Posted on 02/23/2017 12:27:49 PM PST by SeekAndFind
It was 1967. The local music store had an ink-blue Mosrite Ventures solid body electric guitar, and I wanted it badly. Cost: $500. My family was not poor, but neither could they drop five bills on one of four children. My first guitar was a $29.99 Stella acoustic from Sears. There was only one way to get the guitar of my dreams: a summer job.
Complication: I had long hair, and even in the psychedelic sixties, few legitimate employers wanted that at their front counters or even their back rooms. All the head shop jobs were taken. We lived in Napa, California, and lucky for me a local farm was hiring plum pickers at $15 per 4X4 foot crate. I talked my buddy Dennis—another unemployable long-hair—into applying for the job with me. We were hired on the spot.
I am a border hawk. I am on record as supporting the most stringent of President Trump’s immigration proposals. In my opinion, the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli Act (aka the Reagan Amnesty) was the biggest mistake in President Reagan’s otherwise magnificent presidency. I believe that securing the border is a ballgame issue.
However, based on my short stint as a plum picker, I know that we’re going to need some kind of seasonal agricultural work permit legislation to get the crops picked. Illegal aliens are doing most of this work now. Unless we want to pay five dollars for a head of lettuce to support $20 per hour jobs with bennies to work the fields, Americans will not do this work, and even then…
The day began with a forklift dropping off a crate at the end of a row of plum trees in a vast orchard. We were not picking these plums off the trees. Since they were destined to be processed as prunes, not grocery produce, we were picking them up off the ground. The tree-shaker had been around before dawn, and there were scores, sometimes hundreds, of fallen plums under every tree.
Since it was piecework, there was nothing to be gained by milking the clock. Dennis and I got busy. The morning hours went OK, as it was still relatively cool. We were healthy teens with a lot of energy. If we could do three crates before lunch, we would split $45; if we could equal that effort after lunch, we’d each take home $45 a day. By that equation, I’d have that Mosrite in about 10 days, at which time I intended to unceremoniously quit by not showing up.
Since we had no vehicle and the farm was on the road to Calistoga, we had to bring a lunch. A couple of times my mother drove out in our Buick Invicta wagon and brought us hamburgers, but mostly it was brought-along sandwiches (whose mayonnaise congealed in the plastic bags) and maybe a bag of Fritos. After the first day, the idea of snacking on a plum or two was unthinkable. Water was provided by a free-standing hose spigot in the field.
Bottom line, we never got those three crates after lunch. The California sun became oppressive on summer afternoons, and trees denuded of their fruit provided little shade. We lagged, lollygagged, bitched, and considered walking off the job, always picking, but at a much slower rate. By three p.m., heat prostration, if not full-on sunstroke, was a real possibility. We were sick to our stomachs, and the sight of another tree-load of warm, syrupy plums was enough to make us hurl.
The forklift came, took our full crate, and then brought another empty one. The farm boss had made clear that if we left a crate unfilled on any given day, we needn’t bother to show up for work the next day. We worked hard to fill two crates after lunch.
On about the fifth day, I noticed that our coworkers, all Hispanic, were doing things differently. By the time Dennis and I got dropped off by my mother at 8:30 a.m., they’d been on the job for hours, taking advantage of first daylight, and they rarely stuck around after two p.m. Whole families picked as a team, including young children, and they’d repeatedly blow past us in the adjoining rows, filling crates at top speed.
After a day in the orchard, my head hurt, like a delayed effect sun-fever, and the thought of going back out in the morning troubled my sleep.
Long story short, I got the guitar, but not because I stuck it out. After a week picking plums, Dennis and I had had enough, and went back to what seemed like a more productive summertime endeavor: smoking pot and chasing chicks at downtown Napa’s Fuller Park.
I’d saved a little under $200 from my time as an agricultural worker, and my parents, with what I reckon was a combination of pity and admiration for my attempt, made up the difference. Today that guitar is worth over four grand; I wish I’d kept it.
That was fifty years ago. For all our technological and mechanical advancement, the job of harvesting the products of our nation’s vast agricultural acreage hasn’t changed much since.
Yes, build the wall, enact Kate’s Law, rescind DACA, and crack down on illegal immigration. But we’re going to have to figure out a program that allows people to do a job that this American would never do again, unless I was starving.
I knew quite a few teens from Uniontown PA who took advantage of this summer ritual.
Prisoners, Paroles, community service sentences.
We need to get rid of the law that allows a pregnant illegal woman can come here, have a child and now that child is a U.S. citizen.
I do not believe any other countries have laws like this.
You can help. You probably don't visit often enough anyway.
Back then they had kids coming from the south spending their summers up here.
They had camps set up to house them.
You have orange cards that an employer can use during certain times of the year. Three quarters of the wages are held until the worker returns home, or is put into an account in Mexico
Your 73-year old parents are dole leeches?
I don’t believe I said that.
Those folks that actually do crop/farm work are 1-2% of all the illegals here.
They are not necessarily the ones with idle time causing the serious problems and the desire of most folks to put a wall up,in the first place.
So the author of this piece really has no clue at all about the wall or the real crux of the problem of illegal immigrants we are talking about.
Put an end to welfare and the minimum wage and we’ll have plenty of willing and able farm workers.
Some examples of the new hi teck/large scale farm equipment minimizing need of any manual labor.
http://www.tgschmeiser.com/products/vineyarddiscs/pth.html
Business are a lot more flexible than people give them credit for. When I first moved from the east coast to california I was amazed at how the car washes operate here. Back home it was all machines but here you get an army of latinos to swab down your car. Obviously illegals working for pennies. But back home no one was really suffering because we didn’t have this. When the cost of something goes up businesses adjust, it tends to work out in the end.
They are two of the 94 million people who are considered in the work force and who are not working, in their case by choice. So yeah, you included them in your remarks.
>They can’t pick asparagus with a machine. Although they have been trying to develop one for the past 20 years
Working AI has only existed for 5 years and cheap labor has greatly reduced the amount of capital thrown at picking machines.
My grandfather worked with some of those POWs south of Nampa, ID. Up until a few years ago, the old wooden guard tower from one of the camps still stood just east of Highway 12 south of town.
>
Use chain gangs.
Seriously. Put low risk prisoners to work.
>
...right alongside welfare recipients. There’s no reason the ‘can’t find a job’ can’t be picking fruit, up trash by the highway, cleaning out restrooms @ parks, etc.
Less than 5% of all illegal aliens work in agriculture and a good percentage of the aliens who do work in agriculture are here legally.
This is McLettucehead style Fake News.
7 robots that are replacing farm workers around the world
http://www.businessinsider.com/robots-that-are-replacing-farm-workers-2016-8
That’s what happened to Senator George McGovern’s daughter——very sad story.
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Remember this Pima Indian?
Ira Hayes:
On February 23, 1945, he helped to raise an American flag
over Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, an event photographed by
Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press. Hayes and the other five flag-raisers became national heroes as a result. In 1946, he was instrumental in revealing the true identity of one of the other pictured Marines, who was killed in action on Iwo Jima. However, Hayes was never comfortable with his fame, and after his service in the Marine Corps, he descended into alcoholism. He died of exposure to cold and alcohol poisoning after a night of drinking on January 23–24, 1955. He was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on February 2, 1955.
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