Yes, but I would say as you go down in income, there’s almost zero of “wanting” to do the job and mostly “needing” to do it. Whereas an engineer might answer that they like the work they do, I doubt someone bending over all day and picking strawberries would.
I've been dirt poor for years. I'm a freelance writer by trade. I like writing. I've always wanted to be a writer. I hate being poor, of course. I've been told for years to "go get a real job." I'm medically handicapped. For that and other reasons I can't readily "just go get a real job." The fact that you hate the working conditions and pay doesn't mean you inherently hate the work. There are people who garden as a…
Everybody has days when you just want to be lazy. A job won't give into that feeling.
Every job has something you don't want to do. Either it is tedious and boring, or it is hard in same way. Many of those things could be ignored (my windows at home are dirty...) in your personal life but the job forces you to do them.
The above factors means even if you love your job there are things to complain about.
That's because they would never be able to afford basic things like: - college education ($30K-$75K/year, preceded by purchasing a shack for $800K in a good-school town) - health care ($25K/year for a high-deductible family plan) What's the point? Or do we consider education or healthcare luxury now?
America has long treated both education and healthcare as luxury items that only the rich deserve. We need to fix those things. They are negatively impacting quite a lot of people. The lack of healthcare is hardly peculiar to farm labor jobs.
In the US school is free for 13 years. After that there are scholarships for the poor.
Healthcare is expensive, but there are programs for the poor.
When you move out of poor things get hard quick though because you don't get the above and so you have to come up with the prices you quote.
I'd be happy to! Tomatoes are super forgiving and are a great place to start. The easiest thing is to pick up a seed packet at a garden supply store. I buy most of mine online or from Stokes. Drying out seeds is fairly easy, but seed packets are less work. For starting seedlings you only need a few simple supplies. Ideally you have very light, "airy", soil. This usually sold as "seed starter" mix. You can make do wit…
Do you have a blog? I love your writing style. These are great tips. This year I also started some seedlings early — I used some left over egg cartons as containers, and put them on top of my clothes dryer which is next a window and often warm. My sugar snap peas shot up the fastest so those are already in the ground. Thinking of putting the rest of my seedlings in the ground this weekend and starting some more sprou…
Thanks for the kind words! I do, jcdl.net. Only one post on there ranting about ThinkPads though. I never thought to use egg cartons, what a good idea.
At some point enough harvests will be missed because of lockdown that famines become inevitable. The choice to risk it will probably me made too late. Not sure why I'm getting downvoted. Food takes months to grow and needs to be harvested within a short window. By the time people realize there's a famine coming it will be too late. Just look at how we could have prepared in January for this virus if people weren't so…
I'm downvoting this because it's a huge claim without adequate evidence. Feel free to cite some sources showing what % of harvests have been missed, etc, and I'll change my downvote.
Migrants can't make it to harvests because countries/states are locked down. Isn't that literally in the article?
There won't be any sources for a while because this is literally just starting.
I mean 3billion people are on lockdown of some sort globally right now. Not hard to imagine it may be hard for workers to get to farms across borders, or even within borders. CA alone will probably see a shortage of migrants. No, I don't know for sure but I'm speculating that it's quite likely.
Supply chains have also been strained because people have been panic buying for what, 3 weeks now? You can't just snap your fingers and double your supply of vegetables.
Got a butternut squash in your pantry? Maybe a couple of tomatoes? Cook it up for dinner and save some seeds! Wash off the pulp and dry them out on a paper towel. It's not too late to start some seedlings, and it's a nice way to pass the time. I've also been experimenting with different dried beans that we stocked up on, and most of them have a pretty high germination rate. Roma beans are super tasty and high in prot…
Thank you for both having the foresight to plan(t) as well as the willingness to help those around you.
Otherwise you could end up like my neighbor with a strategic reserve level of toilet paper, proud to hoard yet share with no one even when the stores are empty.
