Fucking hell.
In the wake of Georgia’s Arizona-esque immigration bill, thousands of immigrants who were content to do the work that — as Stephen Colbert pointed out months ago — few if any Americans want to do, have fled the state, leaving crops to rot in the fields. Needless to say, somebody has got to pick these crops, and who better than the O.G. Crop-pickers — black folks!
Georgia, which passed an Arizona-style immigration bill in April that is due to take effect next month, has seen thousands of undocumented immigrants flee the state. A state survey released last week found 11,080 vacant positions on state farms that needed to be filled to avoid losing crops.
At the same time as the survey’s release, Deal, a first-term Republican, announced a program to link the state’s 100,000 probationers with farmers looking to fill positions, the vast majority of which pay less than $15 per hour.
The AP reported the first group of probationers began working last week at an Americus farm owned by Dick Minor, the president of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association.
I read about this over at The Reid Report — I urge you to head over there and read her take on this fuckery — and, needless to say, I’m stunned and sick to my stomach.
Here’s the AP:
Republican Gov. Nathan Deal started the experiment after farmers publicly complained they couldn’t find enough workers to harvest labor-intensive crops such as cucumbers and berries because Latino workers – including many illegal immigrants – refused to show up, even when offered one-time or weekly bonuses. One crew who previously worked for Mendez told him they wouldn’t come to Georgia for fear of risking deportation.
Farmers told state authorities in an unscientific survey that they had more than 11,000 unfilled agriculture jobs, although it’s not clear how that compares to prior years or whether the shortage can be blamed on the new law.
For more than a week, the state’s probation officers have encouraged their unemployed offenders to consider taking field jobs. While most offenders are required to work while on probation, statistics show they have a hard time finding jobs. Georgia’s unemployment rate is nearly 10 percent, but correction officials say among the state’s 103,000 probationers, it’s about 15 percent. Still, offenders can turn down jobs they consider unsuitable, and harvesting is physically demanding.
The first batch of probationers started work last week at a farm owned by Dick Minor, president of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association. In the coming days, more farmers could join the program.
So far, the experiment at Minor’s farm is yielding mixed results. On the first two days, all the probationers quit by mid-afternoon, said Mendez, one of two crew leaders at Minor’s farm.
“Those guys out here weren’t out there 30 minutes and they got the bucket and just threw them in the air and say, `Bonk this, I ain’t with this, I can’t do this,’” said Jermond Powell, a 33-year-old probationer. “They just left, took off across the field walking.”
Mendez put the probationers to the test last Wednesday, assigning them to fill one truck and a Latino crew to a second truck. The Latinos picked six truckloads of cucumbers compared to one truckload and four bins for the probationers.
“It’s not going to work,” Mendez said. “No way. If I’m going to depend on the probation people, I’m never going to get the crops up.”
Conditions in the field are bruising, and the probationers didn’t seem to know what to expect. Cucumber plants hug the ground, forcing the workers to bend over, push aside the large leaves and pull them from the vine. Unlike the Mexican and Guatemalan workers, the probationers didn’t wear gloves to protect their hands from the small but prickly thorns on the vines and sandpaper-rough leaves.
The harvesters carried filled buckets on their shoulders to a nearby flatbed truck and hoisted them up to a dumper, who tossed the vegetables into a bin.
Temperatures hovered in the low 90s with heavy humidity Thursday, but taking off a shirt to relieve the heat invited a blistering sunburn. Tiny gnats flew into workers’ eyes and ears. One experienced Latino worker carried a machete that he used to dispatch a rattlesnake found in the fields.
By law, each worker must earn minimum wage, or $7.25 an hour. But there’s an incentive system. Harvesters get a green ticket worth 50 cents every time they dump a bucket of cucumbers. If they collect more than 15 tickets an hour, they can beat minimum wage.
The Latino workers moved furiously Thursday for the extra pay.
The Reid Report has screenshots of some of the comments on these articles, and yes, they are as horribly racist and xenophobic as one might imagine. You really need to read the rest (which includes a quote from Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin) to truly grasp the horror of what is going on in Georgia.
Make no mistake, this isn’t about black and white. The plutocrats are just getting started. Pretty soon they’ll be laughing as blacks, whites, and latinos all fight for the opportunity to make 50 cents a day picking crops for rich people.
This is where we are, America.
And this is where we were:
Are you fucking awake yet?
[via The Reid Report; first image via Politico; second image via Georgia Department of Archives and History]
[cross-posted]***[For the record, I realize slaves weren’t paid minimum wage… or any wage… the title popped into my head after I read the bit over at Joy’s place about working for a quarter and the ensuing comments.]
