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10.21.11 - 11:32 AM
Oops: White People Don't Want To Do All That Hard Work Brown People Did
First, it was tomatoes. Now potatoes. Alabama's tough new immigration law, touted the worst in the country, has worked mighty fast. It quickly drove experienced Hispanic workers out, leaving crops rotting in the fields, few new workers able or willing to do the backbreaking work, and many farmers losing their farms. At one, the law's GOP sponsor was invited to pick and haul one bucket of potatoes. He declined. Some great rants on the subject here.
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101 Comments so far
Show AllOne does not "pick" potatoes. One digs them up with a pitch fork. When the media cannot get even the simplest facts or concepts right, how can we believe them as the "report" more complex events? Come on, Abby.
Yes, but the practice has always been called "picking potatoes", whatever tools you use. You are joking, right?
I have always heard "digging potatoes".
Never heard 'picking potatoes either.
And there's a lot of people who won't do physical labor like this.
Does Abby have a special hate thing for white people?
"And there's a lot of people who won't do physical labor like this.'
Won't do it for the current wage being offered. Add health benefits and raise it to a living wage and I expect you'll see a line form. Yes, there are a lot of people who won't do physical anything but a lot will if the price is right.
Since when does Capitalism prohibit rising wages when workers (citizens) are in short supply?
So, the price of French fries goes up. That wouldn't be all bad.
Well, to be technical, generally machines dig up the potatoes and then workers pick them up as they ride on the backs of the machines, or pick them up off the ground where they've dried off after the machines dig them up.
If small farmers would build 2 foot high, 4-5 feet wide, as long as they want raised beds for their vegetables, the work would be a lot easier and more efficient, since there would be little stoop labor and crops can be inter-planted for greater efficiency and greater diversity of crops.
Tell you what - lots of people would work for $15 an hour in poorer parts of the country, including the North Coast of Maine. Many make less than that doing all sorts of work, including "clean" office work.
Local "white" people used to do the stoop labor agricultural work here in pesticide-sprayed "wild" blueberry land,but the pay is not enough to live on anymore, since agribusiness brought in the illegals and pays them much less than they used to pay local workers. Many illegals don't speak English, so they get paid whatever the overseers/owners can get away with, which is often very, very little.
Also, local "white" workers didn't like being sent into fields newly pesticided, but desperate illegals will go in, and even spray pesticides without protective equipment. Check out the cancer and life expectancies of farm workers where pesticides are sprayed. Not good.
Also, as the Right-wing Rethugs like to point out, those who used to do the hard labor have discovered that if they can fake an injury or disability, they can get a check for life, and food and housing and heating oil, etc., paid for by the taxpayers. Many choose to never work again, sad to say, when there's so much work that needs doing.
We need county poor farms (call them something else) again where indigent people can go to live and grow food for themselves and for market. Then they won't be homeless or starving, and will hopefully keep out of trouble such as getting into drugs because they're bored.
No need for homelessness or hunger in this society; we just have to re-order our thinking about what everyone needs and figure out how to make that happen.
$15 per hour would be considered fabulous pay for a majority of USAns everywhere, not just in poor areas. My starting pay at a consulting firm in well-off Lexington, Kentucky with a masters degree in civil engineering, was about $15 per hour.
The idea of acres and acres of raised beds (Made of what? Treated wood leaches nasty chemicals into the food) sounds immensely impractical to me.
And your idea of "poor farms" is reactionary and Dickensian to say the least. What next, debtor's prisons?
The idea has merit if we remove the "poor" part. ;)
"We need county [...] farms where [...] people can go to live and grow food for themselves and for market."
Farms are failing even without banning their no-visa workers, right?
Failing farms could be purchased publicly -or otherwise socially. Farmers could then be hired -or could be found from initial corps of volunteers- to grow the crops and what-have-you, keeping a portion for the farmers (workers) use, sending a portion to the town or co-op that put up the $, and retaining a portion for market (for whoever's profit).
For sustainability and environmental reasons the farms should be converted -or re-converted- to small-scale polycultures with hedgerows with "wild" corridors.
The amount of quality labor needed and the amount of quality jobs to be had would serve the "poor farms" goal, minus the Dickensian outlook.
"My starting pay at a consulting firm...was about $15 per hour."
Year???
