A Dearth of Agricultural Workers?
Press accounts abound of the problems of agricultural producers who cannot find workers to harvest their crops. Even NYC Mayor Bloomberg, who has a penchant for pontificating about things of which he has little or no knowledge, jumped on this bandwagon in the CNN special report on immigration on June 10 when he cited the problems of farmers abandoning crops to rot for lack of workers.
Usually not mentioned in these stories – as it was not in the CNN report – is the fact that a legal agricultural guest worker program exists that can bring in an unlimited number of foreign workers if U.S. workers are unavailable. An exception to this generalization was published by the Independent Mail in South Carolina on June 8, 2012. This article, circulated by Scripps Howard News Service, notes that the H-2A visa program for agricultural workers exists, but, “If he used the program … he would have to increase his employees’ wages to $9.50 an hour from an estimated $7.67, which is the minimum wage in Florida.”
The article explains that the salary requirement results from a provision that is regulated by the U.S. Department of Labor
Read More: http://immigrationreform.com/2012/06/11/a-dearth-o...
blustering and arrests, the crops begin to rot in the fields and agriculture interests, particularly large public corporations in that business, begin to pressure all agencies to lighten up on the rhetoric and actions.
So, all of you who whine and cry so loudly about those open borders, prepare to replace your favorite foods with things imported from Brazil or Mexico rather than "locally grown" produce. The lacking immigration policies are not as simple and easily modified as you
would believe. Or, being the "patriots" that you are, take a job in the fields and help harvest the crops for the $8-9 an hour that such labor provides.
Growers use "illegals" to avoid paying not only the minimum wage, but payroll taxes of every kind. They pay a "Contractor" who pays the workers whatever is the local bargaining rate. That is a part of the "free market" that most who propose the idea would like to ignore.
poorly informend, of course, the typical RWNJ. There are many times more willing workers than there are jobs available. That is the end result of thirty years of "Reaganomics". Wall Street is still hiring graduates of ivy league colleges and offspring of very wealthy parents, but the rest of the economy is trashed and struggling.
Were there no "undocumented workers" or immigrants to take these jobs, Americans would demand higher wages and some benefits, which would require that they form a collective barganing association for themselves, a Union. Then, either the cost of agriculture products would be increased or the profits of the growers and packers would decrease, probably some of both. Wall Street would claim the world was about to end and nothing would ever be good again. Politicians would be damned for allowing the workers to organize and bargain for their wages, and Republicans would soil themselves with their anger that anyone should dare to reduce the profits of a corporation by demanding a decent wage. Tyson Foods CEO would probably receive somthing less than a $45Million bonus this year, and you can begin to see how the economy would begin to collapse if that happened.
Without unions there would not have been an American middle class, retirement programs, medical or dental insurances, IRAs, 401ks, employer stock option plans, miner's hospitals and Black Lung benefits, OSHA, or other safety measures in the workplace. Our labor force would still be working "at will" for the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carneiges, Vanderbilts, Crockers, Stanfords, and six other families who accumulated all the wealth of the nation.
Today these same interests are more clever, hiding their names behind the likes of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, EXXON, Pfizer, Bain Capital and a dozen other hedge funds. Without OSHA, EPA, SEC, and other Agencies controlling the pillagers, we all would live in rental houses and carry lunch pails to the dangerous work places where disease, death, and pain were made.