[I know JC covered this, but I’m posting it anyway. And no, I’m not returning to the Hamsher thread, so if you feel the need to insult me so I’ll see it, I guess here would be the place! -ABLxx]
cleek
slaves were paid $7/hr ? with bonuses ? and were free to walk away from jobs they didn’t want to do ?
ericblair
Obviously, Georgia wasn’t conservative enough, and the only answer is forty more boxcars full of conservatism. Because conservatism can’t fail, it can only be failed, and cause-and-effect is a commie plot.
ABL
fair enough! that title popped into my head after reading Joy’s bit about working for a quarter.
Zifnab
What a deal!
Elie
This is a disgrace…complete disgrace….
The southern states don’t want unions, don’t want immigration and don’t want fairness and equality.
Lincoln should have let them secede.
cleek
OT: here we go again.
Martin
You know, it’s not easy for someone with a criminal record to get a job, and here’s a direct effort to change that. If they were proposing using prison labor, yeah, I could see a big problem with that – but this is a government run job placement program at this stage – something that I thought Dems supported.
If a voluntary job is now slavery, I guess I never realized how oppressed I’ve been the last 20 years.
JonF
My history is a bit sketchy, but I don’t think that the chattel slaves in the South had the option of saying “Fuck this! I’m out of here”.
Zifnab
These are criminals out on prohibition. And one of the conditions for prohibition is often employment. If you’ve got a choice between prison or manual labor, you’re basically staring down the gun at slavery. Maybe slavery minus the whips and the dogs, but labor compelled by threat of punishment none-the-less.
ItAintEazy
@cleek:
Okay, sharecropping then. Does that make you feel better?
AlladinsLamp
Well, there’s always the handicapped.
cleek
the article says people can turn down jobs they consider “unsuitable”. and they can leave. and they get paid. it’s not slavery, by any stretch of the imagination.
fer fuck’s sake: imagine finding that analogy on a wingnut site. we’d be howling about it for days. it would be clear evidence of the poster’s racism and of the GOP’s in general and how the south is evil and blahblahblah.
Jess
I’m more outraged by prison labor and for-profit prisons–pretty much identical to slavery. Low-wage shit jobs have always been with us, and at least these workers aren’t in physical danger (compare with mining or slaughterhouse work).
Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill
cleek/1: Actually, when I first read about it, I thought about sharecropping — which was pretty much a trap for the (mostly Black) people caught up in that post-Slavery hellhole.
Given that these guys are probationers, and the many parallels Civil Rights folks have pointed out, for years now, on modern prisons and slavery…yeah, it’s not a stretch. As someone with ex-con family, it’s damned hard to get a decent job with a felony conviction in this society, at least one that doesn’t involve white-collar crimes. “Encouraging” them to do this work is no damned joke, and not too damn far from the South’s ugly racial past.
carsick
I don’t know. People are in need of income. Three years ago I was making an executive salary in a business I’d been in for 18 years and last year after looking for a long time I took a job paying $10 an hour just to keep the roof over my son’s head and some food in his belly. Still lived off savings for the most part but I needed income and work. Those folks might be more appreciative than you think.
NobodySpecial
Good thing no one there needs a union, huh? Maybe then they’d be equipped for the job, Mr. Farmer Man. Or get paid decently.
ABL
I agree that my usual style of hyperbole was out of place here, but you’re kidding yourselves if you think that slashing minimum wage isn’t going to be the next item on the Plutocratic Menu.
They are already going after child labor laws, after all.
And a discussion about criminal records and getting a job after a prison bid cannot be complete without a discussion about racism in the justice system.
It’s one big clusterfuck, and in the end, we’re all going to lose big.
Violet
I don’t quite get the outrage in this situation because we’ve been living with this situation for years, decades, centuries. Poor people work in the fields. The conditions are terrible. Pay is poor. And the rest of us take advantage of the situation by having cheap food available. Is this something people are only just discovering?
Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill
cleek/12:
Have you ever left a job given to you under those circumstances?
Sure, you can leave. But good fuckin’ luck trying to get another job, or having them take you seriously. You’re a poor convict, and already suspect on many levels. Trapping you into “work”, no matter how menial or debasing, is exactly what this is about, and why it resembles slavery — esp. given the imagery of the stories around it, and the likely racial makeup.
stuckinred
Violet
Because instead of Mexicans being exploited it’s black folks.
Elie
The need for this, do not forget, is because they have driven immigrants out of their states. Not that anyone should have to work in the fields, but its a result of not having an open door to immigrants.
