A reader sent me this article on how farmers in Alabama can’t find Americans willing to take farm jobs formerly filled by eager illegal immigrants. One big objection to the work is that it is physically demanding, yet millions of Americans voluntarily pay for gym membership and/or boot camp-style fitness programs. Maybe the farm jobs should be advertised as “lose weight working out in the sun”.
25 thoughts on “Gym membership and boot camp popular with Americans, but farm work is not”
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It’s not that they farmers can’t find workers willing to take farm jobs. It is that farmers can’t find workers willing to take farm jobs at the rates they are willing to pay (I’d be out there picking strawberries for, say, $500 an hour!). Food prices will just need to reach an equilibrium with the prices that are required to produce the food. That’s how an economy works.
Big difference between a 45 minute workout 3 times a week and 8 hours a day at minimum wage, or, depending on the size of the farm, well less than that, and with no health benefits for when skin cancer kicks in.
Agree 100% with anonymous. Conversely, ports have no problem finding americans to fill 100k/year longshoremen jobs.
If you model farm attendance to the gym, farmers could only count on people showing up the first 2 weeks of the year and no-show the rest of the year.
Maybe the laborers should pay for the privilege of “losing weight working out in the sun?” http://www.eckerts.com/
So for a non-experienced, entry level worker, the pay amounts to $3 an hour, assuming an eight hour work day (which it may not be).
Say tomatoes cost $2 a lb at market. That means the pickers’ wages accounts for 4% of the price of tomatoes ($2 for $50 of tomatoes, i.e. 25 lbs). So doubling their wages would increase the price of tomatoes by 4%. It might even be less, due to the elasticity of demand.
Is $6 an hour too much to ask?
Farmers will sell the country down the road and saddle taxpayers with tens of thousands in education and health obligations to get a discount on their labor. Farming is tough, but like any other profession, they will put their own interests ahead of the taxpayers’.
45 minutes twice a week jogging in place on a treadmill listening to an iPod and reading Vanity Fair magazine in no way equates with standing bent over in the sun 8-10 hours a day 6-7 days a week picking produce.
Poor performance by Alabama’s legislators for not planning for the transition in the labor workforce. The non-illegal replacements need to have physical preparation, training, transportation, housing, and adjust to a lifestyle in order to be productive. The hand of the free market is not magic – some planning is needed to deal with the physical realities of human frailty and needs.
“Doubling wages would increase the price of tomatoes by only 4%…”
Tomatoes are a pure commodity. Producers are price takers, not price setters. Selling at even a 4% premium, you tend to go out of business.
You can pay farm workers more through higher productivity or by differentiation (to raise prices). For either one, you need a high savings rate (drives down cost of capital) and an educated workforce. Yes, even for farming, our grandpappies were right about education and thrift.
Food for thought – the effect of forced exercise on brain health:
“The preliminary results are raising fascinating questions … about … whether intense, essentially forced workouts affect brains differently than gentler activity does, even in those of us who are healthy.”
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/12/what-parkinsons-teaches-us-about-the-brain/
Of course farmers are complaining and prophesying doom, and of course the media supports their Davos Man overlords and defends illegal aliens (“undocumented workers”), even as they pile on companies like Wal-Mart for not paying employees enough. Laws like the ones in Alabama and Arizona are extremely popular in opinion polls nationwide, but you never hear that in the news stories, it’s all talk of fruit rotting on the vine. Yes, there will be some short-term pain in readjusting to the absence of illegal alien slave labor, but the long-term benefit is that you don’t have a permanent underclass of crime-prone, unassimilable Morlocks. If Congress was serious about bringing unemployment down it would extend the Alabma law to cover the whole country, but they’re all too scared of the r-word to enact a policy that’s a clear winner at the polls everywhere outside of Southern California.
Why can’t farming be outsourced to other countries? We outsource everything else, what is so sacrosanct about having food grown in the US? How come we feel we must import workers under the table to pick crops but we must also restrict skilled immigration to this country? If we must grow crops here why don’t we pay out of work people to pick crops instead of giving them 99 weeks of sitting on the couch?
It is clear that none of you have ever worked in the fields. To equate a gym workout with the day-to-day, filthy, backbreaking work in the fields is absurdity. I’m white, from a small ag community in northern CA where our summer jobs were in the fields. I was a collegiate athlete in track-competition shape – and the first week in the fields ALWAYS kicked my ass, but your body does adjust. I’ve worked in prunes, tomatoes, and peaches, and supervised prune drying crews – there are some jobs that whites will not do for any price. For myself, working asparagus was one job I would not / could not do – the hispanics working there were TOUGH! Maybe my grandparents could do that job (depression era farm hands), but my parents generation and mine couldn’t/wouldn’t – not enough economic pain to go there.
