The right’s new fetish? Send the unemployed, welfare recipients, parolees into the fields **UPDATE: GA crops dying
A Georgia immigration law leaves farmers short of help, so the state is sending in parolees. (Source: Politico)
Talking up Texas, with its low-wage jobs boom… touting a survey that Americans will work for as little as a quarter … gutting unions and now this: the right wants to see more Americans laboring in the fields.
Not Americans like them, of course. The “undesirable” kind: those who happen to be unemployed, receiving some form of welfare, or who have committed crimes. Americans love their cheap produce, and somebody’s got to pick it. So the country needs a readily available, large supply of cheap labor. Where to get it?
Check the comments under a recent raft of labor-related stories and you’ll notice the trend.
Take this story, clipped by Politico today:
Georgia, which passed an Arizona-style immigration bill in April that is due to take effect next month, has seen thousands of undocumented immigrants flee the state. A state survey released last week found 11,080 vacant positions on state farms that needed to be filled to avoid losing crops.
At the same time as the survey’s release, Deal, a first-term Republican, announced a program to link the state’s 100,000 probationers with farmers looking to fill positions, the vast majority of which pay less than $15 per hour.
The AP reported the first group of probationers began working last week at an Americus farm owned by Dick Minor, the president of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association.
According to the AP, it didn’t go well:
Republican Gov. Nathan Deal started the experiment after farmers publicly complained they couldn’t find enough workers to harvest labor-intensive crops such as cucumbers and berries because Latino workers – including many illegal immigrants – refused to show up, even when offered one-time or weekly bonuses. One crew who previously worked for Mendez told him they wouldn’t come to Georgia for fear of risking deportation.
Farmers told state authorities in an unscientific survey that they had more than 11,000 unfilled agriculture jobs, although it’s not clear how that compares to prior years or whether the shortage can be blamed on the new law.
For more than a week, the state’s probation officers have encouraged their unemployed offenders to consider taking field jobs. While most offenders are required to work while on probation, statistics show they have a hard time finding jobs. Georgia’s unemployment rate is nearly 10 percent, but correction officials say among the state’s 103,000 probationers, it’s about 15 percent. Still, offenders can turn down jobs they consider unsuitable, and harvesting is physically demanding.
The first batch of probationers started work last week at a farm owned by Dick Minor, president of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association. In the coming days, more farmers could join the program.
So far, the experiment at Minor’s farm is yielding mixed results. On the first two days, all the probationers quit by mid-afternoon, said Mendez, one of two crew leaders at Minor’s farm.
“Those guys out here weren’t out there 30 minutes and they got the bucket and just threw them in the air and say, `Bonk this, I ain’t with this, I can’t do this,’” said Jermond Powell, a 33-year-old probationer. “They just left, took off across the field walking.”
Mendez put the probationers to the test last Wednesday, assigning them to fill one truck and a Latino crew to a second truck. The Latinos picked six truckloads of cucumbers compared to one truckload and four bins for the probationers.
“It’s not going to work,” Mendez said. “No way. If I’m going to depend on the probation people, I’m never going to get the crops up.”
Conditions in the field are bruising, and the probationers didn’t seem to know what to expect. Cucumber plants hug the ground, forcing the workers to bend over, push aside the large leaves and pull them from the vine. Unlike the Mexican and Guatemalan workers, the probationers didn’t wear gloves to protect their hands from the small but prickly thorns on the vines and sandpaper-rough leaves.
The harvesters carried filled buckets on their shoulders to a nearby flatbed truck and hoisted them up to a dumper, who tossed the vegetables into a bin.
Temperatures hovered in the low 90s with heavy humidity Thursday, but taking off a shirt to relieve the heat invited a blistering sunburn. Tiny gnats flew into workers’ eyes and ears. One experienced Latino worker carried a machete that he used to dispatch a rattlesnake found in the fields.
By law, each worker must earn minimum wage, or $7.25 an hour. But there’s an incentive system. Harvesters get a green ticket worth 50 cents every time they dump a bucket of cucumbers. If they collect more than 15 tickets an hour, they can beat minimum wage.
The Latino workers moved furiously Thursday for the extra pay.
