Become a farm worker

http://www.takeourjobs.org/

by adamilardi • 16 years ago

85 113 16 years ago

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.]

jeb• 16 years ago

That would mean that anyone who was out of a job in the city would either need to leave the city or prey on the people within the city who still have money.

Your proposal would lead to a huge de-population of the cities. It would also mean that if by some weird series of events you became unemployed for a while, and could not find a job, you would be forced out to work the fields.

It's much easier to start working the fields than to get back to society. When you need to work for minimum wage every day, you don't have time to find that programming job you're looking for.

michael_dorfman• 16 years ago

Sub-minimum wage, I would imagine.

cameldrv• 16 years ago

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.

vinhboy2• 16 years ago

Do you think farmers can afford to hire workers at higher rates?

thesethings• 16 years ago

From my experience (read on), jobs illegal immigrants have get paid at least minimum wage (Not that this is livable).

Most illegal immigrants get a social security number through underground document-makers. They give that number to the employer (who knows it's fake, but acts otherwise).

I've befriended many Mexican immigrants, illegal and legal, and have even gone to a house that makes these documents. (It was surprisingly low-cost. )

Now this doesn't speak to your other point, about whether a farmhand job is livable for anybody. But my main point is: it's probably a legit job that withholds taxes and everything.

There is a large set of jobs that has a high-turnover rate for everybody who works in them. Overnight cleaning crews in offices, table bussers, farmhands... This turnover rate is high for everybody, legal and illegal, who works there. My guess is that the employers assume anybody who works there will leave soon, and it's not worth thoroughly vetting whether the ss# belongs to a dead guy.

As for my opinion on all this... I'm still working it out. I'm also biased, have lots of Mexican family on this of the border, and am admittedly sentimental about it. Ideally we can first focus on making any job livable, and THEN worry about who gets to have it.

ryanelkins5• 16 years ago

Seriously? A border fence? I didn't think many people actually took that serious as a deterrent. Have you seen the Penn and Teller show where they pay (legally questionable) immigrants to build a length of fence using the same specs as the border fence - then pay them to go over, under, and through it? I just remember they were on the other side pretty quick.

Then there's the cost to build and maintain... it's just such a ridiculous idea to me.

jamn• 16 years ago

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.

amalcon• 16 years ago

I would say the first step is immigration reform: remove the incentive to come here illegally, they'll just do it legally, and the problem goes away.

huherto• 16 years ago

I recent the comment. Mexico is not a failed state. Sure, we have many problems. We have a democracy; it is imperfect but still a democracy, we have a GDP per capita of $14,495 which is typical of a country with our level of development.

What we have is a very violent war between rival gangs. We have some of those gangs challenging the state. It is a very serious situation, but it is not that of a failed state. We are still working, traveling and going to school. If you run a red light, you will get fined. All of the government structures are working. Do not minimize the problem, it is very serious, and we are suffering. Yet don't make it seem as it everything is in chaos.

I just googled this index of failed states. I have not knowledge of the political bias of the publisher. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/21/2010_failed...

mechanical_fish• 16 years ago

Are you suggesting that there are an infinite number of jobs for farm workers?

The reason why farm workers have tiny wages and poor working conditions is that there is a massive global surplus of people who are looking for farm work.

And if you're unemployed it doesn't matter what you are unemployed at. You can declare yourself to be an unemployed auto worker, or an unemployed farm worker, or an unemployed ballerina for that matter. There is an infinite number of jobs that I'm not employed at.

You may ask, of course, why an unemployed software engineer collects more benefits than an unemployed day laborer. The answer is: Because unemployment insurance taxes are proportional to income. The engineer pays more taxes when employed, in order to collect higher benefits when unemployed.

mmt3• 16 years ago

The engineer pays more taxes when employed, in order to collect higher benefits when unemployed.

Only in theory. The reality makes far less sense.

