When the U.S. tried to replace migrant farmworkers with high schoolers (2018)

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/when-the-u-s-government-tried-to-replace-migrant-farmworkers-with-high-schoolers

by notamy • 2 years ago

74 82 2 years ago

npr.org

ipnon4• 2 years ago

This sounds quite sinister but it was a common summer job in Iowa for teenagers. You could make enough in a summer to buy a used car. Because of immigration these jobs are not really available for citizens anymore. I haven't heard of any teenagers taking this work in some time. You had to work long hours in the sun and heat but it was "an honest day's work."

begueradj2• 2 years ago

A quick look at the profiles of teenagers on TikTok, Instagram and OnlyFans make me believe they have the physical and mental strength and will to work long hours in the sun in maybe the most physically taxing work ever: farm work.

ipnon4• 2 years ago

It's not that it's physically difficult. You don't have to lift very heavy or have much knowhow other than how to remove a husk from a corncob. But it's incredibly toilsome and boring. You get bussed out from your city or town for a few hours to the middle of nowhere. You bring a gallon of water and don your hat for shade. Then you trudge along endless rows of corn, husking and husking. The corn literally goes as far as your eye can see. You do this from sun up to sun down. Then you go home and shower and pass out in bed, wake up a couple hours before dawn and do it again. My friends, I wouldn't see them for months! They would disappear during June and July and reappear a few thousand dollars richer, usually having lost a lot of weight and with a roasted tan.

blitzar• 2 years ago

Tell them it is a content farm and they will pay you for the summer.

astrange2• 2 years ago

I hope you're not finding teenagers on OnlyFans, that sounds illegal.

cpach• 2 years ago

Are you sure you have the direction of causation right there?

ipnon4• 2 years ago

Well, respectfully speaking, if you have more firsthand knowledge of this industry than I do, and have a point to make other than merely calling my experience in the subject in to question, then I will entertain that I might have things backward. But I suspect between the two of us, I know more about it than you do, because I've been in the fields myself.

magicalhippo• 2 years ago

Here in Norway it seems to be a combination. During the COVID-19 pandemic, farmers couldn't get their usual seasonal workers from other countries and it was touted as a great thing for the young generation as they could now "finally" get a summer job again.

Well, turned out a lot of the young generation didn't like the hours or the pay, and if they dud show up on time they worked at a fraction of the speed of the usual "imported" workers.

Was quite a bit of ruckus in the news about this, as farmers failed to get their crops harvested.

Not that I would have done much better, it's fairly brutal, monotonous work.

emidoots2• 2 years ago

Teenagers young and older are definitely still working on fields here in the US[0], and also a good portion now work the processing facilities instead[1][2].

Whether it qualifies as 'an honest day's work' these days - or a cruel and punishing existence - I'll leave for you to decide.

[0] https://youtu.be/41vETgarh_8?si=S0dBolFjv04SSprh&t=497

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/09/25/1201524399/child-labor-perdue...

[2] https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20230217-1

ipnon4• 2 years ago

It's a good point. I'm speaking of high school who are allowed to legally work in the state of Iowa. If a 16 year old willfully employing themself in an entry level job is considered exploitative child labor to you, I don't know what to say. One sad effect of the changes in labor in the state is that only citizens are beholden to labor laws, whereas those working under the table are not. So it's true there is child labor. The families and farm companies break the law because they still make more than they would back home, but it's less pay than what they are owed under the law, and the parents will lie about their child's age so they can begin working a few years earlier than they are allowed. It causes a cycle of poverty because the kids get used to the farm and they miss out on proper schooling.

nozzlegear• 2 years ago

This sounds quite sinister but it was a common summer job in Iowa for teenagers. You could make enough in a summer to buy a used car.

Yeah, I got my first job working on a family dairy when I turned 14. It was tough work, especially having to wake up at 3:30am on the weekends to go work outside in negative temperatures over the winters. It did help me purchase my first car and other things that my friends either couldn't afford or had to have their parents buy for them.

mmooss6• 2 years ago

Is dairy work in Minnesota the same as picking watermelons in the desert? These are all different jobs, not really comparable.

projectileboy• 2 years ago

I live in Minnesota. I hear what you’re saying, but I would say two things: in general, teenagers here are not being somehow denied farm work that they really want but is unavailable; and there’s a pretty big difference between Minnesota/Iowa summer heat and picking cantaloupes in inland California. The big difference being about 20 degrees on average, with more sun.

dredmorbius2• 2 years ago

Hotter in California perhaps, but far more humid in the Midwest.

