Posted on 08/10/2017 4:25:13 PM PDT by SMGFan
Vegetable prices may be going up soon, as a shortage of migrant workers is resulting in lost crops in California. Farmers say they're having trouble hiring enough people to work during harvest season, causing some crops to rot before they can be picked. Already, the situation has triggered losses of more than $13 million in two California counties alone, according to NBC News.
The ongoing battle about U.S. immigration policies is blamed for the shortage. The vast majority of California's farm workers are foreign born, with many coming from Mexico. However, the PEW Research Center reports more Mexicans are leaving the U.S. than coming here.
(Excerpt) Read more at fortune.com ...
“remember when kids had summer jobs...?”
Do away with SNAP and welfare and you’ll have Americans looking for jobs instead of sitting at home talking on their Obama phones, smoking weed and watching cable.
FAKE NEWS! This is based off a story from a report done over a year ago.
But who wants to pay $15 an hour to kids. It's about developing work ethics.
“We don’t plant cotton, we don’t plant taters, cause we get paid by the legislators for growing nuttin, but getting paid for it!”
Illegal aliens can get welfare and other govt free stuff right away.
And, they KNOW it.
If Growers can't get labor, they are paying too little to compete with the welfare office.
That's that.
$3.15 per carton/24 heads/carton = .13 cents per head.
Harvest: Iceberg lettuce is hand harvested (field packed and wrapped) under contract 70 to 130 days after planting depending on the time of year planted. Cool season plantings may require 130 days to mature but as the season warms, time to maturity decreases. Total costs will vary by type of pack, labor (piece rate vs. hourly), packer and other miscellaneous items. The costs in this study are $2.10 for the carton, $3.15 per carton for harvest labor, which brings the field harvest cost to $5.25 per packed carton. A c arton in this study is a 24 count weighing approximately 40 pounds per carton. Transportation costs vary depending on the distance to market and are included in the above costs. Most growers are within a 25 - mile radius of the cooler. Cooling and palleti zing cost an additional $0.9 6 per carton, which brings the total harvest cost to $6. 21 per carton. Selling costs are $0.61 per carton
Jobs no one else will do? Really? A very nice black woman I know grew up as a sharecroppers daughter. All her siblings were out in the fields working...not doing drugs and shooting up cities.
Her boys are smart hardworking kids, one worked at McDonalds, developed some skill and knowledge about the restaurant biz and now has a better job at a high end place with an eye to opening his own some day.
Hard working ambitious young people might learn a lot about farming and marketing farm products if they’d get out in the fields and start at the bottom. Literally. Every go-nowhere job looks like a stepping stone to an ambitious kid.
Time to replace Manuel with Otto(mation)
“They should allow more work visas with the stipulation that if they overstay they will be permanently banned.”
We used to have the Bracero Program here in California which did just that, but the Blacks claimed the Mexicans were taking their jobs, so the program was cancelled. Funny thing though, we didn’t see the Blacks getting up off of their lazy asses back then and head out to the fields. Noseree, dat work be too mfing hard, specially when we can bang out welfare recipients with our wimmen den sit back and just collect de benefits while we do nuttin. All thanks to our “patron saint,” Lyndon Baines Johnson and his “great society programs.”
“Do away with SNAP and welfare and you’ll have Americans looking for jobs instead of sitting at home talking on their Obama phones, smoking weed and watching cable.”
Don’t forget procreating!
Nailed it.
Ill pay more for produce knowing knowing there will be less illegals
on Welfare, Food Stamps and Free Health Care.
Welfare peoples are getting money for nothing and you already have their names and addresses
They should allow more work visas with the stipulation that
if they overstay they will be permanently banned.
*****************
Visa overstays in numbers are now ranked up there with
illegals crossing the southern border.
And healthy people are sitting on their butts, collecting welfare, instead of taking them out to the farms and orchards to harvest that produce. The fresh air and exercise would do them some good.”If any would not work, neither shall they eat,” the Bible says.
I have been in the wholesale business for decades and I do know that getting any product from conception to consumer is a multi-staged process. For example, a 20% increase in the cost of one of those stages doesn’t translate into a 20% increase in the cost of the product to the end consumer.
In this case it is interesting because we are really only transferring costs from one place in the economy to another. Higher wages to pick lettuce are costs that were in effect in another area of the economy already. Illegal welfare, crime etc. We aren’t paying more for lettuce, we are simply moving the costs from one accounting column to another. With some added benefits also.
Fake news...
The problem: the central fact relied on by NBC News to back up the anecdotes of the single farmer interviewed is two years old. The connection to current debates over immigration or the Trump administration is simply imaginary.
http://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2017/08/08/fake-news-nbc-news-phony-crop-rot-story-goes-viral/
Water seeks its own level. As will farm wages, workers and productivity once the artificial suppressant of illegal workers is removed from the equation.
Growing up in Idaho potato country, we even had what we called "spud vacation" from school so kids could help with the harvest and pick up some extra money. That was before the days of mechanized harvesters. But kids (and parents) today would consider such work demeaning and beneath them. But there are plenty of idle able-bodied welfare recipients who should be put to work in order to receive their benefits.
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