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Maybe Americans will finally understand that their cheap food and lifestyle has been dependent on essentially illegal slave labor with no rights. You can harves

Maybe Americans will finally understand that their cheap food and lifestyle has been dependent on essentially illegal slave labor with no rights. You can harvest your crops with legal migrant workers with legal temporary visas and minimum wages and labor protections but you'll have to pay a few cents more for those strawberries.

e40 1y ago
It's not even that. Most Americans would not do that job for $25/hr ($52k/yr). It's hard, backbreaking work.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> essentially illegal slave labor California’s farm workers are not slaves…
burningChrome 1y ago
Used to stay and work in ND during my Summers in college. One of the businesses I worked for was a bin sealing company. The owner was a successful farmer and during the Summer, he would have two large families get work visas and would come up and help from Mexico during the Summer harvest. It was basically three months of sun up to sun down work. At the end of the Summer, the family would celebrate and put on a huge fiesta and cook food for everybody. The farmer paid them extremely well and they would leave and go back to Mexico in August, fondly talking about coming back again the following Summer when the farmer needed them again. This was my first exposure to migrant labor. It was clear the farmer took the appropriate steps to get visas and paid the family well for their efforts. Likewise, the family was thankful for the work, good pay and with the relationship. When I moved back to Minnesota after college, I started playing hockey again and two of my teammates had done something similar and worked on poultry and cattle farms in the southern part of the state. Their stories were the complete opposite of what I had experienced. Illegals were used all over the operation. They were paid roughly $3/hour cash to work 12-16 hour shifts. If they spoke up about safety issues or the pay, a supervisor would pick them up, buy them a ticket back to the border and drop them off at the bus station. The stories they had were pretty eye opening to say the least. I felt dumb for being so naive to think farmers just did everything legally.
EA-3167 1y ago
You famously the key point of slavery (at least the sort that existed in what would become The Confederacy) is that it was for life, heritable, and you had no way out, no human rights, and if you tried to escape you were hunted down and tortured. It's possible to point out that there are problems with migrant labor without making such an inflammatory and inappropriate claim no one can really engage with you seriously.

e40 1y ago

It's not even that. Most Americans would not do that job for $25/hr ($52k/yr). It's hard, backbreaking work.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> essentially illegal slave labor California’s farm workers are not slaves…

burningChrome 1y ago

Used to stay and work in ND during my Summers in college. One of the businesses I worked for was a bin sealing company. The owner was a successful farmer and during the Summer, he would have two large families get work visas and would come up and help from Mexico during the Summer harvest. It was basically three months of sun up to sun down work. At the end of the Summer, the family would celebrate and put on a huge fiesta and cook food for everybody. The farmer paid them extremely well and they would leave and go back to Mexico in August, fondly talking about coming back again the following Summer when the farmer needed them again. This was my first exposure to migrant labor. It was clear the farmer took the appropriate steps to get visas and paid the family well for their efforts. Likewise, the family was thankful for the work, good pay and with the relationship. When I moved back to Minnesota after college, I started playing hockey again and two of my teammates had done something similar and worked on poultry and cattle farms in the southern part of the state. Their stories were the complete opposite of what I had experienced. Illegals were used all over the operation. They were paid roughly $3/hour cash to work 12-16 hour shifts. If they spoke up about safety issues or the pay, a supervisor would pick them up, buy them a ticket back to the border and drop them off at the bus station. The stories they had were pretty eye opening to say the least. I felt dumb for being so naive to think farmers just did everything legally.

EA-3167 1y ago

You famously the key point of slavery (at least the sort that existed in what would become The Confederacy) is that it was for life, heritable, and you had no way out, no human rights, and if you tried to escape you were hunted down and tortured. It's possible to point out that there are problems with migrant labor without making such an inflammatory and inappropriate claim no one can really engage with you seriously.