Martin, while I hear your point, its always interesting that its the south that loves solutions like this that put poor and black people out in fields…Coincidence?
cleek
did you read the second article in ABLs post?
Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill
Violet/18: In point of fact, people have been talking about this stuff for decades. This is outrage at a new facet of the issue, not surprise at the issue itself. One that’s now making the situation clearer to more and more people, including the GOP major of a agri-based Georgia town.
Saying “well, this isn’t new” seems an odd way to express displeasure at the situation. Nor do I think it encourages people to work towards solutions, or even engaging the situation.
Elie
..and while I agree that the need for jobs for those on probation is important, it is significant that the need to get jobs more or less forces them to take what is on hand, since few jobs are available to those with a criminal record.
Violet
@NobodySpecial:
If we’re going to talk about farmworkers and slavery, take a look at Mark Bittman’s column on the new book Tomatoland. This excerpt is relevant:
stuckinred
You need to read the comments on Franklin’s blog, they want welfare folks out there too.
Citizen_X
You, ABL? Pshaw!
Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill
cleek/22: Yes, I did. Nothing there indicates what I said is untrue. The law says one thing, but penal officers can have serious power over these issues, and not always for the good. I didn’t say there was a law about it, I said there’s a stigma to turning such work down, just as there is to a felony conviction, in and of itself.
I live in SC. I’m friends with people directly aligned with overseeing exactly these kinds of processes. On top of my family experiences, I assure you, I’m not talking out of my hat, nor unaware of these kinds of situations.
Martin
Could be. The wingnut menu of shitty deeds is certainly extensive, but let’s wait for them to pick before we tell them how awful their choice is. But given the current situation, effective minimum wage in GA is going to go up due to a real, if localized, labor shortage. And maybe it’s just my upbringing, but if I was out of work and Cole offered me $8 an hour to build his fence, I’d have my 42 year old white ass out there digging holes before dinner. Nobody is too good for manual labor.
Zifnab
@cleek:
If I found this on a right-wing site – or something equally mild in overstatement – I’d leap for joy. Sighting a primary source? Addressing real-life events? Including specific facts and figures (the min. wage is $7.25, the crop pickers got $.50 coupons) that didn’t come out of someone’s ass?
Leap. For. Joy.
Now we can have a sane and reasonable discussion about events that doesn’t boil down to someones screaming “MAN-BEAR-PIG!” and calling you out for an insufficient love of Jesus America.
Instead, you want to fling poop at the screen because someone dropped the S-bomb in an insufficiently pure context.
Thanks for dragging us back down into the right-wing screech fest hell-hole. I suddenly feel nostalgic for ClownHall.
Marshal T
Oh god black people picking vegetables in a field! The humanity! Get a grip honey. They walked right off that field and nobody brought them back in a chain.
There are plenty of injustices at play here, I could wax eternal. But black slavery ain’t one of them. Lord.
Makewi
Paid and not forced to take the job. Just like slavery.
The we laughed and laughed and laughed.
Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill
Martin/29:
And no one is saying that, dammit.
As someone who lives in this area, asking people to pull crops in 90+ deg. heat isn’t even close to building a goddamned fence. There’s a very real reason Certain Groups tend to get pushed into this work, and it’s not always about the darkness of your skin — although it frequently was.
My upbringing, from folks who’s parents did sharecropping, was to get us kids the fuck outta anything like it, because it was horrible. Better than slavery? SURE. But that doesn’t mean it was good, or even so-so.
There’s a lot of backstory around driving poor Southerners, esp. African-Americans, into crop-pulling — esp. in brutal conditions and without proper training. I wish like Hell this was juts about “honest manual labor”, but it’s not, and there still aren’t enough of these guys to fill the gap, much less trained ones.
stuckinred
Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill
Martin doesn’t want to hear it.
Raylo
Calling paid voluntary labor slavery seems a lot like calling anybody you disagree with a Nazi. It equally diminishes the suffering of victims and your own credibility. ABL gets so upset when her (legitimate) charges of racism aren’t taken seriously, and then says something so obviously absurd…
Pangloss
Let’s see, a sub-minimum wage manual labor job in the fields, enforced by the threat of prison if you don’t accept their work terms…. and if you’re convicted of a felony you can’t vote….
What’s the difference between this and 1930s sharecropping again?
Thoughtcrime
Still the best living Ex-President:
http://www.ciw-online.org/pres_carter_visit_to_museum.html
Gozer
Assuming I’m reading things correctly let’s not forget a base salary rate of only 25 cents/hr. That’s not even remotely close to any kind of living wage.
