Posted on 09/12/2015 12:16:50 PM PDT by Hojczyk
Here in Washington State, in agriculture one pays the minimum or above, period. If one wants trouble with Labor and Industries or the Feds, just get caught trying to pay less. In fact, any piece worker worth his or her salt makes far more than minimum wage. When we packed peaches, many of the packers would have a take-home of 600 dollars or more a week.
One reason to look at the money sent home by guest workers as better than foreign aid is that with foreign aid, it is very hard to keep this money out of the hands of the big boys. At least the guest workers are putting it in the hands of people they trust, who are not likely to already be rich. I cannot see why guest workers would be counted in the census. On the other hand the question of citizenship for children born here would mean major legal or even a constitutional change.
Brick layers were mentioned a little earlier. How does one, especially and inner city black even learn how to be a brick layer, whether at $8.50 or $18. Vocational education is almost nonexistent there, and most of the whites and their unions have moved to the suburbs. Whose fault is this neglect of useful education for those who are not college bound?
Another pretender bites the dust.
Why are you so in favor of developing and institutionalizing more programs for Latino “guest” workers in the US when we have 94 million people of our own not working, more low-skill citizens than we know what to do with, and massive social and taxpayer costs to those Latinos we have working here anyway?
What BS, both my sons work demanding jobs. 1 is a manager for Papa John’s the other makes steel cabinets and shelves.
Supposedly jobs no American would work.
MY BIL is a Boilermaker, my baby sis is a hair stylist. My middle sis works 2 jobs cleaning, her husband has MS and drives a shuttle bus.
Stop all the handouts. Able-bodied folks get minimal assistance for only 3 months. Assistance is reduced to subsistence levels - those who have vehicles have to sell them and any other luxury items they have to make ends meet and be down to the clothes on their back status in order to qualify for 3 bowls of mush a day and a pallet to sleep on.<p.That would increase the desire to work by a big chunk.
I am only in favor of “guest” workers in the US when there are jobs that cannot be filled by US workers. See my comment #223. We must upgrade our industrial education, especially in large towns and cities so that our own workers are competent to fill these jobs. So much emphasis is put on getting a college education, that people think if they don’t have one they have no hope in the job field.
I looked at the video from Comment #211 regarding mechanized tomato harvesting. That works fine for the hard kind of tomatoes for sauces and canned, but not for good salad tomatoes. Tomatoes are either determinate or indeterminate. One ripens all at once which works for machine harvesting or traveling pickers, the other produces tomatoes over a number of weeks and is good for gardens for home or local markets. There are areas in this country where pickers travel with the crops as they ripen, hundreds and even thousands of miles. How can a low income citizen with a family afford to have a permanent home and do all this travel, and would they want to even with better pay? I was selling at a flea market on the Delmarva peninsula. A young Hispanic tomato picker came to my table. His hands were bright green from picking and you could smell the tomatoes from 5 feet. I had several thoughts: were there no washing facilities at that farm, was it really that hard to get the residues off the skin, how many Americans would want to do that kind of work? This was over an hour from a large town, and 1 1/2 hours from a city.
Oh, stop—pay people enough money, be creative enough in getting people there at harvesting time, make the jobs attractive enough and there are plenty of Americans who will pick tomatoes. And, if the labor costs are high enough, we’ll develop tomato harvesters that are more gentle with the produce.
The taxpayers of America end up paying for cheap legal or illegal foreign labor—and we can’t afford it culturally or financially.
If employers have to be creative in training their labor forces, as they used to have to, they can do that too.
We already have more than enough low-skill Americans!
Let it grow. If the business model requires labor from illegal immigrants the businesses deserve to fail.
There are not many jobs in the trades going unfilled and as usual, unless there is a mandate they are going to mostly younger males who are mainly white. If you want a roofing crew at $10/hour though you can find Brazilians who’ll do it and the government will take care of all their benefits; in other words you can abet law breaking.
Yes! They lied to Eisenhower telling him that the tomatoes in Florida would not get harvested and then came up with a way to do it mechanically after the illegal farm labor left.
You’ve made a strong argument for a ‘guest worker’ program.
I don’t think the argument isn’t strong enough to justify continuing what most people would consider a ‘slavery program’ if they could see exactly what is going on.
We tried that once before, and the results were catastrophic, which is where we are headed now.
As a retired farmer, I know a little bit about hard, often thankless, jobs. I think we have to allow the market to sort these things out, and not let government interfere.
Can agree with that. I’m the eldest of 4, my dad worked in the steel mills in E. Chicago, Ind. We lived pay check to pay check. I raised 2 boys on my own as divorced mom from a abusive husband. Nearly everything my boys had came out of garage sales. Took a decade to find the man GOD meant me to have. Had 23 yrs of a great marriage, until a massive heart attack took him home.
We need more jobs training programs. Not all are cut out for college. And if we want manufacturing in this country to be the best, we need job training programs to go with college educated people. Jr College can be a big help along with job specific training programs. Some one has to repair cars, HAVC, things like that. And we need construction workers who can read a ruler too.
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