Farmers in deep-red Pennsylvania struggle to find workers | Hacker News Reader

Farmers in deep-red Pennsylvania struggle to find workers

politico.com

32k to 34k from entry-level to expert level. Basically businesses choosing to close over offering pay raises.

Which actually can make sense with competition still on illegal workers, and larger scale competition using prison labor.

> “But the big reason why nobody fixes it is because it’s a big political bombshell, and both parties can use it against the other one.”

Except... a bipartisan fixing bill was nuked on Trump's disapproval shortly before the elections, so that immigration and immigrant status could still be an issue at election time.

Farmers followed up by voting to have all immigrants deported quickly after Inauguration Day. That was clearly communicated.

Farmers FAFO again.

"Immigration question" doesn't have a solution because without the immigrants the economy collapses. And, besides, not having it solved allows Republicans to run on the platform of solving it, as you said. But if there is a single politician in the US history who is not only willing to kill the economy, but has an unquestionable approval from the voters to do it, that's Trump, so who knows.

Article doesn't mention the pay once. No matter what you think about this issue, this is total trash journalism by the reporter Samuel Benson and Politico. No wonder people don't trust news sources.

the issue is pay, but it is hard to evaluate pay on a dairy, as the work occurs 365 days a year, with a few intense periods when haying and or planting and harvesting corn,calving, and then mostly 3~4 hrs a day, one very early in the morning, so there are only odd situations that make it worth while to anybody, and as pointed out, loosing labour can instantly change all of someones plans. I read the article diferently as my grand parents and uncles farmed in Penn state, one of them as a dairy farmer and those experiences with them fills in the blanks. It takes a lot of creativity and decisivness to survive in dairy and family farming, margins are small but often the equity is high, so the temptation to sell out to big business is always there.

Can you elaborate?

I assume GP's point is that the farms rely on being able to pay below minimum wage (IIRC at least some places have carveouts in minimum wage laws for farm labor, not just tipped workers), and that's part of why it's so difficult to find replacement workers.

The lack of mentioning that in a story about the economic impacts of this seems like a deliberate choice to garner more sympathy than "I want to pay people $2 an hour to work" might otherwise. (That is a made up number, I did not go dig up the relevant PA pay rates.)

> “The whole thing is screwed up,” said John Painter, a three-time Trump voter who runs an organic dairy farm in Westfield. “We need people to do the jobs Americans are too spoiled to do.”

That seems to cover it in the words of one of the farmers. I personally wouldn't consider the article too sympathetic to them.

I think GP means that illegal workers have no guarantee of making minimum wage or any legal protections against wage theft.

It is weird we are speculating on this, just catching up to GP whi has already denounced the author, newspaper, and journalism in general.

Low income work just doesn't make financial sense for many americans. https://www.cato.org/commentary/welfare-better-deal-work#

Maybe people don't want to move to deep red Pennsylvania?

Lots of black folks left the South and it's not like they were handing out bags of money in New York.

> Painter voted for Trump three times, but he said he’s “very disappointed” in how the president has handled immigration policy this term. “It’s not right, what they’re doing,” he said.

He was apparently conditioned to not believe the person he voted for would follow through on his campaign promises.

One thing that Trump did very effectively was take advantage of how people will selectively hear what they want to hear if they're desperate, and not pay attention to fine details that might suggest a different meaning than they're taking.

For example, someone who thinks that doing a lot of labor is a sign of good moral character might think "deport the lazy criminals" sounds reasonable, and ignore the details which suggest that the crime in their mind is "being foreign", leading to surprise when those you thought of as "good people" are being deported.

(None of that removes the responsibility for the consequences of your actions, of course, just that it's not necessarily that they thought he wouldn't follow through, and more that they only remembered what they wanted to hear.)

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