Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

Nothing helped me appreciate education and hard work like working as a produce clerk at a second rate grocery store, seeing day in, day out, the same customers buying the same horrible processed foods, and the same burnout co-workers showing up stoned out of their minds to deal with the shit jobs they work to afford their weed to help them deal with their shit jobs.

Taught me more about life than any class or book ever could.

> How do we get the unemployed Midwesterners into Napa Valley?

Just a thought:

Government loans with low interest, delayed and income-contingent repayment, and forgiveness after a set period of on-time payments for relocation expenses for unemployed adults with job offers outside of their own immediate area. Getting people to where the work is good for the public fisc, good for employers, and good for the people involved.

The staggering low wages on Californian farms is preventing proper incentivisation to automate these processes. It reminds me of how slaves in the antibellum south prevented the area from becoming industrialized.

Has anyone here even worked a minimum wage job??

A few dollars an hour above the baseline isn't enough to compensate for the long term health and career advancement penalties you'll be taking. These are terminal career positions; they don't get better. Hauling apples and hay isn't going to get you a spot at a tractor design firm.

Pay people enough to make a decent, comfortable life and you'll have workers. The CoL/wage arbitrage between foreign and american workers is what makes these jobs work.

I lived in northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri for 12 years, until 2009. Not only is this where the Tyson corporation is based, but it's also where one of the highest densities of chicken farms are located.

We lived in a house in an extremely rural area. I made good money doing high tech work at the nearby WalMart Stores, Inc., home office.

Most of our neighbors, for miles in every direction, were pretty poor. Many of them lived in broken down trailers on properties handed down generation after generation. Unemployment was very high.

A kindly, law abiding man who went to our church ran one of the many chicken farms, and had for decades.

The only people he could find to work on his chicken farms were Latinos, many or most of them were probably illegal. They did provide proper documentation, so he wasn't breaking the law by employing them.

I asked him how he ran his farm before the Latinos started arriving 15 or so years earlier. He said that in that time, it wasn't hard to find young people who were happy to do the hard, unpleasant work associated with a chicken farm. He said he hadn't raised his wages past minimum wage since the very beginning.

In fact, he said, the Latinos worked a lot harder than the native locals had.

> Americans live in more than just CA, I know a lot of people in CA find this hard to believe but there is a whole world outside of Sillycon Valley.

While not adding much of anything to this conversation, and being needlessly snarky, I understand the fundamental sentiment here. I live in 'Sillycon Valley'. In many ways, it is quite silly here, and a lot of folks have a rather insular mindset, one that I personally try hard to keep clear of.