Even though it’s not technically slavery, combined with the difficulty of ex-cons finding gainful employment and the depressed wages, it may as well be slavery.
reflectionephemeral
I agree with Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill.
The first thing to come to mind when I saw this was the recent book, Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon. I saw the author give a captivating talk on C-Span a while back. More here.
Yes, of course this story isn’t nearly as bad as that. But people on probation don’t really have a whole lot of leverage, either. What we’re seeing here is scapegoating of Latino workers out of their livelihoods, and (vastly disproportionately black) probationers brought in to do their work.
It’s a far cry from slavery, but it is pretty goddamned awful. And as ABL points out, God only knows what they’re going to do next.
Linda Featheringill
Jess #13
Have you ever done any field work?
Maybe you’d like to run down to Georgia and volunteer to harvest watermelons in 95-100 degree weather.
Heat stroke. Exhaustion. Severe dehydration. Kidney failure.
You have to be tough and in good shape to do this kind of thing.
Prisoners who have spent the last several months living in small cages are probably not physically fit enough to do this work.
And yes, I have done field work, on the family farm. Very hard work. And we weren’t trying to break any speed records. Up and out at daybreak, siesta from noon until 4 or 5 and out again until dark. I don’t think we could have survived working straight through all day.
Mike E
Jess @13: This
ETA to respond to the above comment, it is backbreaking work and dangerous. But this for-profit forced labor is yet another GOP business model; morals n ethics shouldn’t compete with the bottom line amirite?
elftx
I just love how no one seems to be seeing the big picture here and instead focusing on race..again…and no I do not mean you ABL.
When are we going to realize this is what they are pushing for for all of us…as was mentioned by the attacks on child labor laws.
Shirley Sherrod was absolutely correct. It is not a race issue, it is a class issue.
Joel
First impressions, I’m with Martin here; these jobs are voluntary. And it looks like the state is pursuing the route of “encouragement” at this point, not compulsion. But the program just looks terrible. What’s really not up for debate is the fact that the decisions that led Georgia down this road certainly were.
Still, its preferable to what Pete Wilson tried to pull off in California.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I guess there is a problem with trying to make people do a job they feel is deliberately torture. Only the conservative mind would come up with something this stupid “let’s make then outlaws and then they will have no choice but to follow our rules!” Seriously, why is this better than a jail cell for these convicts?
ABL your missing the rest of the history; back in the days of prison farms the prisoners had no choice but to work. If they didn’t the guards would torture them to death. Not toss them back into a cell.
General Stuck
Yes, we are, but it will take some more shark jumping for the really horrid stuff starts happening. That is why the wingers are working overtime to rig the electoral process, because they know that sooner or later they will piss off enough people to get voted out of power, again.
The GOP starts out with the advantage representing the white majority in this country, but unless they either moderate their exploitive bullshit, or the one man one vote problem will knock them in the head. As long as we keep relatively free and fair elections in this country, I have hope that the democratic system will sooner or later ferret out the behavior that is best for the greater good, from all the other. It is often a very slow process, and never quite complete as to whatever course corrections are needed and then happen, but we generally pull out heads out of our asses at the last possible moment, to avoid going over the cliff. We have a lot problems and things to fix these days, and not forever to fix them, so it will be close this time, imo.
bourbaki
Pangloss and Gozer
Your reading things wrong
The ticket deal allows for the more.
El Cid
There was another and quite recent slavery system more applicable as an analogy:
The South’s segregation-era prison labor system.
Now, there already had been the “convict lease” system with ex-free blacks after the destruction of Reconstruction.
But the chain gang system was the more modern (i.e., “Cool Hand Luke”) version. After all, we had to get those roads modernized.
Local ‘law enforcement’ authorities and deputized thugs captured blacks and poor whites and charged them with minor offenses and giant punishments, or made up charges altogether.
They then ‘sold’ this forced labor to local agriculture barons.
It was slavery. Up and down. “Prison labor” meaning you got to be a prisoner and the shit beat out of you if you weren’t hard working enough or keep your mouth shut enough or any of the other totalitarian monitorings of the slavery & segregation system.
burnspbesq
The solution, at first glance, seems simple. Pay farm workers a living wage and give them decent working conditions. The only problem is that watermelon will cost as much as filet mignon.
You can’t have it both ways.
Mike M
Harvesting certain crops requires a lot of labor for very brief periods of time. The work is physically demanding and pays poorly. Someone needs to do the work, and I won’t criticize the state of Georgia for attempting to get farmers to hire people on probation. I’m sure those people could use a place to work and some money in their pockets.