Here in California, it's not the employee who pays the tax, but the employer, and it's only proportional to income up to $7000 per year (yes, year, not month) per employee. The payout is only proportional to earnings up to around $50k annually.

adamilardi• 16 years ago

I think your analysis is a bit harsh but hits on a good point. If we give people benefits forever it doesn't make sense to work. Ie if you lost a higher paying job. You will make more taking unemployment than getting a lower paying job.

yason• 16 years ago

Income trap.

Taking a job, any job, should always increase a person's net income. Similarly, working more as opposed to working less should consistently do the same. Working several jobs should do the same as opposed to doing only one job or doing no job. This is not always the case, depending on taxation, subsidies, and other eases.

Basic income would be a good solution for such traps.

You would always make at least X money where X is large enough that it allows you to live but small enough to make most people not want to live like that. So, there would be no unemployment checks, just basic income. If you took the job as a farm worker, you would always get your earnings on top of the basic income.

lukeqsee2• 16 years ago

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.

hugh39• 16 years ago

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.

ryanelkins5• 16 years ago

I think the point is that no one is going to take their jobs.

This is brutally hard work for anyone that has never tried it. It is probably more physically demanding than anything most Americans have ever done. I know it would be one of the last things I'd want to do to support myself.

sgoraya3• 16 years ago

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.

vinhboy2• 16 years ago

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?

lukeqsee2• 16 years ago

Which is exactly why more Americans need these jobs. If Americans never learn to work, America will never progress.

(This is on a macro level, obviously there are progressive Americans, but they aren't the norm.)

balding_n_tired2• 16 years ago

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."

Were you and your co-workers above average or non-American? As an American worker, reasonably close to average in physical condition, I did work low-wage jobs (loading dock, janitorial, landscape) when in my late teens and very early 20s. No doubt I complained, but apparently I sufficed.

"People complain when they work in air conditioned offices, how will they survive standing in 100 degrees weather in a field?"

Complaining, I guess.

Frankly, it isn't primarily the conditions of work that would deter me from farm work--though that would, too--it's the pay.

mynameishere• 16 years ago

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".

sgoraya3• 16 years ago

I agree. And to provide an anecdote, I grew up in Central CA where my father is real estate broker who specializes in farm land. When I was 12, I begged my Dad to get me a summer job and asked if one of his farmer friends could help me out.

My father gladly obliged and got me a job in the fields, cutting grapes and placing them on 'raisin paper' (I was to receive .10/raisin paper). Toughest, hardest job of my life - I barely survived and at lunch time, decided to call it a day and spent rest of the afternoon under the shade of an almond grove across the road. All the while, the real farm workers were busting their ass in 100+ degree weather and taking a quick 20min lunch and sporadic water breaks. At that time there was no break/lunch/water mandate similar to what we have nowadays.

Nothing but respect for those folks after that.

karzeem2• 16 years ago

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.

mmt3• 16 years ago

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"

hugh39• 16 years ago

I was disappointed that a urinal elephant is not a real elephant. I suppose while an elephant could be trained to clean toilets, you'd still need someone to clean up after the elephant.

karzeem2• 16 years ago

I agree with you. What I meant is that for a variety of bad reasons, farm workers sometimes get less than the true market price for their labor.

jackowayed• 16 years ago

> 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.

ivankirigin2• 16 years ago

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_tired2• 16 years ago

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.

ivankirigin2• 16 years ago

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?

rdouble• 16 years ago

I used to work at a school for the kids of migrant laborers. The dads don't really trust anything that looks like "the system." Going into an office - that is how you're going to get into trouble with the INS.

However, keep in mind that day-workers and agricultural laborers aren't necessarily illegal. Where I was working, most of the people working in agricultural labor were migrant workers, but were also actually legal U.S. citizens from border towns in Texas.

nradov2• 16 years ago

There is at least one such office in Silicon Valley. http://www.dayworkercentermv.org/

motters• 16 years ago

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.

hugh39• 16 years ago

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.