85F / 90% humidity is probably more taxing than 100F / 30% RH.

throwaway984393• 2 years ago

The jobs are available for citizens. But they don't do them. And it's not because of immigration. Think about it for more than 5 seconds. They could just stop immigration for migrant workers and suddenly give citizens jobs. Every politician wants to be known as a job creator. But they don't. Why? There is not enough workers here. Proof? COVID. They stopped letting migrant workers in and farms failed left and right from lack of workers.

We weren't lacking teenagers. We were lacking a dirt cheap seasonal exploitable massive workforce. There are not enough teens even if we conscripted them all. And if you don't, teens don't like doing work. Most teens don't live in the sticks anymore. And (for teens) we care about these stupid things like safety, a minimum wage, and labor laws.

It's not 1950 anymore. The world has changed. The reason we need migrant workers is WalMart. Their demand for ever lower prices creates the need for the lowest priced highest supply scalable labor due to a global supply chain and pricing pressure. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Want cheap shit? Then you hire migrant workers. Or give up on farms and buy from overseas. Or make robots that can pick fruit. There's no free lunch.

mmooss6• 2 years ago

It's not 1950 anymore. The world has changed.

Per the OP, the US needed migrant workers in the 1960s and before that - the OP is about a failed experiment in replacing migrant workers.

dredmorbius2• 2 years ago

US ag labour has rarely functioned in a free-market fashion.

Through 1864, roughly half of the ag states used slave labour.

California, nominally a free state, had developed (under Spanish and Mexican rule) using what was effectively slave native labour. Following statehood, ag labour was largely imported: from China in the 19th century, from Mexico and Japan in the 20th, with the Bracero programme (established in WWII), and of course Oakies during the dustbowl as immortalised in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, all of whom were at best severely politically marginalised. Conditions in the antebellum former Confederacy long disadvantaged labour as well.

The US National Labour Relations Act (NLRA, 1935) explicitly excluded farm labor from its protections (wages, hours, conditions, unions). California eventually pased the Agricultural Labour Relations Act (ALRA) forty years later, which provided for the right to unionise (Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association features strongly in promoting this), and ... even it is fairly weak sauce despite being the only significant ag labour law in the US.

Farming itself is a marginal business, and farm labour gets the short side of that stick. The underlying economic reasons are complex, and not readily solved. It's not that the present situation is fair to farm workers at all, but a sudden shift would likely be catastrophic across the board. I'd like to see a far fairer system, but it would take significant governance and management to roll out smoothly.

bitbuilder• 2 years ago

Likewise it reminded me of my first summer job growing up in rural northern Illinois in the 80s: detasseling corn [1]. It was just something we pretty much all did, starting in Jr. High. So, if my math is correct, starting at around 12 or 13. The whole thing was managed via our school counselors, and they even used school buses to haul us out to the fields.

In the years I was doing it we all just lined up on one end of the field and walked the length of it pulling the tassles from the top of every stalk of corn. We started before dawn, soaked in the dew of the fields and freezing cold. And we ended early afternoon, soaked in sweat.

Pretty messed up in hindsight, though I can't say I've spent too much time thinking about it over the years. The only real lasting impact it's had on me is a crippling fear of grasshoppers, after being swarmed by them a few times in the fields.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detasseling

7bit3• 2 years ago

An honest day's work, doing hard labour and getting paid merely nothing in comparison. Teenager's are often used because they lack the experience of what a job should pay. If I think back to the jobs I took and the money I earned, my hard work was never appreciated. Neither on a human level nor financially. But I was shouted at for the tiniest mistakes.

hitekker• 2 years ago

It's definitely true that early farm employment can deprive children of opportunity, and cause a knock-down effect on their education. Your naysayers are right to cite how exploitative these illegal farming employments are.