But picking crops is not like getting a job sweeping floors at the local grocer. It’s not just that the work is hard. Many people are willing to do hard work. The problem is that harvesting crops doesn’t provide steady work unless you are willing to move with the seasons. That means being willing to leave your home and travel a long way. Migrant farm workers often travel to several states and across the border following available work. That sort of existence isn’t compatible with what most people think of as a stable life.
Like any job, it takes some experience to get good at picking certain crops. Different techniques are used depending on the vegetable. During your first week on the job, you are likely to be horrible. Experienced workers will out pick you many times over and make more money as a result.
If you are unemployed and living in a cheap apartment in the city, you might be able to earn a few bucks at a nearby farm if you are able to get there. But picking crops isn’t likely to be a longterm solution your financial woes.
Maura Cavaleri
I’m going to just echo others when I say as a North Carolina farmer, this is back breaking work. Our temperatures down here have not dropped below 85 in over a month, these past few weeks, not below 90, some days we’ve been close to a 100.
I have a small organic herb and veggie farm. Everything is done by hand, for the most part, and the days picking have been brutal. I cannot imagine, for one instant, putting men and women out there, with no training and in this heat, without tragedy.
El Cid
That said, I just don’t think this is going to work out, not just for the non-immigrants who can’t keep up and will just not do it, but for the farmers who can’t afford to wait around until the other labor gets up to speed or pay for the larger payroll needed to get the crops in.
The agricultural system presumed the subsidy of quick, efficient, cheap, and compliant labor.
Internet Dragons
Maybe the field owners need to start lobbying for more humane immigration laws.
Maybe they need to provide better pay and working conditions.
Maybe they need to just do that instead of providing ‘incentives’ to die of heat stroke for an extra fifty cents.
Maybe they should do that instead of whining about the probationers.
The workers aren’t safe. I’ll be glad to share any number of horror stories about what happens to field workers.
Those jobs aren’t ‘voluntary’ for millions of undocumented workers or folks who live in poverty. Those who say this is a class issue are right…my grandparents were sharecroppers (and there was noting romantic about that life that I could see) and I’m white. But it’s equally true that class is inextricably linked with race in this country, and you can’t fairly or cleanly separate the two…even though it’s always important to look at the beast from all angles and through all available lenses.
As is so often true for me these days, this thing feels utterly wrong to me on so many levels, but I struggle to articulate why I am so certain that it’s pointing to something much bigger and more disturbing than the story on its face value.
Riggsveda
For a minute, just out of high school, I worked picking strawberries. It was without doubt the hardest work I’ve ever done, and I was a healthy 17 year old who couldn’t last the week out. There’s a reason why farmers can’t get people to work these jobs, and it’s not only the money. We should get down on our knees and kiss the ground farm workers walk on for the gifts they give us every day.
That said, ABL, have you read the book “Slavery by Another Name”, by Douglas Blackmon? If not, please give it a go. It should be required reading for every white kid in high school.
MoeLarryAndJesus
I have an idea. Let’s have Martin take a week of vacation time and go down to Georgia and see how he does picking melons or cucumbers for 5 days.
After that he can tell us more about his superior upbringing, okay? If his 42 year old white ass is still alive, that is.
Elisabeth
Thanks for the reminder that I need to hit the farmers’ market Saturday and to weed the garden when it’s not raining.
ABL
i haven’t, but i will
buy itdownload it.thanks for the rec!
Thoughtcrime
An old engineering adage: Faster, better, cheaper — pick two.
An old slavery adage: Faster, better, cheaper – pick crops.
rikyrah
LET THE FUCKING FRUIT ROT.
shaking the fist in air with my Afro-wig on right beside you, ABL.
MattMinus
The real problem is that the Georgia voters will read this article, and their take away will be that it’s an outrage to let these probationers walk off the job.
We are fucked.
Daulnay
Why should the state of Georgia interfere in the working of the competitive free market? The ‘suffering’ farmers were breaking the law, and exploiting illegal immigrants.
Before, their farm businesses made money because they broke the law. As they did, they were able to out-compete their honest rivals, and drive the honest farmers out of business. Now that they have to operate honestly, they can’t compete and want subsidies. I say, too effing bad.
Fieldwork is lousy. I grew up on a small farm – we had 15 acres of strawberries. Picking was miserable enough, but 1) we were near the Great Lakes, so it didn’t get too hot and 2) we never worked in the middle of the day on a really hot day. It was unsafe.