I guess no one has been to the San Luis Valley -Colorado's potato farms. Machines do most of the work and include a conveyor right into the haul trucks. Onions are pretty much done the same way. We used to pick up the "spill" along 285. Field workers typically do the gleaning.
As long as a farmer can get an endless supply of cheap labor he'll have no motive to invest in machinery.
" if they can fake an injury or disability, they can get a check for life, and food and housing and heating oil, etc., paid for by the taxpayers. Many choose to never work again, sad to say"
Damm all I can say is where is mine?? I sit in pain 40+ hour a week, becaust 80% disability aint enough???
I want a life of leasure and insurance marijuana too!!! >^^<
You better believe she knows how potatoes are, er, harvested.Nice word, no? She's from Maine ferchrisake. Come on dkshaw. Find some other nits to pick.
First, jump into a bog...
Actually Abby is closer to being right than dkshaw is. If one wants to ruin their potatoes they dig them with a pitch fork. (pitch fork holes are a fine way to ruin a potato and since you can't see through the dirt to know where the potato is you are going to damage a high percentage trying to harvest them with a pitch fork).
In commercial potato operations, and very few potatoes are grown in Alabama, they are dug with a harvesting machine. Even at small scale market growers don't usually dig potatoes with a hand tool but will use a plow, a bottom plow like a 'spud buster' and then once the potatoes have been brought to the surface they are 'picked' out of the loose dirt.
A pitch fork is used to pitch hay from the field up to the hay wagon, or down from the hayloft. With three narrow cylindrical tines, it's fairly useless for digging. See American Gothic.
These are the jobs that Americans are going to be doing once Congress passes the jobs bill.
These are the jobs that Americans are going to be doing once Congress passes the jobs bill.
I lived on my family's farm and yes, it IS HARD WORK -- all of it is. The planting, the picking (or digging), it is back-breaking and in the hottest weather. So everyone in Alabama who wanted the illegal immigrants out because they said there were people who wanted these jobs --- where the hell are they???? If I was unemployed, I would go back into those fields and pick. BUT, the pay is VERY VERY LOW. So hard work for low pay. Come on people -- you said you wanted the work, now go out into those fields, put on your hat, sweat a whole LOT, and pick those vegetables! People who never picked vegetables need to go there and DO IT and experience the hard work. You eat 'em -- you pick 'em. That's where your food comes from --- be one with the earth or be quiet when immigrants are doing the hard work. I want to see every Republican in Alabama out in those fields working!
The effect of Alabama's immigration law has unintended consequences for the farmers and their slaves. The "illegal" immigrant farmworkers don't stay on the farm forever. As soon as a better job is available -construction, hotel and food, etc they'll leave a vacancy for the next, never-ending illegal migration. Consequently, wages in are driven down wherever they appear. For instance, construction wages are the same now as they were in the 80's; at least here in the SW. I believe the law is intended to break this vicious cycle. The illegals will have to share the pain with their slavemasters. I 'm always surprised how "progressives" always defend the Chamber of Commerce when it comes to illegal immigration and in the same breath condemn the general electorate for voting against their own interests.
Yes, it is too bad the money from farm subsidizes goes to industrial agriculture and corn ethanol boondoggles, and not to paying farm laborers a good wage with health care benefits.
I've worked on organic farms all around the USA, Hawaii, and New Zealand. Never once did I get a deal where for my backbreaking labor get more than a sharecropper's pittance. It's neofeudalism out there in the fields; people should know where their food comes from.
I'd like to see more progressive legislation in regards to immigration, but I firmly believe hiring undocumented workers for farm labor and paying pennies (literally pennies for some crops) hurts all of us. We need to value the primacy of good work for good food again in this country; if that means paying Americans $50 an hour to pick lettuce, then so be it. Because $15 per ain't worth the aches.
Very good post. What I'd add is that fieldwork isn't as unskilled as a lot of people like to think. We shouldn't expect people who've never done it to do it competently, and fast enough.
I especially agree with the last part of what you said. Fieldwork is valuable work, and those who do it should be better-treated and better-paid, whether they're Black, Brown, Red, Yellow, White, or Green.
Good stuff here.
And I'D add that skill level even in the actual fieldwork alters drastically with type of farming.
A complex polyculture takes a much higher level of skill than filling a cog's role in industrial monoculture.