As for the comments, these are typical from the Politico version:
Yes indeed. Let’s not permit them to “wander off.”
Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin has called out this practice as “slavery by another name,” in a blog post that reads in part:
And now – an echo of earlier times appears. Ill-conceived public policy – an agricultural crisis – the discovery of labor shortage – and a simple solution through the criminal justice system. There is certainly a sound argument for humane reform of our immigration system. There is also an argument to be made for ensuring needed jobs go first to those citizens who are much in need of work and income. However, the suggestion of sending probationers into the fields to solve our self-inflicted economic wound is nothing more than retrogressing to an earlier shameful time in our State’s history of victimizing hundreds of mostly black men and condemning them to near slavery, while the rest of us watch silently. Now as then many of the potential victims have poor if any legal representation and few employment opportunities.
It is time to step back. Not to step back in time – but to step back to some truly useful public policy in immigration reform and in jobs development and not pervert our criminal justice system yet again.
Indeed, the notion that Americans need to get back to back-breaking labor, and get comfortable with lower and lower wages has taken hold on the right, where labor unions are seen as blood sucking leeches and CEOs are America’s “productive class” — the heroes of their Ayn Randian world.
In this world, a story about an experiment showing Americans would work for the lowest wages of any Western population — just 25 cents an hour — was met with this kind of response on the right:
HotAir.com, which got similar responses when it posted that story to its “green room” is among those on the right that are chock full of odes to low-skilled, less educated southern labor, especially the kind of minimum wage jobs Texas has come to specialize in.
Combine this increasing drive on the right to tell their followers to accept and laud any job corporations will throw at them, no matter how low paid, and to protect the rich from taxes at all costs, while replacing “illegals” with American prisoners, welfare recipients and the like, and you’ve got a recipe for an America that’s more like the 19th century than the 21st. But then, that’s what the tea party says it wants, right? To “take America back(ward)?”
So what’s next in this brave new world?
Welfare recipients made to clean the New York subways (that way the city doesn’t have to pay expensive union wages and benefits);
Prison dorms for welfare recipients (to go with the drug tests);
And the evergreen: bus black people to the farms and make them pick the crops.
Related:
All work and no pay: the plight of American workers (Mother Jones)
Harrowing, heartbreaking tales of the overworked (Mother Jones)
UPDATE: It looks like Georgia’s anti-immigration law is working too well. Crops are now dying for lack of people to harvest them.
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13 Responses to “The right’s new fetish? Send the unemployed, welfare recipients, parolees into the fields **UPDATE: GA crops dying”
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Wow. I just had a really negative visceral reaction to that photo.
Fucking hell.
And now — after reading the article — I feel physically ill.
Welcome back to the plantation, this is slavery all over again. Fucking SICK…
Pay them the way Americans expect to be paid, grant them some workplace protections, and you’ll have more takers. People have forgotten Cesar Chavez and his attempt to unionize farmworkers and improve their living conditions. They forget that the way the Reagan administration handled the problem of AMERICANS who were working the fields and as janitors and hotel cleaners demanding decent conditions and higher pay was by passing an immigrant amnesty and decriminalizing illegal immigration, thus flooding the labor market with people who were expected to do the work without complaint and without actually expecting to be able to house and feed their children as Americans. They did it all with a wink and a nod toward enforcement, declaring the hiring of these workers illegal while never actually arresting anyone for doing so. Now the people who make millions of dollars per year as business executives stand in judgment of those who cannot and will not take the kind of backbreaking work of the fields with no expectation of anything better. They stand in judgment of those who grew up for the most part in urban or suburban settings, often poorly nourished, and with no experience at all in farm work. They would not do such work themselves, but they think their poorer – darker – fellow citizens should jump at the chance to do the physically demanding, ill paid, work of stoop labor with no chance whatsoever of advancement and no protections in place. Forward into the 19th Century …
I live in GA, and I could have told Deal, the GOPers who voted for this bill, and the conservatives who support it, that it would be an EPIC fail. This story came out in the local paper today. The probationers are NOT suited to this kind of work. They are paid $7.25/hour and can receive a .50 bonus for each bucket of cucumbers they pick. The migrant farm workers are cleaning their clocks and are averaging, with bonuses, $20/hr. One of the workers picked a bucket of cucumbers in 25 secs. Some of the probationers walked off the job. To show the depth of some conservatives lack of empathy here in GA, and their failure to understand the law and that others have rights, they are calling for probationers who walk off the job to be jailed or fined. They’re also suggesting that anyone on welfare be forced to work on the farms. I guess they don’t realize that many people who receive some form of welfare also have jobs. Facts don’t matter much here in GA among many conservatives, and the excerpts of comments from them you include in this post shows that this is the case among conservatives in other states, too.