I do not blame the probationers for taking off in the middle of the day. I blame the farmer for lousy working conditions. The farmers’ business model doesn’t work if they have to pay wages high enough to attract workers. By the logic of the free, competitive market, they should go out of business. And since before this the farmers made money only because of their law-breaking, the sooner the better.
Original Lee
I have done field work, as a teenager. I have picked strawberries, red raspberries, black raspberries, blueberries, Queen Anne cherries, peppers, and plums. We did not work past noon, so we were in the fields at just about “can”. It was years before I could eat red raspberries because I got soaked to the skin from the dew on the leaves within minutes and stayed that way all day (the berries grow deep inside the bushes, in case you’ve never picked red raspberries). The older field workers were fairly nice about giving me tips because they could tell I wasn’t competition.
The cherries and the plums were the worst – you filled your bucket as full as you could before going down the ladder. You needed to go at a deliberate speed down the ladder so you wouldn’t spill your bucket, which was time away from filling your bucket. I once fell off a ladder because I got dehydrated (didn’t want to walk all the way over to the water truck in between buckets).
Bottom line, even pulling crops requires some job training and physical conditioning to do well. They are setting these probationers up for failure (besides all of the other negatives).
mclaren
Why? It isn’t slavery if brown people with Latino accents do it, but it is slavery if black people do it?
Get a clue. America’s agribusiness has run on legal slavery ever since the 1930s. The serfs are just central Americans shipped in by the busload using underground railroads paid for by giant corporations, and working with phony IDs and using social security numbers taken from legal U.S. citizens courtesy of a fantastically well-organized corporate indentured-serviture-illegal-immigrant racket.
Folks, wake up. When the ICE raids poultry processing warehouses and meat packing plants in Nebraska and finds three hundred illegal immigrants from Guatamala, all of whom conveniently and mysteriously have valid drivers licenses and legal social security numbers stolen by identity theft from legal U.S. citizens, this ain’t just coincidence. Two hundred or three hundred Guatamalans do not just all happen to coincidentally get together and cross the border into the U.S. at the same time and then all just coincidentally wind up at the same slaughterhouse in Idaho or Nebraska or Montana, 1200 miles from the border where they crossed.
Giant U.S. corporations run underground railroads to funnel millions of these illegal immigrants into America and give them fraudulent drivers licenses because it’s good business. These immigrants work for pennies. And the fines for employing ’em are a pittance.
So now that racist Repubs are forcing the Latino illegals to flee, it’s back to indentured servitude for black people.
What? You didn’t actually think American corporations are going to pay anyone a living wage, did you…?
Chris
Enjoy your 20 dollar watermelons.
Chris
kathy a
Bwahahahahaha! Careful what you wish for mofos. This means less product and higher prices. Thanks, xenophobes. Of course you lot will blame Obama because a cuke costs $6.00 instead of $1.00, so it’s all good for the racist class.
DPirate
Cucumbers already cost $5 each where I live. The cost of produce is an entirely selfish argument, anyhow. Care more about how much you pay for salad than you do about the American labor market is the outlook of our 1% – the guys that screw us whenever they can if it will make a penny.
chopper
lol. kinda like this.
cleek
@Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill:
that’s some pretty weak-ass coercion.
@Zifnab:
so that’s ironic.
Jess
At Linda #40
“The slaughterhouse injury that most often sends worker to the doctor is the laceration, Mother Jones reports. Amputations are also up there, with workers getting limbs caught in everything from conveyor belts to meat grinders. Decapitation is not uncommon. Other injuries include being crushed, hit or run over by the wide range of vehicles; bearing the brunt of falling objects, like 100-pound sides of cattle, and getting hit in the eye, mouth or head with bloody, swinging meat hooks.”
Not saying farm labor doesn’t suck. Just that it’s far from the most dangerous work that desperate people have to subject themselves to in this country.
Roy G.
It’s interesting that nobody has mentioned the other option: that the farmers pay a better wage and reduce their profit margin. Why is that?
Jess
As someone else said upstream, it’s a class issue, not a race issue. The poorest people in our society work shitty, dangerous jobs for very little compensation and with very few opportunities for changing the game. True, African Americans have been more systematically shut out of opportunities to change their prospects than any other group (except maybe Native Americans), but poverty sucks and being at the mercy of the capitalist machine sucks no matter what color your skin is.
PS
I am stunned. People on this thread are justifying this? Have you no shame? Have you no sense of what a century of labor organizing won, and what is now about a generation of capitalist fight-back has damn near taken away?
Look, if your initial reaction to this kind of story is to nit-pick and quibble, you are in serious need of reconsidering your attitude to your fellow people.
