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Mexicans Afraid of Being in America Create Farm Worker Shortage – Crops Suffer
- ikeyany 9y agoWould there be a shortage if these jobs paid $20/hr with more comfortable work conditions?
- rjbwork 9y agoWould there be a shortage if this happened 30 years ago and the work had been even further automated by now?
- craftyguy 9y agoProbably not, but that's not the case now is it..
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- enervate 9y agoProbably. NPR ran a story on the radio a few years ago about immigrant workers in geogia and how it was difficult to find people for this. Heres a link: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/05/27/136718112/georgia-farmers-say-immigration-law-keeps-workers-away https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/05/27/136718112...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoHmm, well let's analyze it. So from your link in 2011: In Kathy Lohr's report, she spoke to R.T. Stanley Jr., a farmer who says he can't hire locals to do the job: Stanley says experienced workers can earn as much as $200 a day. He says he's tried to hire locals to do the job — working in the fields eight hours or more clipping, bending and lifting in the oppressive Georgia heat. "They just don't want to do this hard work. And they'll tell you right quick," he says. "I have 'em to come out and work for two hours and they said, 'I'm not doing this. It's too hard.' " For Stanley, finding workers is already tough enough and he says the new restrictions are likely to make it worse. "I got my livelihood on the line," he says. "If I don't harvest these onions, I'll lose my farm." So first of all let's be honest about that $200 a day figure, they're being paid by how much they harvest. $200 a day is basically never going to happen, it's a dream figure, no onion farmer in america is paying $200/day to pick onions. In fact at Stanley's Farm you're going to be making a whole lot less than that, from 2013: The plaintiffs say Stanley Farms paid them less than minimum wage over the last three years and illegally cut their wages. The plaintiffs said they also worked alongside pickers who had work permits and who were paid more money than what American workers received “We see this repeatedly,” said plaintiff’s attorney Dawson Morton. “Farms complain that no local workers are available. But when they do hire local workers, they don’t pay them fairly and don’t offer them the same pay as their foreign workers. It’s illegal and discourages American workers from continuing in agriculture.” The suit claims the workers were paid 40 cents for each 5-gallon bucket of onions picked, while foreign workers received more than $9 a hour. Workers also had to purchase work tools from the company, the suit says. http://www.ajc.com/business/vidalia-onion-workers-sue-georgia-farm/AH44Vv8LBXpO5hQ230x6nI/ http://www.ajc.com/business/vidalia-onion-workers-sue-georgi... $0.40 for a 5-gallon bucket, so to get to that $200 figure you only need to pick... 2,500 lbs of onions! Every day! Easy! And then later in 2014: A judge on Monday approved the agreement. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution states that Stanley Farms agreed to pay $92,500, with $82,500 going to back wages and damages and $10,000 going to attorney’s fees and costs. The company also agreed to follow specific hiring and employment practices that were outlined in the agreement. “We’re pleased with the resolution reached, and we’re pleased that the farm is agreeing to pay U.S. and foreign workers the same amount, which we don’t believe they were doing,” said Dawson Morton, a lawyer for the workers. “That should reduce the exclusion of U.S. workers from Vidalia onion work and we hope assure equal treatment and equal pay.” The American workers and their former co-workers filed a lawsuit last year that claimed that American farmworkers were paid less than the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour while foreign guest workers were paid between $9.11 and $9.38 an hour. https://www.andnowuknow.com/shop-talk/stanley-farms-pay-over-90000-dollar-settlement-farmworkers/christofer-oberst/41981 https://www.andnowuknow.com/shop-talk/stanley-farms-pay-over... That same articles states that they now follow certain guidelines like making sure there are enough seats for workers on transportation, that the transportation is properly inspected and insured, that workers can't go into fields until at least 24 hours after application of certain chemicals and that they'll provide tools. So what kind of farm was Stanley actually running when that article was written? Well it's obvious he was paying less than minimum wage to americans and more to illegal immigrants so that he could have an all immigrant workforce so that he could skimp on labor protections. And after doing this for years and years he settles for less than $100,000. This is the problem with american farming. If Mr. Staley had ever actually tried paying americans $200/day and had provided a safe work environment I'm sure workers would have been lined up. It's a pervasive lie that americans won't do farm work for good wages.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 9y agoProbably, in the sense that there would be fewer operating farms.
