Become a farm worker
takeourjobs.org
takeourjobs.org
It was interesting in that most folks said yes they would, with many citing illegal immigration and how it is ruining the nation. Funny moment was when an unemployed person also said yes, then was offered a job on the spot, and answered 'but I'm still collecting unemployment.' The reporter then asked when his unemployment runs out, the good citizen refused to answer and walked away.
I've worked in minimum wage jobs before (janitor, field work) and I just don't see how the work ethics of an average American worker will suffice on a farm.
People complain when they work in air conditioned offices, how will they survive standing in 100 degrees weather in a field?
(This is on a macro level, obviously there are progressive Americans, but they aren't the norm.)
Were you and your co-workers above average or non-American? As an American worker, reasonably close to average in physical condition, I did work low-wage jobs (loading dock, janitorial, landscape) when in my late teens and very early 20s. No doubt I complained, but apparently I sufficed.
"People complain when they work in air conditioned offices, how will they survive standing in 100 degrees weather in a field?"
Complaining, I guess.
Frankly, it isn't primarily the conditions of work that would deter me from farm work--though that would, too--it's the pay.
1. Many "average American workers" are still farmers, and
2. Before the supply of labor was manipulated via deliberate government policy, almost all farmers/farm workers were "average American workers".
My father gladly obliged and got me a job in the fields, cutting grapes and placing them on 'raisin paper' (I was to receive .10/raisin paper). Toughest, hardest job of my life - I barely survived and at lunch time, decided to call it a day and spent rest of the afternoon under the shade of an almond grove across the road. All the while, the real farm workers were busting their ass in 100+ degree weather and taking a quick 20min lunch and sporadic water breaks. At that time there was no break/lunch/water mandate similar to what we have nowadays.
Nothing but respect for those folks after that.
A proposal for reducing unemployment: anyone physically capable of doing farm work is not eligible for unemployment benefits. Obviously this is a non-starter with the current political leadership...
[edit: to be clear, this only applies until there are no further vacancies in farming jobs.]
Your proposal would lead to a huge de-population of the cities. It would also mean that if by some weird series of events you became unemployed for a while, and could not find a job, you would be forced out to work the fields.
It's much easier to start working the fields than to get back to society. When you need to work for minimum wage every day, you don't have time to find that programming job you're looking for.
The second step is probably drug legalization, because our drug laws have turned Mexico into a failed state, and it's impossible for Mexico to build a decent economy with the level of crime that they have.
Most illegal immigrants get a social security number through underground document-makers. They give that number to the employer (who knows it's fake, but acts otherwise).
I've befriended many Mexican immigrants, illegal and legal, and have even gone to a house that makes these documents. (It was surprisingly low-cost. )
Now this doesn't speak to your other point, about whether a farmhand job is livable for anybody. But my main point is: it's probably a legit job that withholds taxes and everything.
There is a large set of jobs that has a high-turnover rate for everybody who works in them. Overnight cleaning crews in offices, table bussers, farmhands... This turnover rate is high for everybody, legal and illegal, who works there. My guess is that the employers assume anybody who works there will leave soon, and it's not worth thoroughly vetting whether the ss# belongs to a dead guy.
As for my opinion on all this... I'm still working it out. I'm also biased, have lots of Mexican family on this of the border, and am admittedly sentimental about it. Ideally we can first focus on making any job livable, and THEN worry about who gets to have it.
Then there's the cost to build and maintain... it's just such a ridiculous idea to me.
Or are you simply suggesting that the US military is less capable of securing a border than the Indian, Chinese, Israeli or South Korean military?
If you were simply discussing the tactic of building a fence with no other guard measures, I agree with you; a fence is not sufficient.
How much will it cost?
Are we suspending Habeus Corpus for this?
Folks in Mexico are not entitled to US habeas corpus.
Border control is not like ordinary law enforcement.
If a human being has both feet planted on US soil, the military have no right to detain them or do anything besides make polite suggestions, regardless of any suspicions about the person's nationality, probable cause or any of that.
This is one of the most fundamental constitutional issues in the US. I'd think about it a lot less lightly if you're going to claim to support things like "liberty" and "rights".
Unlike most other branches of law, the scope and administration of which are constitutionally limited, immigration is plenary law - an area in which the government has absolute power and its actions are not subject to judicial review unless otherwise stated (going back to the Supreme court's decision in the Chinese Exclusion Case in 1889, holding that where aliens are concerned, only property rights are constitutionally protected and others may be revoked as the government sees fit). So the ability of the courts to entertain petitions for Habeas Corpus in immigration cases is quite limited (and defined by statute), and other kinds of legal action (eg certification of class action suits) are off-limits altogether.
