
Become a farm worker - adamilardi
http://www.takeourjobs.org/
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sgoraya
There was a local news story (in CA) about this initiative last night where
the reporter was asking random people if they would work as a farm worker.

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.

~~~
vinhboy
Personally I don't think the people who answered "yes" are cut out for the
jobs anyways.

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?

~~~
mynameishere
I'm sure your observations are much more relevant than anything else that
exists in time and space, but it might shock and amaze you to learn that:

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".

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evgen
Are you kidding!?! Very few American workers are farm laborers or farmers. The
entire agribusiness sector employs less than 2% of the US work force, which is
quite a precipitous drop from the 40% of so it employed a century ago. Workers
did not leave the farms because they were pushed out or because the government
manipulated the farm labor market, they left because the work is hard and the
pay has always been low.

~~~
commanda
The decline in the percentage of Americans who work in agriculture is due to
advances in farming technology, not due to low pay. Now one person with a
giant combine that didn't exist 100 years ago can do the work of tens or
hundreds of people.

~~~
sgoraya
Depends on what you're farming - technology certainly has an impact with crops
like wheat and potatoes - grapes, lettuce, melons, citrus, berries, etc. are a
whole different story and require manual labor with technology having less
impact.

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yummyfajitas
Why would I become a farm worker when I could just collect unemployment
checks?

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.]

~~~
cameldrv
The problem is that with the immigration situation, those jobs pay less than
minimum wage, have horrible working conditions, and people often don't get
paid. That's why the solution is a) A border fence, b) Much more strict
employer enforcement, and c) Amnesty for those here, once a and b are
accomplished. That way, the workforce stabilizes, and there is work for people
in the U.S. who don't have a lot of skills. There probably aren't a lot of
these people on HN, but many people just aren't going to be able to work a
high-end job. We need something decent to do for those people. The problem is
that right now, you can't have a first world existence on what a farmhand job
pays.

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.

~~~
jamn
This is something that actually has puzzled me for a while, so if someone can
provide me with some economics insight I'd appreciate it.

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.

~~~
anamax
> The question is: why does it make economic sense to refuse a cheap labor
> force?

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.

~~~
izendejas
"Cheap to employer does not mean cheap to society" Perhaps, but it's difficult
to quantify the overall cost-benefit of a cheap labor force, so I'd stay away
from arguing either way without presenting numbers. On the one hand, a cheap
labor force leads to cheaper goods/food; on the other hand, a cheap labor
force means tax payers have to pay for health benefits, education, etc. Are
savings more than the costs? If anyone has numbers that'd be great to know.

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hugh3
People who think the US agricultural sector couldn't survive without illegal
labour need to look at the Australian example. A helluva lot of food gets
produced in Australia without the need for a permanent third-world underclass.
How? I guess it's a combination of higher wages (a good shearer can make
upwards of $500 a day, frinstance) and greater automation, which presumably
increases prices somewhat, but realistically not by much.

(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.

~~~
bjnortier_hn
Australia doesn't have a large supply of cheap labour next door, so it's
hardly surprising that wages for farm workers are much higher.

~~~
hugh3
Sure it does: it's called Indonesia, it has twice the population of Mexico and
half the GDP (I know, I was surprised too!). What it doesn't have is a porous
border between the two; of course the fact that it's a sea barrier (only ~50
miles though) instead of a land border makes it much easier to close, but if
the US had the political will it could make the US/Mexico border a hundred
times less porous than it currently is.

~~~
philwelch
There's also the offshore concentration camp Australia set up for the
immigrants who do come across:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detentio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detention_facilities)

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mhd
A former co-worker of mine in Germany has a small farm, and required some
workers for the asparagus harvest. Most of them come from Poland or the Czech
Republic. But now the government had a program where long-term unemployed
people had to accept any job or be penalized accordingly. So for the first day
of the harvest, a big percentage of his workers were Germans for the first
time.

On the second day, none of them returned.

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karzeem
Recently I spent a day working on my friend's farm, and I came out of that in
absolute awe of people who do it as a job. I'm reasonably fit, and I felt
exhausted like I never have at the end of the day. There couldn't have been
news more upsetting than "You have to do it again tomorrow." (Granted, I'm
physically pretty lazy.)

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.

~~~
mmt
_It's hard, hard work, and the people who do it get undercompensated_

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"

~~~
jackowayed
> _I assert, instead, that appropriate compensation is proportional to the
> productivity of the work._

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.

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lukeqsee
Trouble is people that need jobs like this probably will never hear about the
campaign.

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.

~~~
hugh3
Trouble is, if you actually _do_ try taking their jobs, see what happens. Most
illegal-dominated farms probably wouldn't even hire you.

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.

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jedwhite
To stretch a programming analogy, freedom and immigration are two of the key
standard library modules on which the USA's phenomenal strength has been
built.

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.

------
amohr
Having recently left a farm job, (tonsillitis brought a premature end to my
tenure) I figure maybe I'll share a bit of my insight on the situation.

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.

~~~
jacobolus
> _there's a lot of bending over and kneeling down - which I think we are
> becoming worse at as a species_

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.

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ivankirigin
I often see people on street corners clearly standing there to get day-worker
jobs. If you rent a U-Haul truck, they'll be there, eager to work and get
paid.

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.

~~~
balding_n_tired
Such offices exists here and there, sometimes to the discontent of the
neighborhood. The vetting and recommendation service might unfortunately serve
as a handy resource for the INS, though.

~~~
ivankirigin
It is in the best interests of the immigrants to at least approach some form
of legitimacy, and regular employment can help that. It is doubtful mass
deportation would happen. Also, do those folks on street corners ever get
busted? If not, would a center for them get busted?

~~~
aspiringsensei
It probably would in Arizona, but anywhere else it would just be a
sensationalized Fox News headline:

'Internet hackers organize illegals to take american jobs.'

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VladRussian
forget the farm - nice work with fresh air. How about carpeting job? Closed,
unventilated rooms and halls, asphyxiating smell of melted plastic - the
carpet sheets are melted together. I never been so happy of being a software
engineer, MS in Math and and Green Card holder as when i passed by these poor
Mexican guys who were carpeting the hall of our apartment building. 30 seconds
of passing through this smell - i almost vomited.

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motters
Thanks to automation the number of people employed as farm labourers has
fallen dramatically within the previous century. The farm worker endures a
hard life of continual struggle, with the constant threat of technological
unemployment hanging over them.

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jleader
I'm intrigued that no one has talked about the meta-aspects of this
PR/marketing move by the UFW. How many other unions would have the guts to
issue a call for workers to come take their jobs?

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sliverstorm
I'd do it if it fit my situation.

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...

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johnl87
When I was in japan I worked on two organic farms for about a month total. I
did it through the wwoof program which is available all over the world. It was
a great time. Even though the work was really tiring on some days I still felt
happy without the crazy distractions and responsibilities of school and a part
time job. Probably the happiest I've felt in a while.

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roboneal
We need a massive increase in LEGAL immigration (and the resources dedicated
to processing them) and an equally massive crackdown on ILLEGAL immigration.

If either side is honest in their position, this would be the best solution.

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J3L2404
The best way to improve the lives of hard working, blue collar Americans, is
to have them compete with desperate, starving illegals with no rights. Why
would you hire someone with rights when you could hire someone, who if
injured, you can just push off the back of a truck. If you don't enforce the
law, then you force everyone to break that law in order to be able to compete
with the scumbags who hire illegals.

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ergo98
Hacker News?

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pragmatic
Is this hacker news or political action news?

Flagged.