- lalos 9y agoThere may not be a shortage but people would buy less of that produce, prices would go up to cover the higher wages. Unless you subsidize aggressively. Tricky market since people need food to survive.
- ikeyany 9y agoIs it? How do other countries get produce without cheap illegal immigrant labor?
- lalos 9y agoCheaper CoL, that's why importing cheap goods from cheap countries and focusing on technology is the bet one should place. That way you have time and resources to spent developing the technology for automating everything. It's like a business, the butcher is not out in the field with the cows he just butchers, separation of concerns.
- trs80 9y agoAutomation can fix this moving forward but ultimately the lost crops are a result of a bad business decision by the farmers to rely on an an undocumented underpaid labor force without thinking there would ever be any repercussions.
- r00fus 9y agoHow are you as a farmer going to be competitive when your fellow farmers are getting much cheaper labor? This is an area for regulation (no one raised an eye when they got cheap labor) and economic incentives (NAFTA f'd over Central American economies, commodities market manipulation causes prices to skyrocket in developing markets - both causing mass migrations).
- hprotagonist 9y agohttp://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us/farmers-strain-to-hire-american-workers-in-place-of-migrant-labor.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us/farmers-strain-to-hire-... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/despite-economy-americans-dont-want-farm-work/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/despite-economy-americans-dont-... Most americans are unwilling to work on farms, even at the heights of the recent recession.
- rgbrenner 9y agoBecause they pay near minimum wage for dangerous, temporary, hard work. No sane person with any other options would take that trade
- stickfigure 9y ago...which should make you think long and hard about what people are being forced back into now that this avenue of work is cut off.
- mieseratte 9y agoSo let's hurt our own citizens for the benefit of other nationalities who are willing to demonstrate their disrespect for our laws, for the benefit of greedy business owners?
- bob_theslob646 9y agoReminds of what happened in Alabama. Vice did a documentary on it. It was definitely eye opening. The only thing that scares me for this type of labor is the sheer amount of automation being done in farming.( They have these crazy lettuce cutting machines as well as sorting machines.) >Alabama’s Failed Anti-Immigration Law The state's experiment in "self-deportation" reveals what might happen if the US sent 11 million undocumented workers home. [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8gk7nx/what-alabamas-failed-anti-immigration-law-can-teach-us-about-donald-trump https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8gk7nx/what-alabamas-fail...]
- trs80 9y agoThe southern agricultural economy suffered greatly after slavery ended. I think America will adjust to this some how, without starving.
- jayd16 9y agoWhat kind of argument is this? Any policy that doesn't completely destroy America is good policy?
- trs80 9y agoThey're not slaves proper so it wouldn't be nearly as destructive. More like a healthy correction in the market.
- logfromblammo 9y agoLettuce be honest. The end of slavery in the South was immediately replaced by slavery-like exploitation of second-class workers without enforceable rights. When a massive nationwide movement for equal civil rights finally made that non-viable a hundred years later, the farmers just did a global search-and-replace in their business plans from "black" to "foreign" and continued as usual. Having zero abusable second-class workers would be more destructive. 150 years of dragging ass on modernizing their farming operations will come back and bite them all at once. But they probably won't learn their lesson and just use robots. They will beg and squeal for prisoner labor first. And then the cops will be ginning up bogus traffic offenses right before harvest time, so the people who can't pay the fines will have to pick vegetables instead.
- DanBC 9y agoWe're seeing the same thing in England, with seasonal farm workers not coming over.