In cases where the jurisdiction of federal courts is at issue, the government often argues that the terms of a visa or similar document an agreement or bargain (but not a contract) between the US and the alien, formed outside the US for legal purposes. It is thus asserted to be a private matter between the government and the individual, outside the scope of judicial review. The Attorney General or the Director of Homeland Security has more or less absolute discretion in such cases.
This leads to some odd outcomes. For example, if someone sneaks across the border and is later arrested and tried, they have full constitutional rights. If at any point they are handed over to DHS, they have the right to a hearing in front of an immigration judge (part of the DoJ) to determine their legal status, and can appeal any decisions to either a special immigration appeals court in DC and/or the federal courts (depending on exactly what the situation is). The same is approximately true of someone who overstays or commits a crime violating the terms of their visa. On the other hand, some 30 million people visit the US every year without a visa as tourists. If a DHS officer determines such a person has violated their conditions of entry they can be arrested and deported or detained pretty much at will, with no opportunity for a hearing at all (unless they claim asylum, which of course happens all the time as a result). The government's current view is that such persons have no constitutionally protected liberty interest, putting them outside Habeas Corpus altogether.
These are not good models for a ~2000 mile border with a basically friendly neighbor. Economic theory suggests that free trade works best if it includes labor markets.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/12/bethlehem/finkel-t...
during the discussion, Jewish coworkers who had lived in Israel at the time recalled that it was far from perfect.
OK, that was only through Berlin, but the East/West Germany border was apparently pretty successful.
One thing that's way better than a fence: two fences, half a mile apart, with a minefield in between.
I'm not sure how the fact that they're attempting to provide a better life for themselves is supposed to be an excuse. Bank robbers are also attempting to provide a better life for themselves, too.
Anyone who wishes to avoid being blown up can pay attention to the "Warning: land mines" sign and not climb over the fence topped with barbed wire. Similarly, the zoo isn't violating your human rights if you ignore the "warning: bears" sign, swim through the moat, and then get eaten by the bears.
Would it not be a human rights violation if we used bears (or other animals better suited to the southwest) as a deterrent for border crossing rather than land mines?
The thought of us doing this to our own territory is ridiculous.
A well-marked, time-limited or centrally controlled minefield is generally much less dangerous, on par with a razor-wire fence. Functionally, it's a sentry system which can be turned off electronically (or by waiting past a certain date), or at worst, which is marked on maps well enough that individual mines can be removed safely by engineers.
Unexploded ordnance (i.e. bombs which you fire and which then fail to explode) are a bigger threat after a modern battle than US-style minefields.
A minefield is probably much less likely to be deployed for this than automated sentry towers, however.
We should impose a must-be-marked-at-all-times lethal health hazard on our own territory for the hell of it? We're not at war here.
I agree doing this over a 2000 mile border is a bad idea. For that, we should try to develop 0-50mi deep monitoring zone (depending on the area), with seismic sensors, UAV overflights, etc., and then whenever anyone is detected, send CBP/ICE agents to intercept. If they're innocent hikers, no harm done; if they're drug/people/etc. smugglers, detain and process them.
That's largely what we do now. The main issue is insufficient CBP agents, and no real consequences for illegally crossing the border ("catch and release"). I think punishment should be much harsher for anyone involved commercially in running the border, and somewhat harsher for people who do it repeatedly.
Ultimately the best solution is to make Mexico a less shitty place to be.
Minefield:
You || * * mines * * || Delicious cake
You || GRAR bear ||
Note also how bears tend to be large and rather obvious dangers (to most people, anyway), whereas mines tend to be buried under the ground, because their deterrent effect depends on uncertainty about their position.
At the Berlin zoo, the possibility of playing with Knut the polar bear was actually a tempting opportunity inside the bear pit (note: the lady who got mauled wasn't even the first person to jump in).
True, though I couldn't suppress a giggle at the the thought of some radio ranter getting upset if it included a Spanish translation, since the fence would be on US territory.
What you're ignoring is the fundamental difference between a natural danger which we mitigate to increase the scope of people's freedom (observe dangerous animals from behind a fence, skydive after checking the parachute, hike with the aid of a map and compass) and an artificial danger which we impose to obstruct or limit people's freedom.
