Reporting from Wray, Ga. — It was a Tuesday afternoon at the height of blackberry season, and the Paulk family farm was short 100 pickers. It was Don Pedro's job to find them.
The Georgia Department of Agriculture this month released a survey of farmers who said they needed to fill more than 11,000 positions lasting from one day to a year. Critics of U.S. farming practices have long said Americans would take such jobs if they paid better.
Don Pedro said his job has never been so tough, nor workers so scarce. His boss had told the state Labor Department he needed pickers, but he had received no responses. He wasn't surprised, even though the jobless rate in Irwin County was 13%. Few here believe that native Southerners, white or black, wish to return to the land their ancestors once sharecropped or tended in bondage.
Pedro Guerrero, 54, the smiling, soft-spoken man in black cowboy boots whom everyone calls Don Pedro, was barreling down two-lane roads in a compact Chevy on a hunt for his own people. He was searching amid the trailers and tumbledown rental houses and mercados that have sprung up since the 1990s, when waves of Latinos began arriving in Georgia to harvest food, serve it in restaurants and scrape it from soiled plates.
Don Pedro kept one hand on the wheel. The other sorted paper scraps stuffed in the pocket of his Western shirt. On a flip phone, he punched in numbers for guys named Felipe and Miguel and Sixto, surfing an analog network of cousins and friends of friends and old sources who might know where the hard workers
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
oooooh!!! JOBS FOR THE TEENAGERS!!!!
yes, tell them it is one of the best green jobs
they could do. tell them it is about
nutritional sustainability and working
with diverse peoples. give them college
credits and tell them it is part of americorps.
they will lose weight and learn a skill.
win-win.
perfect! (arrgh, i don’t know why i just sent
my comment again. accident.)
They need to do neither. One of the reasons why more automation has not penetrated farming like all other fields is precisely because of the cheap labor available.
While employing the youth would be optional, optimally farmers would go with more automation instead.
Plus, we have to have the workers screened South of the border. We pay for that.
Then those workers have to be screened North of the border. We pay for that.
Then we have to provide transportation from the border to our location. We pay for that.
Then we have to provide housing for them. We pay for that.
Then we have to haul them to work and back again. We pay for that.
Then, if they get sick or injured, we pay for that.
We have to guarantee them a certain amount of hours of work, whether they do in fact work, or not. We pay for that.
But, the kicker is this. If they perceive they have a grievance, they call the USDA representative on their cell phone. Automatically, we are shut out of the process. The USDA rep. interviews them privately. The process takes years. The worker is already back in Mexico. WE have no recourse to the fines, lawyer fees to protect us, etc.
Finally, there is misconception that farm workers are underpaid. That is a common lie that is perpetrated by the ignorant to the uninformed. Very few work for minimum wage. Most positions, especially for those experienced, make significantly more. They have to be paid because they are responsible for operating equipment work ten of thousands of dollars.
Farming today is not 'Old MacDonald' walking behind a mule plowing a field. It is a highly specialized business.
Most of you see apples in the grocery store of your choice. It costs, before any money is made, $4,000 an acre to produce those apples. Do the math, multiply that by any number of acres you wish to see the amount of money required to farm in today's economy.
Don Pedro did not know anyone but Mexican illegals to work the farm. The farmer built his business on sand - illegal workers who no speaka english. Pedro is going to have to learn the culture and language of Americans and how to interact with them in a respectful way - they ain’t poor peasants from Mexico. In place with illegal labor is not available anymore, Pedro may not be an asset anymore.
Pedro is going to have to speak English and interact respectfully with network of Americans and legals. I know American high school boys who work summers on farms. They love it and make good money.
I wonder if there were similar articles about fewer hands in Georgia fields after the end of slavery.
Anybody who spent summers in corn and bean country during the 70’s and 80’s (and earlier) would have noticed the fields full of local kids off school making some money for next year. They worked hard for long hours and came out of the fields looking like lobsters in bluejeans. Of course that was back before agribusiness ate up the small farmer and cut margins to the point that lawful citizens, paid above board and on the books became an unjustifiable expense. You should see what the illegal Mexicans have done to those once-prosperous small Midwestern communities. It’s like watching cancer devour an old friend.
Ditch minimum wage and give kids credits towards college.
Excellent!
So Mikey from the LA Slimes is sad over the lack of slave labor ?
What a sick twisted lot the radical left at the Slimes are !
The landowners aren't even talking about going out-of-business should they need to pay decent wages to attract pickers, only that doing so will "cut into their profits". Well, that's just too damn bad.
If they can't obey the law and pay what the job is worth to attract pickers, then perhaps they should just shut down and sell.
Any thoughts on why the local teenagers aren’t used more? The laws? The kids don’t want/need to work, etc. Not that many kids in the rural areas?
I was doing some consulting for a guy on his small winery in Eastern Washington and he said he had a small group of good workers (mainly Hispanic) that knew what they were doing when it came time for harvest. He said they like working with grapes ‘cuz it is all at eye-level (no stooping, etc.). But even then, in order to keep them he was paying a couple bucks above minimum wage.
The government killed the Bracero program that provided a legal way for temporary foreign workers to take jobs like this, then go home when they are done.
I believe it was intentional as a way of creating support for their “comprehensive immigration reform” by making sure there is a shortage of pickers every year.
Yes they need to let the high school and college kids know about the jobs. They may have to pay a little more. Thats life. Getting rid of these illegals is like having 20 lbs lifted off your back. Its been a nightmare for years.
I was at a McDonalds today where they had a sign that they participate in E-Verify; I think that was to make people feel better that there were no visible Americans working there.
I didn’t feel better.
There is no obvious path to employment; I wasted an hour or so trying to search Google for seasonal or temporary farm jobs in Georgia with no luck. Even the website "TakeOurJobs.org" (supposedly setup last year in response to this same problem in Arizona) does not load, much less tell me how to find a peach of a job (Georgia humor ;-)
It will take time for legal citizens to discover that way of life; the illegal-alien aspect did not happen overnight and neither will the solution. The farmers may have to take their losses as part of the lesson they learn about the pitfalls of hiring illegal workers in the first place.
I seriously doubt this. That would make the berries about almost $4/lb on labor alone. I get them in the store for about $3/lb. No farmer is taking that kind of loss.
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