Stoop Labor Challenges The Smug Crowd

go ahead punk, take my pay

Farm workers: Take our jobs, please!

"Facing growing anti-immigrant rhetoric, the United Farm Workers union is challenging Americans to take their labor-intensive, low-paying farm jobs.
As communities nationwide grapple with tenacious unemployment, migrant workers are often accused of stealing jobs from Americans. The union believes this accusation is without basis, and intends to demonstrate this with a newly-launched campaign called "Take Our Jobs."

"Farm workers do the work that most Americans are not willing to do," said union president Arturo Rodriguez in the announcement of the campaign.
At least half a million applicants are needed to replace the immigrant workforce, so the union has posted an online application for Americans who want to work on a farm.
Through its Web site, at www.takeourjobs.org, the union promises to connect applicants with farm jobs in their area.
Since June 24, at least 4,000 people have responded to the application, said Rodriguez. Some are serious responses and others are hate mail. "Only a few dozen have really followed through with the process," he said.
Most applicants quickly lose interest once the reality sinks in that these are back-breaking jobs in triple-digit temperatures that pay minimum wage, usually without benefits, according to the union. Some small farms are not required to pay minimum wage and in 15 states farms aren't required to offer workers' compensation.
Despite the dismal job market in the U.S., where the unemployment rate is 9.5% and 14.6 million people are out of work, there have been few takers."

Of course that figure is wildly wrong, relying on numbers juggling and outright lies.

Even though we moved down here to the SW I avoid the immigrant issue like the plague. It's lose - lose politics. Any stance you take will get you in hot water and since I'm a relative newcomer I also don't feel I have any say in the matter of a red hot button borders issue.

I would say this though. I spent decades in the Xmas tree business up in Oregon. As a contractor I took care of millions of trees grown by everybody from hobby farmers to huge growers. I was involved in every aspect of the business from getting the seedlings from greenhousesto shipping the harvested trees out of state. I had crews and worked on crews. Some work was for flat wage and some was piecework but it was pretty much all backbreaking farm labor.

A lot of Mexicans worked the trees. They came and went a lot, but to be quite honest you could generalize and divide the guys (they were all men who did this work) into two categories. Some were from the border areas, spoke english mostly, and didn't really apply themselves to the point you never knew who'd show up day to day.

But the other group was remarkable. They were mostly from deeper in Mexico and from more rural areas. The majority didn't know much english, and they were smaller in stature with Indian roots.

These men, and some were in their fifties, were positively astounding. We never asked because frankly immigration never bothered us, but most of them were probably illegals and they just wanted to avoid the bewildering complexity of bureaucratic paperwork. They just wanted to make some money and they worked really hard, day in and day out. They stayed by themselves, usually all showing up in one car, and all lived together to cut down on expenses. They sent virtually every penny they made back to their families down south. I had nothing but admiration for these guys running the border gauntlet into a strange culture where you couldn't understand anybody, under constant threat of being arrested and deported, to find backbreaking, low paying stoop labor so they could support their families back home. And you have to remember that in Oregon they were several thousand miles from the Mexican border.

Let me just relate one job that was a constant in the holiday tree business. Harvest in late November and warly December was an insanely frantic season. Workers who showed up reliably were treasured because work was immensely tough day after day. You have fields of hundreds of thousands of trees. Usually it was selectively cut taking the tagged, best product. It rains a lot up there and the tree fields have no ground cover because you have to spray to keep the blackberries from invading and taking over. Most of the fields are in the hills. All this means is that the cut trees are on their side in steep, muddy terrain, usually far from a road, and the only way to collect them is to yard them out and you carry them because dragging them through mud is forbidden. I don't know how many times I saw these little guys trudge back and forth, up and down, all day long day after day, carrying trees on their backs bigger than they were, through the mud and the driving rain.

So like I said I stay away from the immigrant issues. I realize the flood of illegals, and how they trash the countryside. I also know how dangerous the drug gangs are making the border. But I also realize how successive admunistrations have turned a blind eye to the problem to placate their corporate masters and their endless need for cheap labor. You have to be pretty goddamned brave to risk death walking through miles of burnt countryside for a handful of dollars at some crappy job, and rising racist attitudes don't make it any easier. But I understand the crushing burden the waves of illegals are placing on infrastructures and the resentment it's causing. However just like the article above states - smug, entitled americans are not about to do the grunt work that's being done by Mexicans. Any way you look at the border issue there are plenty of good arguments from the other side. You can't win.