Coworkers in Shenzhen are already saying that more fancier foods are already getting scarcer in the inland China, and prices are going up by day. China has done a massive livestock slaughter campaign when the quarantine was declared. That has actually depressed the food prices quite a bit for the first months, but after that, the prices have shot up. This is how they got that much meat: https://mustsharenews.com/wp-c…
Worst case with meat shortages, they'll just have to eat the corn and soy they were feeding to the animals or process the grains into grain based meat substitutes. In general grain production is very automated so there won't be as much of an issue with labor issues in the US or South America impacting the global supply of grain compared to fruits and vegetables.
It sounded like farm picker migration from Mexico was on hold - no visas. But recent news suggest maybe not. Mexico could shut it down too - or might have a better time breaking their constitution to not allow their citizens back in on the way home.
Either way I would bet that with millions out of work unable to pay rent a backbreaking job sounds better than nothing. Especially if so much food is at stake send in the national guard if can't get enough bodies.
Not a chance. When you're paying a couple bucks a pound for fresh ______, it didn't take 15 minutes of a migrant worker's time to plant/pick/care/pack that pound. My guess is that the migrant worker proportion of retail cost is edit: > What would happen to consumer food costs if farm wages rose and the extra costs were passed on to consumers? The average earnings of field workers were $9.78 an hour in 2008, according…
A long time ago, I read that you could double the wages of farm laborers and it would add like two cents or four cents to the cost of a box of breakfast cereal.
Breakfast cereal has very little farm labor. It takes seconds for a combine to harvest all the wheat you would eat in a year.
Fruit and fresh vegetables are much more labor intense.
As an eastern European I think the British should pick their own fruit and pay the appropriate price if they like it so much, otherwise the market is artificially inflated. Germany has the exact same problem with asparagus. We can't be everywhere with our low wage expectations.
I think that probably that would make you and your countryfolk worse off. To try to illustrate, I'll switch the analogy to my own country, which is Canada, where we fly in Mexican labour to pick crops. If we didn't fly in migrant labour, we'd have to pay Canadians, who are generally a spoiled, lazy, picky bunch (at least compared to the sort of Mexicans who fly here to work, who obviously are not lazy nor excessively…
I worked one summer doing migrant labor in agriculture harvesting blueberries in Maine. I migrated with my sister from elsewhere in the US. We were doing it because we wanted money and we were curious about the experience. Alongside us were poor people from Maine -- Native Americans and poor European Americans -- and migrant laborers from south of the border. There was a solidarity among all the groups, and strangely, between all these groups and our overseers against the land owners and Wyman Foods, our ostensible employers. One thing I saw was that the Hispanic laborers were in a lot better shape and in better practice than the other groups. Another thing I saw was that the people who got ahead disregarded the rules we were set. There was a particular technique in raking the berries we were to employ which would maximize profits for the landowners and minimize waste but which was much less efficient per hour. There was another technique, called sweeping, which would maximize the amount we harvested per hour at the cost of many more berries dropped on the ground, so less profit per acre. An advantage the migrant groups had on top of their greater fitness and experience was that they felt less solidarity with the landowners, so they were more willing to break the rules for their own gain. The overseers were cool with this, generally. My point is that this may be a pattern repeated across the globe. It isn't just that the migrants are cheaper and you can cheat them with less consequence. It's also that various parties in the arrangement can shift the burden of harvesting to their preference under the table. I'm not saying that anyone is wrong -- though my preference is that there be less waste -- but that there's something people prefer in having labor from away with different alliances. I'm not certain this is true, but in my particular experience it certainly was. To elaborate still further, I'm not saying this is necessarily wrong. The landowners still made out well, and they were earning profit without labor. The spilled berries went to the birds and insects. I'm just saying there was a non-obvious incentive for the overseers to hire people from away.
I also read, the nurses that were commuting from other EU countries to work in Germany are now going back to help their home countries.
That sounds a bit hard to believe. Walk away now and you'll probably never be employed in the country ever again. If they were OK with wages in their home country they would not be cross border commuters to begin with.