- dazc 9y agoI think the problem in the UK is that this kind of work has become monopolised by gang-masters who have an interest in recruiting workers from the poorest areas of the EU. I'm not so sure there is any great shortage of willing workers at the moment but it may be a problem in the future once free-movement comes to an end? As has been mentioned about the US above, there is this myth, propagated by the media, that natives aren't interested, are too lazy and so on... Truth is that farmers have gotten away with exploiting cheap labour and they don't want it to end. You try getting a job today, as a UK native, picking vegetables and you'll likely face a brick wall. We didn't have any problems before when people could do casual seasonal work for a fair days pay. When the source of cheap labour dries up we'll likely go back to not having problems. Just a few fat farmers will be slightly miffed about it.
- meheleventyone 9y agoThere’s numerous articles about the food being left to rot, for example from a couple of days ago: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-crops-eu-farm-workers-brexit-referendum-rot-manpower-recruitment-numbers-a8194701.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-crops-eu-f... So it seems very much to be an issue pre-Brexit.
- dazc 9y agoWell, it cites one 'farmer' and a poll from the National Farmer's Union.
- coolso 9y agoWhy are they afraid of being in America?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- millermp12 9y agoProstitutes afraid of being in America create shortage of females who put out - horny fat men of low SMV suffer.
- hugh4life 9y agoI personally do not care. Selecting migrants based of their value for the agriculture industry is about the worst thing a nation can do itself. Let's hope that constraints breed creativity and industry invests in automation. I think the government should do more to support farmer automation... especially when it's been proven to be effective like for dairy. (I come from a family of farmers... going up my family tree there are been nothing but farmers)
- rgbrenner 9y agoGood. These are some of the worst paying jobs in the country.. because they have used migrants to solve their labor problem, removing the need for them to compete for workers. They need to raise their wages, pay what it really costs for labor. And as a bonus, the increased costs will provide an incentive for future automation.
- tptacek 9y agoThis an interesting A -> B -> C transition. It was coherent, until the last sentence.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoIncreased labor costs provide an incentive to reduce labor costs. When labor costs are higher than automation costs, there's an incentive to automate. If you consider the existence of human labor undesirable then automation is always good. If you consider jobs the end-goal of human existence then automation is always bad. In all likelihood you're somewhere in between those, and whether automation is good or not depends on external factors. GP seems to lean more towards the "human labor is bad" side.
- rgbrenner 9y agoGP seems to lean more towards the "human labor is bad" side. Actually no. But farmers have created a special problem for themselves: In a normal industry, wages increase and over a period of time, technology and techniques are developed to reduce the use of labor.. increasing labor productivity and controlling costs. This increased productivity is what allows firms to pay high wages. In the farm industry, this hasn't occurred. Instead of increasing wages (and stimulating demand for new technology in their industry), they would simply hire more migrants to do the work instead. And so farmworkers are now almost entirely migrants. They've been doing this so long, that they've lost decades of small increases in labor productivity that would have normally occurred (and has occurred in virtually every other industry.. which they are competing with for labor). So while part of the answer is to increase wages to attract US workers... increasing labor productivity is also required. I think farms would find it quite difficult to compete in the US labor market, while depending on practices that have not been modernized. We know farm productivity can be increased.. where there's a real cost (the farmers themselves), plenty of tools have been created. But in the specific area of picking, migrants have been used instead.
- coliveira 9y agoCrops are not capable of suffering. Another publication that spreads the idea that inanimate things can suffer, while the true suffering is experienced by workers.
- tsomctl 9y agoSuffer, intransitive verb, definition 2: to sustain loss or damage. (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suffer https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suffer)
- coliveira 9y agoThis only shows that the practice is widespread, not that I should go around saying that things suffer, when in fact they cannot do that. This is especially insensitive in a context when there is real human suffering.
- dmritard96 9y agoI pedantic point, but I think crops probably qualify as animate.
- rejschaap 9y agoIt is just the hn title that is terrible. The article has the following title "California Crops Rot as Immigration Crackdown Creates Farmworker Shortage". Somehow the hn title manages to put the blame with the Mexicans.
- quantumofmalice 9y agoIf only there were some sort of market mechanism that would incentivize legal US citizens to perform these jobs, in order to spare these suffering crops.
- patrickg_zill 9y agoHonest question: how do German (for example) farms manage to work, since there are virtually no Mexicans in Germany?