Thank GOD for an education where you don’t have to do this work.
I’ve had the “oh, I’d do that for $500/hr” types try to work my crew – they always quit after a few hours. America is SOFT, it isn’t an economic incentive, in this economy there are too many easier options – like welfare. I think you’d have to get to economics like my grandparents’ era – everyone totally broke with no options – to get a supply of non-immigrants into the fields.
What can you achieve with backbreaking labor? My grandfather literally had a dime when he started and ended up a millionaire owning a quarter section of prime CA ag land (after 30yrs of hard labor, also being as his own banker). He always told us to get an education, summer ag jobs were OK, but don’t do them for a living.
If the legislators in AL and GA were forced to work in the fields for one week, they would change that legislation and give all those illegal workers green cards.
OK Mark, lets see you put your money where you mouth is. I am an ivy league graduate with a graduate education and work in finance services. You pick the farm (that you are unassociated with): I’ll show up and work with the immigrants every day for a week. If I make it through the week without quieting or getting fired, I’ll pay you $500 for every hour I didn’t make it. On the other hand, if I make it through the week you pay me $500 a hour for those I worked. Deal?
Phil, will you agree to arbitrate?
Anonymous/Mark: I would agree to arbitrate. I would also try out the work myself. I have a feeling that I would not last the full week. I pull weeds in the yard here (where “weed” includes glossy buckthorns that are up to 20′ high) and am pretty wiped out after 3 hours plus sore the next day. In my present shape I could probably handle 3 hours of agricultural work every other day (i.e., about 10 hours/week). But maybe that would be practical. Just have Americans who would have gone to the gym instead go to the fields. Our domestic workforce of field hands would be weak and pathetic compared to experienced workers but much larger and therefore still able to bring in the crops.
Here comes the old “doing jobs Americans won’t do” canard. An acquaintance who lives in Alabama tells me there were virtually NO Mexicans there just 10-15 years ago, yet all the heavy manual labor still got done somehow. Mark himself admits that the work is tough at first but then your body adjusts and it gets easier. Anecdotes notwithstanding, it’s also hard to believe that Mexicans are some kind of tough, industrious super-race doing jobs Americans are physically incapable of, especially given Mexico’s stagnant 3rd-world economy.
It’s not a complicated issue: the mass immigration of the last few decades has been a war waged by the rich against the middle class, which has driven down wages, forced people to flee the immigrant ghettos sprouting up in all major cities, created a permanent crime-prone underclass that will never assimilate, and brought on chaotic ethnic balkanization that has destroyed the social capital built up over centuries (I strongly recommend Harvard professor Robert Putnam’s work on how diversity destroys trust and breaks up communities; there’s a reason white people keep fleeing to enclaves like Portland and Seattle). The people who should have opposed this major transformation of America were too afraid of being called racists to make any effective resistance, so now a few states are making last-ditch efforts to defend themselves. I shudder to think where this country will be in 20 years if these efforts fail.
Mannerheim: Could it be that certain politicians have encouraged this fragmentation of our culture to get votes? A short term goal with long term consequences…
The Bracero Program that was in place from 1942 to 1964 provided a legal avenue to import mexican farm workers on a short term basis. The Unions effectively shut it down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracero_Program
As an alternative to working the fields on a part time basis, perhaps spending a few hours a day working our on own gardens might be an effective way to get a workout. Other than that, an hour to an hour and a half a day of focused scientific exercise is a much healthier way to stay in shape.
> …I’ll pay you $500 for every hour I didn’t make it. On the other hand, if I make it through the week you pay me $500 a hour for those I worked…
Am I the only one who is surprised this premise hasn’t been packaged into a reality TV show?
Where do people get the idea that picking crops is unskilled labor?
It takes raw talent (physical ability to start with), skill, training, endurance, and hundreds of hours of experience to be able to do the job.
Isn’t most of it piecework? i.e. you get paid by the bag, bushel or pound, not by the hour.
All,
As a person who grew up on a hay and tobacco farm in southern Virginia, I am amazed to read all these thoughtful replies yet that fail to mention the major factor that has contributed to the illegal immigrant woes on most farm ops, at least in the south.