Playing with a bear is only tempting to small children or someone who's functionally retarded. A small percentage of people are suicidal or stupid enough to kill or injure themselves by ignoring or circumventing protective measures but we don't consider their rights violated as a result; the ratio of zoo deaths:zoo visitors (or whatever) is so low that the social benefit far exceeds the cost. If people in Mexico felt no particular motivation to enter the US other than for tourism, then we would expect to see at most 21 deaths annually on the Mexican side (~7m border area population/~0.003% suicide rate). Interestingly, we could expect up to 75 on the US side (also ~7m border population/0.012% s.r.).
I'm not sure what we do with the bodies in this hypothetical minefield; perhaps leave them there as a warning, because we don't want expensive border patrol agents to die removing them for burial. sure, they could be issued with maps or the mines could be turned off remotely, but as hackers we can all see the potential security pitfalls in such safety procedures. Given past administrative lapses with things as important as nuclear weapons, it's clear that we can't trust anyone - especially not government employees - to maintain the security of our minefield, so it would be better to shred all our maps as soon as we've deployed the things. I gather this is often what happens in a military context. It's true that this might result in avoidable future inconvenience if we ever develop a more comfortable relationship with Mexico, since removing the landmines would be dangerous and expensive. It would probably be better to turn the fence into a tourist attraction - people could buy a ticket to climb into guard towers and machine-gun cardboard targets of border jumpers, say. This would eventually set off (most of) the landmines, and tap into the unexploited commercial potential of historical killing zones.
Returning to the possibility of people crossing minefields, economic opportunity is enormously tempting to people notwithstanding the possibility of danger: it is a fundamental driver of history. We have gone to the moon and the ocean depths, fought wars, and died in vast numbers in order to gain economic advantages. About 3% of the world population is estimated have migrated from one country to another for economic reasons, and of course people often migrate within countries - either freely, as in the US, or illegally, as in places like China where choice of residence is considered a privilege rather than a right.
The interior German border mentioned above was regarded as one of the most secure ever; it actually had minefields, as well as guard towers with machine guns and so forth, and only consumed about 0.4% of the DDR's annual GDP by the time the country collapsed. Despite this outstanding achievement, people still insisted on sneaking across it, to the tune of about 120 a year. The East German government had a plan to reduce this by adding more security, but postponed it for lack of ready cash. It's unknown how many people died; most estimates are in the low thousands. Not all went across the border on foot; some traveled in hot air balloons, some swam or used inflatables to travel by sea, and some were smuggled inside commercial vehicles.
Of course, a key difference is that the DDR was more concerned with keeping people inside while you are more concerned with keeping them out. Whether this will have much influence at the individual level is hard to say. Notions about all men having inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have been responsible for large-scale subversive behavior in the past, and if anything, the popularity of such ideas seems to have spread since then. Clearly, these concepts of fundamental equality and inalienable rights need to be curtailed and decisions about their availability placed in the hands of qualified administrators, who can then issue them in projectile form.
I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment. I'm not even sure how to approach such a misguided argument. So I haven't yet, because I didn't want to lower the level of conversation on hn.
I simply meant to encourage you to avoid snarky one-liners like one you've posted, and instead raise the level of discussion here.
Some things that I disagree with are great for intelligent discussion. Other things I'd discourage regardless of the intelligence or sincerity involved.
An adult should know what is wrong with setting landmines. See: http://www.globalissues.org/article/79/landmines We should say this firmly.
Of course. Setting deadly booby traps is a privilege the goverment reserves for itself. And fair enough too -- the setting of deadly booby traps should be very well regulated to ensure that there's absolutely no way that anyone can wander into the trap without knowing (a) it's there and (b) it's very very deadly.
The purpose of this sort of trap is not to kill or maim anybody, it's to ensure that it never kills or maims anybody by being so obviously deadly that nobody would be stupid enough to ever attempt to cross it. Let's face it, life in Mexico isn't so bad that it's worth facing a 99.9% chance of death in order to escape it.
They have an entire museum dedicated to show the different ways people would get over, under and frequently through the wall. It will absolutely blow your mind.
If there were ten thousand illegal immigrants in the US instead of ten million, it wouldn't have the deleterious effects on agricultural wages (and consequently job prospects for low-skilled US workers) that it has.
They took your job? Seriously? :-)
For the future, don't worry ... agriculture is exactly the kind of work that will be done by robots.
If it is not already, that's just because your unions are out of control, which made countries like Japan take the leadership in the robotics industry.
The question is: why does it make economic sense to refuse a cheap labor force? If suddenly some aliens came to the US and said "we have figured out a way to get free food. have all the food you need here", would there be complaints about the number of farmers that are losing their jobs or unfairly competing against free products?