The sickest thing is that a significant % of these immigrant workers were polyculture farmers of skill in Mexico -or were from families who recently were such- before industrial monoculutres and NAFTA put them out of business.
Now they come north and pick potatoes in a stupid system that ruined their skilled one, and they are called -by the TOTALLY no-skilled non-farmers- "unskilled laborers"!
Who sez their unskilled the problem is their ILLEGAL! so they can work in the worst jobs and get the worst pay and can't do anything about it because their ILLEGAL, I 'd have no trouble paying any worker their worth! But the illegal/slave labor screws up the pay-scales! >^^<
Umm, read the articles to see who "sez" that.
And read our immigration laws to discover the prejudice in them that makes "unskilled laborers" illegal, and skilled ones legal.
Nearly every country does the same. Why would we want to seek the lowest common denominator as a society? Don't we have enough of that already?
Uh, what?
Did you read the post I was responding to?
I wasn't opining as to the god or bad of the immigration laws. I was just pointing out that skilled laborers and professionals aren't often in-country-without-visa because they get the visas they seek.
There are less visas than the number of open jobs, and visa lengths and re-issuance are less than the workers require. That is why there are "illegal immigrants".
The problem with the quantity and quality of jobs is a separate one from the problem of guest workers lacking visas.
Does that clarify?
I would be interested in responses that actually respond to what I have written. ;)
Why yes, matti, I did read the post and your response, quote: "And read our immigration laws to discover the prejudice in them..."
Then you state, "I wasn't opining as to the god(sp) or bad of the immigration laws."
So, the "prejudice" in our immigration laws is neither good nor bad?
Clear as mud.....
You should preview before you post.
Thanks for catching that typo!
Very helpful. :)
"Prejudice" does not mean "bad" Mr. Keyboard.
It means "pre-judgement".
Our immigration laws -and most immigration laws as you point out- contain a pre-judgement that boils down to "individuals with wealth or skills will be beneficial, individuals without them will be harmful".
Beyond the correctness or not of this pre-judgement, it is important to remember that it contains an additional pre-judgement of what is going on domestically.
Meaning that if immigrants are judged worthy or no based upon their skills or wealth, domestic society should be building both of those internally as well. Otherwise it is an inconsistent value-judgement, which leads back to the more colloquial definition of "prejudice" you assumed in reading my post.
The problem in our failing Empire is not the prejudice against unskilled and poor immigrants, but rather the failure of the prejudice for skilled and comfortable Citizens.
Oh, and the Modern English word "good" is derived from the word "god".
"Good Works" are "God's Works", to be "good" is to be like "god". ;)
SSJJ makes a good point. There is a book for sale over on the counterpunch site that points out farm labor work is actually highly skilled but instead of using machines the workers use tools. Farm labor work is not only highly skilled labor but it demands physical strength, endurance and involves hours of repetition. Its not just 'white people' that don't want to do farm labor. For the most part they aren't skilled enough to do it and they are physically unable to do it. On the other hand a high percentage of the migrant labor coming from the south (both the ones with papers and those without ) are skilled farm workers and they come here because NAFTA has destroyed many of the skilled farm jobs back home and because relatively the US pays a premium (when compared to wages for the few farm jobs left back home) for those able to do that sort of work.
You're confusing skill with experience. It's probably more accurate to say the white people trying to do the farm work are simply inexperienced. It's merely a routine that one learns over time. Unless it involves animals I doubt that it is "highly skilled" as you state; that's pro-amnesty propaganda. You are partially correct about NAFTA but not all illegals are displaced "farmers" and you've ignored the effect of population doubling in Mexico and C.A. between 1970 and 2000. Illegal immigration from those countries existed before NAFTA due to nothing more than excess population.
What CAUSED the "excess population"?
One could describe the post-NAFTA Mexico as suddenly having an "excess population", but it was the trade agreement, not lack of condoms, that caused it.
A significant % of migrant farm workers either were once small, independent farmers, come from such families, or were in a similar situation but as quasi-independent or serf-like hacienda farmers. Do you think that Mexicans just have a in-born taste for fieldwork? Or are you forgetting that this was originally a discussion of farm workers effected by blanket bans on workers-without-visas, not a debate on "illegals" as a whole?