Unbelievable.
cleek
i doubt the economics work. farming is a very low profit margin business. there’s not a lot of room to lower cost.
your average GA onion farmer isn’t making a killing.
joeshabadoo
Instead of illegal immigrants doing the work we have American citizens doing it with a system set up where they can actually make more than minimum wage.
So illegal immigrants are “content” with the shit work and no real law protecting them yet Americans doing it with the law backing their pay and benefiting from their taxes and SS and it is somehow beyond the pale
“Are you fucking awake yet?”
We’ve been using illegal immigrants like tissue paper for years and suddenly now that Americans, Americans who typically have trouble finding jobs, are given the option to do their jobs we need to wake up?
Jess
to PS, #71: Justifying what? Unemployed people with few economic options being “encouraged” to take a shitty job for minimum wage? I think the “so what” response you’re seeing is because this is nothing new or shocking–not because we think this is just fine and dandy. The gains made by organized labor haven’t been all that great, and this is not an isolated incident. Sorry if you’re shocked by this, but don’t condemn the messengers.
Jess
@ joeshabadoo: Exactly. Thank you.
PS
@Jess: Really? You don’t think the 8-hour day was significant? You don’t think the minimum wage was significant? You don’t think that OSHA was significant? You think these things magically appeared?
I am not naive, and I have marched in support of strawberry workers near where I live, but I am seriously sorry that you are NOT shocked.
Jimperson Zibb (formerly Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
My mother lives on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Her family settled there 400 years ago, and did well, owning slaves and fighting for the Confederacy and all that wonderful shit hte teabaggers would love to bring back, even if they’re too smart to say it aloud. I’m disgusted by much of our family history, though I’m proud to say that my mother somehow managed to see how toxic it was and brought me up a bigtime liberal.
Anyway, a place like that is far off the track. There aren’t too many people there, and farming is the biggest business–truck farming and chicken farming. Both counties that make up the Shore are about 50% black, and there’s little likelihood of ever getting ahead there if you don’t already have some money by virtue of being one of the “right” families.
And so down there you can see that as much as we’ve made some real strides in this country with race in the last 50 years, we have a long way to go. There’s a whole shitload of poverty there, and, as is true in most of the country, it hits the black familes the hardest. If you’re black, you pretty much have the choice of working in one of the canning plants or in one of the Tyson or Perdue chicken plants. There are some service jobs, but whites compete for those, so it’s harder to get a good service job. I’ve met a few people who have worked in those chicken plants, and, damn, I wouldn’t set foot in one on a bet. Low pay. Dangerous work. Dirty. Smelly. No benefits.
And then there is the field work, which down there is mostly work that migrant Spanish speakers do. And that, too, is no way to live. They don’t have any job security, the conditions are shitty as hell, they get paid next to nothing, get no benefits, and have to follow the work. And they can’t do anything if somebody screws them over for fear of getting deported.
Our food industry is one big immoral mess. We need to think long and hard as a society about what we put in our mouths. It’s easy to buy a few tomatoes or some chicken at the store and give no thought to where they came from, but it’s high time we started. Everything we do had consequences, and the sooner we begin to heed them the better off we’ll all be.
I’m no economist, but I just find it hard to believe that if we paid the people–and they are people, even if most of us will never meet them–enough to live with some dignity that food would cost too much for us to afford. We might have to change the way we go about buying our food, buying more stuff locally and maybe only buying things in their natural growing seasons where we happen to live. But, hell, what kind of people are we as a society if we let big farming businesses treat their workers like they have no worth? This one outrage here is a particularly galling example of how these big industries exploit people–most often poor minorities without the means to stand up for themselves–to pay big money to their shareholders and officers, but the whole industry is vile. I don’t know what we can do to change it, but broadcasting this kind of offense is one small thing. Thinking about what each thing we buy when we shop really means, what the human price might have been to bring that cantelope to the shelf, would help, too.
Well, I’ve depressed myself, so I guess I’ll go weep into my pillow until I fall asleep…
Jimperson Zibb (formerly Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
I’ll also say that if treating people who work in slaughterhouses and canneries and on farms like humas means we have to pay $4 for a cucumber, then maybe that’s what we should be paying for it. My guess, though, is that with some agressive and burdensome regulation of these industries, we might find to our shock that we can pay these workers enough to live decent lives and still afford to buy our food without needing to buy it on installment.
Dollared
Wow, I’m with the $5 cucumber crowd here. If that’s what it costs for human beings to pick them for 40 years and then retire with health care and a roof over their heads, then I will pay it. Gladly.