Theoretically, it seems to me that the positive aggregate effect on consumers is larger than the negative (and very regrettable) effect on the farmers. For this reason, wouldn't it make more sense to have the consumers compensate the farmers by helping them pay for their education, etc, so that they can find new jobs? This seems to me as the efficient way to think about immigration.
Where I come from (Mexico, of all places), I hear people sometimes complain about how computers shouldn't be allowed on certain government offices, since they will leave thousands of people without a job. I'd say that, if they can find a different job, then we can all be better off by finding cheaper production factors.
More conventionally, it is also used in support of free trade, even when a foreign country subsidizes their exports: it is functionally identical to productivity improvements in the importing nation.
Cheap to whom? Cheap to the employer does not mean cheap to society.
Note that we have "cheap" people, they're just in the wrong places.
And yes, I've done farm labor for a couple of seasons. My father worked seasons in different parts of the country.
What we have is a very violent war between rival gangs. We have some of those gangs challenging the state. It is a very serious situation, but it is not that of a failed state. We are still working, traveling and going to school. If you run a red light, you will get fined. All of the government structures are working. Do not minimize the problem, it is very serious, and we are suffering. Yet don't make it seem as it everything is in chaos.
I just googled this index of failed states. I have not knowledge of the political bias of the publisher. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/21/2010_failed...
I'm finding it hard to distinguish Mexico 2010 from Iraq 2003. Gun battles in broad daylight, murdered political candidates, rampant corruption, beheadings...
So these beheadings never happened?
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1839576,00.htm...
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=359559&Categor...
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-v...
Mass Grave in Silver Mine
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06...
Corruption?
"Mexican state security minister can't trust her own police"
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-b...
Mexican Governor Candidate Murdered
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/world/americas/29mexico.ht...
The reason why farm workers have tiny wages and poor working conditions is that there is a massive global surplus of people who are looking for farm work.
And if you're unemployed it doesn't matter what you are unemployed at. You can declare yourself to be an unemployed auto worker, or an unemployed farm worker, or an unemployed ballerina for that matter. There is an infinite number of jobs that I'm not employed at.
You may ask, of course, why an unemployed software engineer collects more benefits than an unemployed day laborer. The answer is: Because unemployment insurance taxes are proportional to income. The engineer pays more taxes when employed, in order to collect higher benefits when unemployed.
Only in theory. The reality makes far less sense.
Here in California, it's not the employee who pays the tax, but the employer, and it's only proportional to income up to $7000 per year (yes, year, not month) per employee. The payout is only proportional to earnings up to around $50k annually.
What's the difference?
To the employer it's just added to the salary, they don't think about it any differently.
You could give it to the employee first, and then take it from them if you like. It's identical.
Not under current income tax treatment, it isn't. For mandated insurance, if the employer pays, then the benefits are taxable[1]. If the employee pays, the benefits are not taxable [2].
More importantly, since unemployment insurance premiums can be variable, depending on an employer's layoff history, the rate isn't influenced by the employee.
Arguably most importantly, an employee-side tax would be visible to everyone on every pay stub. The bizarre inconsistencies wouldn't be hidden away.
[1] Such as is the case with unemployment benefits. [2] Such as is the case with short-term disability.
But I'll acknowledge the part about "the rate isn't influenced by the employee".
Taking a job, any job, should always increase a person's net income. Similarly, working more as opposed to working less should consistently do the same. Working several jobs should do the same as opposed to doing only one job or doing no job. This is not always the case, depending on taxation, subsidies, and other eases.
Basic income would be a good solution for such traps.
You would always make at least X money where X is large enough that it allows you to live but small enough to make most people not want to live like that. So, there would be no unemployment checks, just basic income. If you took the job as a farm worker, you would always get your earnings on top of the basic income.
(There's also a class of visas for foreigners who want to do some fruit picking as part of a working holiday. These mostly wind up getting taken by backpacking students from Europe.)
People who think the US agricultural sector couldn't survive without subsidies also need to look at the Australian example.
Some agriculture scales, some does not. Grain and meat are reasonably scalable. Everything else is not. You could get rid of the illegal agricultural labor in the USA, you just would no longer have any fruits or vegetables. Australians don't eat such things, so they have no use for illegal labor. :)
And it has more people who could fill those jobs! Funny how that works, isn't it?
You could get rid of the illegal agricultural labor in the USA, you just would no longer have any fruits or vegetables.