REAL farmwork is highly-skilled.
Read some Joel Salatin or one of the other beyond organic farmers if you don't believe me.
Industrial agribusiness work is low or no-skill.
But as I wrote above, the skilled farmer displaced is more likely to become the unskilled agribusiness laborer. For the same reason the agribusiness was once a real farm.
But I am curious about your solution to the problem?
Have you mentioned it somewhere you could point me to? :)
matti, the Mexican birthrate started to decline long before NAFTA, however a generation is considered 20years. Hopefully you know how to extrapolate.
Running a farm does take skill, however, the world we know runs on division of labor.
Then there's this, "this was originally a discussion of farm workers effected by blanket bans on workers-without-visas, not a debate on "illegals" as a whole?"
Now, I'm curious, what is the difference?
You talk down to people and then expect them to fill the holes in your knowledge?
What a strange way to behave!
But since I'm so nice, I'll explain the difference for you. ;)
Not all "illegals" are "farm workers".
See, they have to work on a farm to be farm workers. But some workers-without-visas work as roofers, or painters, or in slaughterhouses, or packing plants, not farms.
Make sense now? ;)
Well said SSJJ, ergoat, iwonder, morningsun and matti.
Well if farm labor gets paid $50 an hour, we are all going to need to make that much because a pound of potato's will be $25 and tomatoes will be $10 each. There is nothing "neo" about the feudalism coming to America it's the good old fashioned kind, along with a police state to make sure we all enjoy it. In the meantime grow your own potatoes and dig them yourselves.
I disagree, and spell out how this can be done by rerouting our farm subsidizes from the 1% to the workers for wages and health care.
I'm not a shill for this bakery, but an example: Alvarado St Bakery which sells fine organic breads, uses a co-op model and pays its kneaders and bakers $60,000+ a year. Starting. (RE: Capitalism: A Love Story) That's close to $30 an hour. And that bread is on the shelf for under $4 per loaf.
Yes ergoat, Good point, owner operated and co-op's are the way to go.The powers that be are determined to bring back indentured servitude, and life long debt. The race is on. Will the people wake up before it's to late, or have we already reached that point?
I really doubt Alvarado St bakery is "paying" 60K+. What they are doing is called profit sharing, which is pretty coll BTW. For an enterprise like that to work you need like minded working people. I bet slackers are not allowed to work in that co-op for too long.
And that is how slackers get weeded out of co-operative systems.
The current version of the competitive idea can't tell the difference between slackers and willing hands out of work. Most co-operative systems can. Because there are no willing hands out of work.
We need to support food agriculture, coop as you say, or traditional farms, rather than commodity agriculture.
"White People Don't Want To Do All That Hard Work Brown People Did"
Of course they don't. Unemployment and welfare are still flowing and you get to watch a lot mote TV. The illegal (or undocumented, whatever the PC term is these days) workers do not qualify for for either one of those programs. They might not even get minimum wage.
And rich people don't want to fight the wars that make them rich. They would much rather sit home and watch it unfold on TV while polishing their american flag pin and believing they are entitled patriots and above the fray!
If the wages and working conditions were better maybe the work would attract more takers. Of course if you have something to hold over someone (like citizenship) that makes them a lot more willing to work for poverty wages and not complain.
The title of the article is that White people do not want to do the work of Brown people...
The article strongly suggests that there is racist or supremacist elements to the immigration law passed in Alabama to assure that Mexican were not taking "American" jobs...a euphemism for White people.
The law has passed, the jobs the Mexicans held are open, and needless to say, rather crucial: the harvested the crops of American farmland.
The unemployment rate is high enough that the fields should be filled with those same "Americans" who believed their opportunities for work were being stolen from them by immigrants. They have taken that opportunity back, but have yet to take advantage of it.
Another article written in the DistressedGentlefolk.com website puts the matter succinctly:
"After shooting itself in the foot, and after terrorizing thousands of families, Alabama still can't figure out how to deal with this issue. There is high unemployment throughout the state, but nobody is willing to go pick potatoes and harvest other crops by hand. You see, that's "Mexican" work and people who have a very high opinion of themselves simply refuse to spend more than a pleasant, sunny morning working in the fields. Oh, the horror of it all! Having to bend over and pick things up--why, that's just not right. Americans should be in charge of the people who have to do that sort of thing, right? And when the jobs of the overseers are filled up, certainly we can create jobs were decent Americans can stand around with cattle prods and shotguns to ensure that no one misses a potato or takes a twenty minute break, right?"