It’s young people, or more plainly the distinct lack thereof that has resulted in immigrants taking these jobs! In my farm days (25 years ago) the local community produced scores of youngsters (age anywhere from 14-21) who would take virtually every farm job offered in the summer and early fall. Now days, these same farms couldn’t get an American youth off the couch to perform these back-breaking jobs if their lives depended on it.
Parents used to urge their kids to work, but now they’re way to busy running them to a mall or getting their xbox repaired to even consider putting Johnny or Timmy in a tobacco field.
Ask a southern US farmer who has been around awhile about the difference in the labor make-up over the last two decades and one of the first things he will mention is the total lack of available American youth labor now.
I suppose moms and dads recall how tough that work was and just don’t want to make their own kids get in the fields.
They don’t get Americans to perform this work because farmers pay slave wages in a virtually unregulated working environment. Even if you worked under these conditions you would still need welfare to survive.
César Chávez figured this out decades ago.
What nonsense. I used to wash dishes for 4.25/hour. Of course I’ll pick tomatoes for 500/hour. 99.999 percent of Americans would, no matter the back pain.
Work in pain can ye onetwothree? I’ll believe it when I see you walk a mile with both feet freshly sawed off!
I washed dishes too ($0.75/hr). They had to be removed while hot (burned hands) but it was easy work. Later on I cut meat ($3.80/hour) in a place where 9 men out of 10 quit in the first two hours. Of those actually able to do the work, I saw one slice off the tips of three fingers in a band-saw, another put a knife through his wrist (a month later he did it again), another nick the femoral vein (his blood came out like he was peeing–a near death that), another had the insides of both knees gored to the bone at the same time, the man that slit throats got kicked a dozen times every day—these were all careful, skilled men who knew the job well. The worse thing I saw was the ex-foreman, who had retired, show up one day to tell the crew how our employer had screwed him in his pension (not a union shop).
A dangerous job, but a paradise compared to any kind of fieldwork—I was damned glad I wasn’t detasseling corn!
It’s mighty easy for someone who has never done a lick of work to tell someone else to hop to it.
Jim,
I’d love to see our government’s attempts at “regulating” a farm’s
working environment. Let’s try to imagine…mandatory water breaks
every three slide loads of pulled tobacco, a fifteen minute rest after each bulk
barn is filled, sun exposure for no more than three consecutive hours,
etc and of course, free ObamaCare for all workers, legal or not!
And in the end, the mass confusion over the new regs would be blamed
on the Bush Administration.
Unlike many, I attended private schools my whole life. Now, I bill out a comfortable $100 an hour. What got me here? Am I spoiled? Not a chance… I had to work for it – as soon as I was 13 or 14, my parents sent me to work on a farm every summer, and for those 5 or 6 years, all the money I earned went straight to tuition.
Farm work involved doing everything from picking berries/corn/tomatoes/etc to hoeing acres and acres of growing plants, and much more. All for less than $5 an hour. The days were backbreaking and long – at LEAST 8 hours, sometimes as much as twice that. And yes, it’s true – most american’s can’t handle it. I’ve seen scores of locals quit, but the immigrant workers never did.
Immigrant workers tend to work hard, show up reliably, and do a good job. The average american shows up late, complains too much, takes too many breaks, and doesn’t work fast enough or with as much quality. When they realize they can’t handle farm work, they quit and go sit at home. It seems like it comes down to the lack of a solid work ethic, and the mentality that they don’t have to stick with it – to americans, sitting at home and living off their parents or the government is an option. The immigrant’s don’t have a choice – farm work is the best thing available. American’s feel like they have a choice – not working at all.
Other than learning a lot of Spanish from the immigrant workers, farm work instilled a work ethic in me that very few of my peers have. Knowing the real meaning of hard work is something that keeps paying back years later. I’m only in my 30s, but I shake my head when I see how lazy some people (especially the younger generation) can be.
>> “…should be advertised as ‘lose weight working out in the sun’.”
In the early ’90s on my college campus, UPS placed advertizements for seasonal jobs unloading semitrailers. The ads said “Work Out While You Work!”. Those of us who took the jobs found out very quickly that the jobs were a lot harder than anything we did at the gym. (And handling boxes is tame compared to some of the tasks involved in farming/fishing/mining/etc.) I don’t think the white collar population recognizes the bodily damage incurred by people who do physical work. Like pro football players, they spend their later years suffering from injuries sustained in their prime. Of course, they don’t get the football player’s million dollar paycheck.