I wonder how much fruit prices would go up if we were to pay the pickers a fair first-world wage. Let's do some maths!
If I buy an apple it costs about $1.60 per lb. That includes the picker's labour, plus the costs of land, pest control, irrigation, transport, the farmer's profit, the retailer's profit, the middleman's profit, and the little sticker that tells me what kind of apple it is.
According to this Canadian site: http://www.bctree.com/orchards/picking.php it looks like an inexperienced picker up there makes about eight bucks an hour, getting paid to fill 800-lb bins at $15.60 per bin. Quick sanity check: that's three pounds of apples per minute, an apple weighs about a third of a pound, so that's nine apples every minute on average. Sounds like a plausible sort of rate.
So if pickers are only getting $15.60 for an 800 lb bin, that means that the cost of picking is a mere two cents per pound, for apples that retail for $1.60/lb! So if we were suddenly forced to pay apple pickers $32 an hour instead of $8 an hour it would raise the cost of our apples from $1.60 to $1.66. Or, like, two cents per apple.
Hardly sounds like an unreasonable price increase to me.
So in conclusion, I think anyone who is claiming that decent wages for farm workers would make agriculture impossible is off their fricking rocker.
Easy for you to say when you're not the one literally betting the farm on a ridiculously tiny margin!
On the second day, none of them returned.
It's hard, hard work, and the people who do it get undercompensated because of a lot of bad regulations and incentive programs gone awry.
It seems to me that you're implying that appropriate compensation is proportional to the difficulty of the work.
I assert, instead, that appropriate compensation is proportional to the productivity of the work.
I have never accepted the notion that hard, physical, agricultural labor is a job "someone" must do, any more than cleaning toilets is [1]. I allege that we lack the requisite farm automation to eliminate the hard jobs because there are people willing to do the work so cheaply.
[1] Search for "urinal elephant"
Productivity puts a ceiling on the compensation (If the farm owner is only getting $10/hr of productivity out of the laborers, there's no way they're going to pay more than $10/hr in the long run because they lose money if they do.), but supply and demand in the labor market decides the rate. It'll generally below the value that employers get from the workers (meaning that the employer profits from the arrangement).
Now it's a little more complicated than that because of imperfect information (the farm owners don't know how many people are going to come around looking for work or how little pay they'll take) and imperfect competition (Even if a worker hears that he could make twice as much 500 miles away, he might have to take the job where he is if he has no good way to get to that area with better jobs.), but that's how it works in theory.
FWIW, I'd take a job if 1) I needed one and 2) I couldn't find anything more in my line of business within a period of time. I'm not opposed to working at a farm; I just think my skills are better used elsewhere.
I commute through a ghetto full of largely-unemployed folks who apparently have nothing to do all day. I'm sure a few years out in the sticks picking strawberries would do them a lot of good.
This is brutally hard work for anyone that has never tried it. It is probably more physically demanding than anything most Americans have ever done. I know it would be one of the last things I'd want to do to support myself.
It's a nation of immigrants. Immigration has provided a hard-working, motivated and passionate population out to create a better life and with entrepreneurialism deeply rooted in its DNA. Immigration drives economic activity. Immigrants with the guts to risk guns and bureaucrats are the same as the ones who start businesses and change countries. The Mayflower was a boatload of immigrants.
Individual freedom, a laissez-faire economy, free markets and free trade (comparatively at least) when combined with immigration have created a great nation. It's created wealth, prosperity and happiness not just in the US, but all the nations it has influenced in the last 200 years.
There was a time when the USA proclaimed to the world: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
There was a time when an American President called out "Tear Down this Wall" to another nation that erected barriers between peoples.
The standard library might need some patching, but for the entire world's sake let's hope those two modules don't get deprecated any time soon.
First off, the farm I worked on was fully organic, so there was a ton of work to do, and to do the work we had 6 residents, in addition to a series of day laborers to do it. I was a resident, but the latter is what I think the campaign is endorsing. We had ~12 acres of produce in fields/greenhouses and a commercial kitchen. We ran a CSA program, sold to small coops and independent grocers, and set up at farmers market - total gross was around 600,000, growing at around 50%/yr (estimated max production was about 1.2 million gross)
Not all that information was necessary, but it's kind of interesting.
The obvious thing keeping people from working on a farm is the work. There's not a lot of beating around the bush there - it's hard work, you're out in the sun, it gets up above 100 REALLY easily in the greenhouses and occasionally in the fields, there's a lot of bending over and kneeling down - which I think we are becoming worse at as a species, and it can get really dirty.