Oh, and fuck all of you who just betrayed that you think Mexicans are less than human.
moops
I’m just not feeling the outrage like some. I guess the images are not shocking to me. I picked next to black workers for years. A black men in the field doing farm work in hot weather is not a tragedy.
That so many people on probation are black is something to be addressed. That probation is a lingering drag on a person’s life is also a serious problem.
I would agree that a city person might find it arduous, and be unskilled at the work. I don’t think the crops will be saved this way, unless the farmers put up way higher wages. The big industrial farms that handle their own wholesale and distribution can stick it to others down the supply line if the wages get the product in the door.
I am tired of every ABL thread being about race. Well, about blacks actually (I didn’t see any wailing about Mexicans doing the exact same work and conditions…). I wonder if the migrant black workers making minimum wage I worked beside in Canada were also slaves ? was I a slave making less than minimum wage as a kid when I started ?
I tell you though. Nobody has a problem making minimum wage in a dorky outfit in an air-conditioned fast food joint in a bad neighborhood after a season in the field. I took my job pumping gas, gladly, in the off-season.
2liberal
@Cleek at 1
what you said. I don’t see the problem. i worked as a kid for my family farm business at $1.65 per hour, worked until i dropped , picked myself up and worked some more, and it was a good thing. they have people wanting to work and found jobs they can do. they have to be treated with more respect than the undocumented folks so working conditions should improve.
mythago
I’m not seeing the problem with $5 cucumbers either. We pay farmworkers more, they will have more money to spend, everybody’s happy. Even Henry Ford got that business does well when its workers have money to throw around.
Besides, the government already subsidizes agriculture heavily, so there’s really no reason subsidies can’t go to protecting farmers who pay a decent wage, instead of going to making sure Archer Daniels Midland shareholders got good returns this year.
2liberal
@60 daulnay
Nailed it.
2liberal
@82 mythago
Sorry but you are WAY off with the $5 cucumber. Most of he cost in produce is NOT in the field labor. Tripling the field wage would NOT result in a $5 cucumber (I am not being strict with my numbers here) A lot of it is shipping / handling and selling at retail.
Tehanu
And another vote for the higher cost, if it means that people who work harder than most of us ever will in our lives can have decent wages and working conditions. chris and kathy a, upthread, snarking about how we’ll all be sorry when cucumbers cost more, can go out in the friggin’ fields themselves and see how much they like being peons. And then stuff a cucumber where it’ll do them some moral good.
Jess
@ 2liberal:
Found this: “what $1 spent on food paid for in 2000”
Jimperson Zibb (formerly Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
Well, that’s quick and easy to take care of: just don’t read them. Skip right on by. The reason she writes about race–well, blacks, actually–is that we still have a big problem here in the U.S. I daresay that when these problems are gone, she won’t feel any need to keep burdening you with her annoying talk about it.
Dollared
@Zibb
But she just proves to me the hardest part of being part of a disadvantaged group – thinking it’s all about your group membership, when it turns out that life is just f-ing hard unless you’re in in the top 1% – and even then, it can be f-ing hard.
This post was profoundly, deeply racist and offensive – “OK, we’ll work with the niggers and the chinks, but not the
Irish! Messicans” The only value it adds, I think, is to illustrate that the Blazing Saddles scene is a cross cultural universal that is easy for the top group to exploit, and I don’t think BJ’s front pagers should represent that. One can be A, B, and L, and still use your brain and want the best for all people. ABL can’t seem to accomplish that.wkwillis
Figure there are sixty minutes in an hour, figure you pick 6 cucumbers a minute (not an underestimate, this is with time to move to the next plant, haul your bucket, get a drink, take a leak (and you had better hydrate enough to take a leak)), figure 9 dollars an hour counting social security taxes, etc, and you have a cost of about 4 cents a cucumber direct labor costs.
This discussion is silly.
So we have to pay high school students ten times as much as a bunch of Mexicans?
It’s still only four cents a cucumber.
2liberal
re: wkwillis @
according to the document the pickers had to get over 15 buckets per hour to get bonused. How many Cukes per bucket? Maybe 20? Otherwise you spend half your time moving buckets around. That is 300 cukes per hour. at $7 per hour that is 2.3 cents per cuke. NOwhere near $5 per unit. If you paid them $21 per hour i bet some of those probationers would start to get motivated to be able to do this work for part of their year. The delta in cost would be 5 cents per cuke.
I find large cucumbers at $0.59 each at my local grocery ad. so the delta to pay pickers $21 per hour would be ~ 5 cents each. If agriculture workers made that kind of money it would be a good thing for this nation.