http://www.macon.com/2011/06/22/1605424/ga-puts-probationers-to-work-harvesting.html
I read about Shirley Franklin’s post on the ajc.com site last night, and the conservatives on the blog were attacking her for pointing out that this policy that Deal has thought up evokes images from slavery. Deal ended the interview by saying that this law is not about “the color of one’s skin.” My response on the blog was that I was told that Jim Crow laws didn’t have anything to do with the color of my skin, either as I grew up under segregation in GA. I also emphasized that Deal and others who aren’t the targets of these types of laws should refrain from making statements based on their conclusions that “these types of laws have nothing to do with the color of one’s skin” because it smacks of elitism and an out of touch with reality type of mentality.
A federal judge asked tough questions about GA’s new immigration law this past Monday, and even though parts of AZ SB1070 were not allowed to be implemented, our delusional republican lawmakers, governor, and conservatives still think the law will be implemented as written. Stupidity has no bounds where some people are concerned. The republicans fashioned this bill after the AZ bill and think it will go forward intact on July 1, even though key portions of SB1070 were struck down in federal court. Just the idea that the judge had questions about the law is considered an insult to conservatives here because Justice Thrash was a Clinton nominee. It’s no longer about the law. With conservatives here in GA, it’s about “we want what we want when we want it, and d@mn the law, we can do what we want!
They’re already looking forward to the 11th U.S. Circuit Ct. appeals process where they feel they will be “guaranteed” a win. God help us all.
http://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-politics-elections/judge-to-rule-later-982101.html
[...] and yes, they are as horribly racist and xenophobic as one might imagine. You really need to read the rest (which includes a quote from Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin) to truly grasp the horror of what is [...]
Woah. I feel physically ill after reading this article. And currently “competing” for a job (read: applying to any minimum wage job that will even so much as glance at me) does not make the reaction any less visceral. It makes it WORSE.
I have been out of work for more than two years, (due to two strokes that have me unable to find work and unable to get Disability Benefits):
This story is frightening and sickening.
It NEVER ends and it never will end until we DEMAND that this craziness ends.
And we won’t do, because “they” won’t listen to us.
Thanks for the update, @Majii. And thanks for your patience re the posting delay. Anything with links has to be manually moderated. But damn. And Florida is probably headed in the same direction, with planters crying labor shortages and immigrants bracing for what seems like an inevitable push for an Arizona-style law. This country is headed for a very dark place.
Ok so maybe I’m missing something, but if these jobs are so awful and exploitative (and it truly seems as if they are, farm labor is awful) why is it NOT a problem for immigrants to be doing them? Why does it only become outrageous when parolees get involved? I think the treatment of farm workers in America is a disgrace, period. But this seems to veer dangerously into the territory of “this sort of work is beneath Americans, make the foreigners do it”
[...] right’s new fetish? Send the unemployed, welfare recipients, parolees into the fields (Reid Report) It turns out that one of the downsides to hounding immigrants is that once they’re gone, [...]
@Mark:
I suspect the bigger issue is the bit where conservatives are advocating jailing probationers that walk off the job…
As a white ex-con who has experienced this sort of thing, I would have preferred to have seen a white person in the lede photo to this article. Too many white people (like, no doubt, the commenters you’ve chosen to display here) don’t think this can happen to them, and this sort of thing will contunue to happen and to grow in frequency until white people figure out that the new slavery will be color-blind. It shouldn’t have take that, but then again, we are not a very nice people.
P.S. This will drag your wage down too, even if it doesn’t happen directly to you.