Tuesday, January 23rd, 2018
Stephan: Since most of the food you eat is harvested by migrant farm workers, and it is almost impossible to hire American citizens to do the work, you would think that in the interest of social wellbeing taking care of those farm workers would be in the national interest -- 56 per cent them work in crop agriculture, and the remaining 44 percent work in livestock. Your good health is dependent on their work.
But we are no longer a country that thinks about wellbeing, particularly the Republican Party. To enrich the few these workers are exploited, abused, and now subject to deportation. As a result there are fewer and fewer of them coming to the country to do the work.
That means your food costs are going to go up as crops rot in the ground, or don't get planted at all. Here's the story.
Immigrant farm workers
Credit: USDA/Bob Nichols
Every decade or so, America’s mass media are surprised to discover that migrant farmworkers are being miserably paid and despicably treated by the industry that profits from their labor.
Stories run, the public is outraged, assorted officials pledge action, then… nothing changes.
Several news reports recently have re-documented that the shameful abuse of these hard-working, hard-traveling families continues.
A Los Angeles Times report revealed that, even if they receive the legal minimum wage, many farm laborers earn less than $17,500 a year because of the low pay and the seasonal nature of their work. Moreover, they are often “housed” in shacks, old chicken coops, shipping containers, and squalid motels.
This year, though, multibillion-dollar agribusiness interests from Florida to California are uniting in a push for new assistance – not for workers, but themselves.
While they backed Trump for president, many are now expressing shock that he may actually try to fulfill his campaign promise to cut off the flow of undocumented immigrants to their fields.
They now admit that these immigrants […]