Goladus• 16 years ago

People who think the US agricultural sector couldn't survive without illegal labor are generally less interesting than the people who understand that the US agricultural sector could survive without illegal labor but encourage it anyway.

bjnortier_hn• 16 years ago

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.

hugh39• 16 years ago

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.

jdminhbg• 16 years ago

I'm sorry, which country are you comparing Australia to which has a "permanent third-world underclass"?

starkfist4• 16 years ago

There are half a billion people in the USA; there are 20 million in Australia. Thus, the USA needs many more agricultural workers. Plus, our 2nd biggest export is agriculture.

Some agriculture scales, some does not. Grain and meat are reasonably scalable. Everything else is not. You could get rid of the illegal agricultural labor in the USA, you just would no longer have any fruits or vegetables. Australians don't eat such things, so they have no use for illegal labor. :)

hugh39• 16 years ago

There are half a billion people in the USA; there are 20 million in Australia. Thus, the USA needs many more agricultural workers.

And it has more people who could fill those jobs! Funny how that works, isn't it?

You could get rid of the illegal agricultural labor in the USA, you just would no longer have any fruits or vegetables.

I wonder how much fruit prices would go up if we were to pay the pickers a fair first-world wage. Let's do some maths!

If I buy an apple it costs about $1.60 per lb. That includes the picker's labour, plus the costs of land, pest control, irrigation, transport, the farmer's profit, the retailer's profit, the middleman's profit, and the little sticker that tells me what kind of apple it is.

According to this Canadian site: http://www.bctree.com/orchards/picking.php it looks like an inexperienced picker up there makes about eight bucks an hour, getting paid to fill 800-lb bins at $15.60 per bin. Quick sanity check: that's three pounds of apples per minute, an apple weighs about a third of a pound, so that's nine apples every minute on average. Sounds like a plausible sort of rate.

So if pickers are only getting $15.60 for an 800 lb bin, that means that the cost of picking is a mere two cents per pound, for apples that retail for $1.60/lb! So if we were suddenly forced to pay apple pickers $32 an hour instead of $8 an hour it would raise the cost of our apples from $1.60 to $1.66. Or, like, two cents per apple.

Hardly sounds like an unreasonable price increase to me.

So in conclusion, I think anyone who is claiming that decent wages for farm workers would make agriculture impossible is off their fricking rocker.

mhd• 16 years ago

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.

ergo98• 16 years ago

Hacker News?

amohr• 16 years ago

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.

bmj• 16 years ago

I've never worked on a farm, but my family purchases our meat and dairy products directly from a local farmer (who farms in the manner Joel Salatin--that is, he is a grass farmer). One benefit of buying this way is that we have gained an understanding of just how difficult farming is. Listening to him talk about weening a hundred calves, or caring for his animals over the winter under several feet of snow, or dealing with the heat in the summer helps me appreciate the work and his desire to farm in a sustainable way. Personally, I'm glad my kids get to experience it, since it's unlikely they would get an appreciate of the work it takes to produce good food otherwise.

jacobolus• 16 years ago

> 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.

joeyh• 16 years ago

Having trouble to reconcile your comments about no talking allowed with my own experience growing up on a farm. Listening to the grownups constantly talking and bantering is really a key part of my own memories. I wonder if this is more because we were a family farm that shared labor with the neighbors, and you were on a commercial farm, or because we were growing mostly tobacco as a cash crop, which provides endless time to chat (and listen to the radio) while one's hands are busy grading the tobacco (and as a "bonus" you get a contact nicotine high (which I first experienced around 9 -- back to your points on safety)). I'm sure that people shut up when doing nasty chemical spraying, and I remember tobacco cutting was a very intense job that left no energy for talking, but all day with no time for talking? Yipes.

VladRussian• 16 years ago

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.

jedwhite• 16 years ago

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.

roboneal3• 16 years ago

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.

pragmatic• 16 years ago

Is this hacker news or political action news?

Flagged.

jleader• 16 years ago

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?

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

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...

J3L2404• 16 years ago

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.

johnl87• 16 years ago

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.

Become a farm worker

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