But the rest of the reaction seems a little out of place. Maybe it's a major culture difference: we're mostly cosmopolitan white collars with luxury time & luxury salaries, and they're our rural countrymen working with their hands and having to make ends meet.

Is it our place to judge them so harshly?

UncleOxidant2• 2 years ago

I worked in strawberry & bean fields (as well as bucking hay) in Oregon when I was a teen in the 70s. It was really common then to work a couple of summers to save up for a used car or for college money.

Because of immigration these jobs are not really available for citizens anymore. I haven't heard of any teenagers taking this work in some time

I don't think immigration was what killed those jobs for citizen teens. I think it was more like rising prosperity such that they didn't want to do those jobs anymore. I can recall teens regularly canvassing the neighborhood in the 90s asking if we wanted our lawn mowed. But that stopped by around 2000. It's unheard of now. Immigration didn't stop them from doing that, it was more of a cultural shift that caused them not to desire to do that kind of work anymore.

[and sure, immigrants have taken over the lawn maintenance field, but their prices aren't cheap - most of them charge a few $hundred just to start service which is generally in the $200/month range now where I'm at. Teens could undercut these prices easily and still do well, but they don't seem interested]

jonfw• 2 years ago

If you think lawn care is expensive now, you’d think it was crazy expensive if the labor was only done by citizens!

Teens would be much more likely to mow lawns if the lawn care market had more money in it.

BenFranklin100• 2 years ago

Wait, seriously, teenagers no longer mow lawns in the neighborhood for extra cash? I did that all the time as a teenager. I sound like a grumpy Boomer.

Afforess• 2 years ago

Setting aside the moral component, and focusing on the economic; the Trump deportation plan is red carpet invitation for consolidation. Agriculture today is a declining mix of many medium and small growers, with a few mega growers that have increasingly concentrated their market share of output. Deportation will greatly accelerate this trend, consolidating most agriculture under a few mega growers. Small and medium sized farm operations can’t afford the capital for complex automation to replace manual labor - but mega corps can.

cjbgkagh2• 2 years ago

The Trump team has already stated they are limiting deportations to criminal illegals, so I guess just people who are in the US illegally and have committed a separate crime. This is before any real opposition has been mounted where it’s expected he’ll cave anyway. Trump is more likely to start a war with Iran than he is to do any sort of mass deportation.

Also a weird thing is happening with automation, it’s getting a lot cheaper, bespoke tooling and machines are going through a substantial revolution. And that is not including any AI stuff. The price of small batch electronics and machines are dropping fast.

Jtsummers• 2 years ago

limiting deportations to criminal illegals

That's where they're intending to start (deporting those convicted of, possibly charged with, other crimes). Neither he nor his representatives have said that that's where they'll stop.

xenospn• 2 years ago

Aren’t these people being deported already? What’s new about this?

energy123• 2 years ago

Can you explain more about changes in automation in farming?

Terr_• 2 years ago

The Trump team has already stated they are limiting deportations to criminal illegals

The same one Trump promised would be "the largest deportation program in American history"?

We've already had years of the Trumposphere emitting contradictory bullshit, and whenever you are considering an entity that that does not care about truth or honesty or ethics, it's sensible to assume that the outcome will be less than good.

somenameforme• 2 years ago

Lots of smaller farms are family run. It's the mega farms that excessively rely on outside labor, particularly during critical seasons. They're 4.4% of farms, but 47.6% of production. There's a lot of data here. [1] I think there's a reasonable argument that deportations could instead work to decentralize things by effectively increasing labor costs. Hard to keep massive farms running (and offering cheap crops) without large labor pools willing to work for what is literally pennies per bucket of crops that they harvest.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

throw2021• 2 years ago

We should make sure all teenagers get an opportunity to work on fields just the way its used to be

kylehotchkiss• 2 years ago

Yeah, as like punishment for spending too many hours on TikTok.

LAC-Tech3• 2 years ago

is "Migrant" a euphemism here for "illegal migrant"?