The point of this article is not to be missed, as any suggestion of using machinery or raising wages ultimately does:
The colorful history of farming in this country, the true field hands and pickers is predominantly Black and Brown, and it has never shown more vividly than in the ramifications of the recent Alabama immigration laws.
The mainstream media will tell you the fields are rotting because there is no one to do the work. The "niggers and the spics" were ever seen as too lazy to do the work without being overseen: now the "lazy coloreds" are gone, and the "overseers", too, who presumably were the ones who really knew how to get the job done.
Only so many eyes are needed in fields all but empty of hands...
The color of the hands in the fields should have never been an issue. Now we are forced to look at the color of the eyes...
What a shame.
hey, corinthian!
you say:
~ Only so many eyes are needed in fields all but empty of hands... ~
great sentence...simple, yet encompassing so much...
"The article strongly suggests that there is racist or supremacist elements to the immigration law passed in Alabama to assure that Mexican were not taking "American" jobs...a euphemism for White people."
It's worse than that. Zimet is a race-baiter. What do you think the reaction would be if I re-wrote Zimet's headline to read " Brown people don't want to do all the hard intellectual work white people did".
If you were to rewrite Zimet's headline to read;
"Brown people don't want to do all the hard intellectual work white people did"
The reaction to this rewrite would be a shrug. Indeed, that premise was the justification for making Brown people to work the fields in the first place.
Hard intellectual work needs leisure time to do...to presume Brown people work so hard and long in the fields, for the lowest wages, to avoid at all costs the leisure time wherein they may be expected to read and write and think for themselves was the greatest example of race-baiting across the history of the world...
For what was denied the oppressed was always justified by asserting they didn't want it; what was degraded when given to the oppressed was always justified by asserting they were happy and grateful for it...
Hence, the shrug.
Your "suggested" headline is no rewrite: Zimet's headline is.
It didn't take the bait...
"The reaction to this rewrite would be a shrug."
Yet you have the need to respond in length. Curious.....
There are many forms of race-baiting, all equally disgusting. Consider this, corinthian, the article could have simply stated Americans aren't willing to do the hard work of illegal migrant farm workers. Instead, Zimet and yourself chose to make it a racial issue -THAT is race-baiting. Sometimes I wonder who the real racists are on CD. There are only a few here who have the cojones to call Zimet out on these kinds of articles. Your eloquence would be better served with objectivity and truth.
I have considered the article "could have simply stated Americans aren't willing to do the hard work of illegal migrant farm workers."
Zimet and myself do not chose to make the immigration law a racial issue...
It is a racial issue.
How else does one weed out the roots of prejudice in a society except through objectivity and truth?
Bear in mind objectivity and truth make strange companions...
one see shadows while the other sees light.
There is nothing objective in denying shadows take the shape of a thing.
There is no truth in believing a thing can be defined by someone else's point of view.
A thing is defined by its shape and comes into our reality by its form.
One must consider the present (and past) immigration issue by the shapes it has taken, and the forms it is making...
When you recognize the form by its purpose, you can learn the shapes taken within the form to begin to define the thing itself.
You find racism in any form, "all equally disgusting.." As I do.
Sometimes you wonder who the real racists are...I don't.
I witness and wait.
That doesn't actually compare well.
What is being said is that there is a shortage of workers now that the visa-less workers are out.
Zimet is "race-baiting" at one level because she equates the visa-less workers with "non-whites" (accurately) and domestic or visa-holding workers with "whites" (inaccurately, what about "blacks", for example?).
But your version is "race-baiting" on a whole 'nutha level because:
a) there is no group of workers being excluded from "intellectual work" that equates with "non-browns".
b) there is no group of workers refusing to do intellectual work that even partially equates with "browns".
You are just swapping the names of supposed "races" around to make the "bad guys" of the headline "brown" instead of "white".
This must be for mere rhetorical purpose because it makes no sense.
Zimet diminishes the potential of the discussion before it begins with her crap.
You diminish it further while it is ongoing with yours.
Call be a dreamy egalitarian, but you both annoy me. ;)