Complaining about any of those obvious things, will get you branded a whiner - and farmers HATE whiners. One whiner can destroy an entire day's labor. I'm not even close to kidding - a negative work attitude is a problem in most places, but in a situation like this, it's absolutely toxic. Whiners on our farm rarely came back after lunch either by their own volition or strong suggestion (it usually didn't take much.)
Which brings me to my next point: it's surprisingly easy, at least in my experience, to get fired from farm labor. (no, I didn't get fired) Farms need labor, but they generally run on really tight margins and can't afford to lose money on unproductive labor.
Unfortunately, another thing that consistently leads to unproductive labor is something I tend to do a lot of - talking. I arrived in rural Wisconsin eager to find out people's life stories (which I assumed were going to be more interesting than many proved to be) only to find out that, for the 10+ hours a day we were working, I was pretty much barred from talking. Due to my residency, I was allowed a little more leeway with this than the day laborers, but sometimes I would be having a great conversation with one of them without thinking about it and they would get fired at lunch. (I felt really bad about that)
But the work on a farm can be incredibly rewarding - it's work that you can look back on and think you really accomplished something. Not to mention a strong sense of connection to the food chain which I think is sorely lacking (to our serious detriment) in modern society. I would recommend it, but there's one more thing that could be an issue for the average starting in this line of work: safety.
Many of us grew up in absurdly safe environments with anything of any particular risk or danger generally abstracted out of our realm of awareness or relegated to a distant location. Mike Rowe had a fantastic bit about this in his presentation to the Future Farmers of America. His speech, on the whole, was similar to his TED talk in some ways, but he drove it home with a slightly different point. He (to uproarious applause) suggested "Maybe OSHA doesn't have it right; maybe PETA doesn't have it right..." He went on to suggest something that I kept in my mind every single time I started up a roto tiller or rode around on a fully extended forklift fastening parts of a greenhouse:
"The second you think somebody else cares more about your safety than you do... you're in trouble"
The best part is, you can substitute in other things for safety too. (success, future, children, equipment, code, etc) But this is what we have a hard time with in our culture. People don't want you to get hurt, but on a farm, there's not usually a guy whose job it is to go around making sure everyone is safe - it's everyone's own job. You may not think it, but this can be very frightening. And it extends into quality of work - if you're only doing a good job so someone will come by and say "man, you did such a great job weeding that onion patch for 9 hours" you're going to be even more disappointed than you were when you found out you were going to have to weed the onion patch for nine hours.
I guess I'll call it here, as this is getting out of hand, but don't be so quick to call the unemployed wimps - it's insanely difficult work (gets better after a week or so) and it's a very daunting lifestyle that most comfortably employed people would similarly poopoo.
Also, there's a surprising amount of paperwork involved in farming (especially organic certification) and I've been brainstorming a way to use technology to alleviate some of that burden - if you're interested, email's in my profile.
I don’t think this is true, in general. Hard manual labor, combined with poor diets and poor healthcare left our ancestors with wrecked bodies by age 45–50.
Well, you might be right that overweight people can’t bend over or kneel down as easily as fit people. But the main thing stopping fit people from kneeling down a lot is that it's unpleasant (and we have neat inventions like ubiquitous chairs), not that we're less inherently capable than in the past.
I always thought this could use a bit of high tech. It should probably involve a web site to request workers and an SMS solution for people out and about. It should also have some sort of vetting and recommendation system to replace the quick size up that happens in person.
At the very least, why not have a day laborer office where people can sit in a chair instead of on a street corner. It could also double as a financial or immigration advisory role. That would be a great non-profit to make.
'Internet hackers organize illegals to take american jobs.'
Here in Phoenix, they do. Google Sherriff Joe Arpaio if you're not familiar with him.
However, keep in mind that day-workers and agricultural laborers aren't necessarily illegal. Where I was working, most of the people working in agricultural labor were migrant workers, but were also actually legal U.S. citizens from border towns in Texas.
Unfortunately (depending on how you look at it!) my opinion doesn't count, because I have no reason to take up farm work- I am gainfully employed elsewhere for better wages, in school, and pretty far from most farms. Even once I graduate, and have to find a new job, economically it's wiser to remain unemployed and search for a job.
I am unhappy about that, and it's tempting to say "screw what's smart" and work in the fields for a while after I graduate. Especially to show that we Americans are not all wusses. I just have to figure out how much that'd screw me over...
If either side is honest in their position, this would be the best solution.
Flagged.