If your business needs illegal labour, then it's not a viable business, and it should die. If your pay is so low that no one wants to do your work, why should you be able to break the law with impunity because your business can't compete? Innovate, or die.

galleywest200• 2 years ago

Road construction could come to a halt in some portions of the US. It is estimated that ~13% of all construction workers in the US are undocumented. I would be willing to bet they are more concentrated in certain states (Texas).

https://www.axios.com/2024/11/19/undocumented-workers-immigr...

LAC-Tech3• 2 years ago

But who will build the roads?

Sorry, just trying to summon libertarians.

marcusverus• 2 years ago

10% of American men aged 25-54 don't have a job and aren't looking for one[0]. The problem isn't a lack of workers, the problem is that Americans expect higher wages than illegals. If you kick the illegals out, wages will rise until Americans are willing to do the work.

This is why Bernie opposed rampant illegal immigration before he sold out.

https://www.businessinsider.com/men-not-working-unemployment...

rib3ye2• 2 years ago

Would you rather your tax dollars were used to subsidize farmers or do you just want to pay more for food?

collingreen• 2 years ago

What's the difference?

LAC-Tech3• 2 years ago

You know what would make farming even cheaper? Child labour. So would indentured servitude. Or why not consider slavery? After all we've established that we're fine with breaking the law so that certain industries have lower operating costs, so these should all be on the table. No one wants to pay more for food.

Besides, child slaves do the jobs Americans don't want to do! You're socially immoral if you don't support it.

jldugger• 2 years ago

There are also legal migrant farm workers, FWIW.

Stevvo• 2 years ago

No, it is not. Try reading the article before attempting to so drastically change the framing.

mmooss6• 2 years ago

Interesting it was in 1965, around the time of the Cultural Revolution in China which forced masses of non-working class people to leave the cities and work on farms.

(I'm not certain of the exact timing of the farm labor program in China.)

titanomachy2• 2 years ago

Similar, except the teenagers were allowed to quit.

mmooss6• 2 years ago

I didn't mean to say it was too similar - the US participants weren't participating forced labor as punishment for their economic class, lasting years, by a violent political movement.

friend_Fernando6• 2 years ago

If you're center-left like me, here's something you might not have realized yet. The conventional wisdom is that racial cleansing is the goal and that the economic cost of mass deportations is the price. It's actually the other way around.

The economic cost is the goal. The racial cleansing is just how that cost is initially justified to the base.

Once the economy really starts heading south, blame Democrats and other phantom enemies. It's much harder to jail the opposition and overturn democracy when things are going well. The blueprints are Venezuela and Argentina.

titanomachy2• 2 years ago

You’re saying that the advocates of deportation are aiming to intentionally destroy the economy so that they can increase their political power?

That seems less likely to me than either simple racism or a poor understanding of economics.

friend_Fernando6• 2 years ago

Obviously not all the advocates share that goal - that's the whole point. Most people would not be OK with intentionally trashing the economy to overturn democracy. It's a camouflaged poison pill policy.

Here are two other Russian proxies achieving totalitarianism. Economically, they're not doing it by racking up pats on the back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_in_Venezuela

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPPC@WEO/VEN

https://apnews.com/article/argentina-economy-crisis-javier-m...

AnimalMuppet2• 2 years ago

Of course, a poor understanding of economics can be nearly as damaging as actual malice...

TrackerFF• 2 years ago

Growing up in Norway, picking strawberries was always a typical summer job for teens. You'd get bussed to the field, be crouched down all day under scorching heat, and...well, it sucked. Just sucked. And the pay was piss poor.

Pretty much any summer job would pay more, and in the end less and less teens decided to pick strawberries. Farmers complained, and then started flying inn south-east Asian rice farmers to pick berries instead. Relative to their pay back home, picking berries in Norway was a pretty sweet deal. Many still go there annually to pick during berry season.

They live cramped in a cottage, and work all day. If it's a good season, they make good money. If it's a bad season, they break even. Unfortunately there are some pretty scummy farmers that will exploit the situation. Here's a short docu following Thai pickers in Sweden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW1QWG3xSNg

glial• 2 years ago

Farms in the US do the exact same thing with Mexicans for berry farming.

When the U.S. tried to replace migrant farmworkers with high schoolers (2018)

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