- philk10 9y agoEastern Europeans
- OliverJones 9y agoEU. People from Turkey, Greece, and other less-industrialized parts of the EU work as migrant harvest workers (and in other laborer jobs) in the more industrialzied parts. The northern EU countries have organized guest-worker programs.
- patrickg_zill 9y agoIs it the situation that the workers show up, do their work, are treated somewhat fairly, and then depart for their home country again?
- kps 9y agoSubsidies and trade barriers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy
- stefs 9y agothey too use cheap labor from the east (poland, ukraine, czechia, slovakia, ...)
- OliverJones 9y agoFor what it's worth, migrant harvest workers have always followed the harvest, in North American moving from north to south in the fall as the frost line moves southward with the season. "Migrant worker" often implies "foreign national", but not necessarily. It's an inconvenient truth of the scaled up agriculture that produces food for us city folk. Many European countries have formal guest-worker programs. A big consequence of the EU is easier guest-worker access and better working conditions. The reason the USA immigration hassle never gets solved by congresscritters is this: it's convenient economically to have an underclass of workers with few rights and no recourse for mistreatment. Congresscritters have to say they're TRYING to solve the problem or they appear to be amoral. But they can't actually solve the problem without antagonizing the 1% who pay their re-election campaign bills. So the issue is a perennial theme of chin music. Both major US parties do this.
- philipodonnell 9y agoAs painful as the current political environment is, some of these informal patronage relationships may be upset by Trump's inability to be cool about anything except his own industry (real estate). He'll happily throw the farming industry under the bus if it means a tax break for real estate investors and a few political points for being tough on "illegals".
- thriftwy 9y agoReal estate is usually number two employer for illegals, if not number one. Something doesn't add up.
- louprado 9y agoIn two recent conversations I was told that the coyete[1] rates are $10,000 from El Salvador and $8,000 from Mexico. The Mexican fellow told me he wouldn't return to the US not only because the rates were high too but the smugglers now seem more menacing. The fellow used to perform home construction in the Bay Area. Incidentally, a recent report in the area cited labor shortages as the #2 road block in the SF builder industry. The US administration seems to believe that our economic growth was cash constrained, hence the massive corporate tax cut. But for many industries growth is labor constrained. [1] Colloquial phrase for Central American human traffickers.
- philipodonnell 9y ago> The US administration seems to believe that our economic growth was cash constrained I'm not going to point fingers at anyone, but corporate cash levels were already hitting records before the tax cuts passed and money was already available at record-low interest rates. Anyone who thought our companies were cash-constrained was intentionally not paying attention.
- sremani 9y agoAmerica produces twice than it consumes. Will the farms suffer perhaps, will Americans starve? no. Should the farms adapt, Yes! Hey I am not going to feel bad, that McDonald does not have a Dollar Menu any more. May be the market forces are the right medicine for the "obesity" problems America is facing.
- ccozan 9y agoAlmost the same thing happened in UK after Brexit. The atmosphere was so poisonous against them, that the EE workers did not return in the normal amount, so that all farms that rely on them for cheap picking are suffering.
- coldtea 9y agoShortage? That's not how demand and supply works. Since the job doesn't require any specialization (which could take years to master and thus might cause a shortage), it should be easy to fill such positions from the large unemployment pool if employers started paying more to compensate for the missing Mexicans. But it's only a shortage of people willing to do the work at shitty prices.
- chrisbennet 9y agoIf you’re wondering what would happen if farm worker wages were raised, this article in The NY Times from 2011 might shed some light: ”For a typical household, a 40 percent increase in farm labor costs translates into a 3.6 percent increase in retail prices. If farm wages rose 40 percent, and this wage increase were passed on to consumers, average spending on fresh fruits and vegetables would rise about $15 a year, the cost of two movie tickets. However, for a typical seasonal farm worker, a 40 percent wage increase could raise earnings from $10,000 for 1,000 hours of work to $14,000 — lifting the wage above the federal poverty line.” https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/08/17/could-farms-survive-without-illegal-labor/the-costs-and-benefits-of-a-raise-for-field-workers https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/08/17/could-farms...