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This is nothing new. Been going on for many years. Migrant workers whole families get out in the fields working. Now all of a sudden it is slave labor?
Heck as a kid growing up on a dairy farm I cannot remember when I didn't have to help out in the milk parlor. After I got some size on me I was out plowing fields, making hay, chop, filling the silos you name it I was doing it.
Maybe if they publicize this enough the bleeding hearts will want to get rid of the illegals.
No, the bleeding heart liberals love money as much as anybody does. They are hypocrites and don't want the price of the head of lettuce they buy to rise by having to pay a real American to harvest it. The only ones that would bother becoming an activist to expose this would be the Hollywood scum that have millions of dollars but no credibility.
Illegal immigrants harvesting our produce will never go away. Americans are too accustomed to paying the prices we do for produce. If we were to start paying triple that amount because it could only be harvested by Americans with benefits, then there would be an uproar.
I remember when I was nine years old my dad had two heart attacks and I had to work like any adult. We had 7000 bales of hay to put up and 5 acres of tobacco and I remember crying and wondering why I had to work so hard at that age. When I went to school I found out real quick that I could whip any three others * with ease as I was always big for my age.
Depends on your perception of "slavery". If the parents get paid for doing a job and the kids help them do that job, it's the parents who are the slave masters not the employer. If the kids are held as property and forced to work w/o compensation, that would be slavery. I worked from age 5 doing chores, milking, and in the hay field. It was expected for kids to help and there were always little jobs to do. My older 1/2 brother was drafted when I was 13 so I was the main source of labor for the next 2 1/2 years. Like jltrent said, I matured fast and went from a typical 13 year old skin and bones 5'3" 90# kid to a 14 year old @115# of solid muscle. No after school sports, dances, or other social activities-just get home ASAP and do the chores and then homework. I didn't consider it as slavery then but I do feel a little twinge when I think back on it now. I wrecked my body before I was old enough to vote and suffer for it now.
Farm families have been known to accept foster children and use them as field hands. Free labor and a check from the state to boot! It worked in Georgia when my ex was in foster care. She and her sister were nothing more than unpaid farm hands.
Child slave labor on American farms? Hey, I want my just reparations with interest compounded for all the years of my childhood milking cows, hoeing tobacco, baling hay, etc., etc., and being whipped for not work fast enough or hard enough or complaining.
I guess back then that was just growing up on the farm as nothing was any different with the other kids I grew up with.
Today on the farm we can't get teenagers to work even for $15.00 per hour.
Cry me a river to the tune of give me some government handouts for the illegals.
Kids have always worked on farms. When they do it in America, it's a family pulling together. When they do it in China, it's explotation of child labor, or slave labor. The first paying job I had was picking strawberries when I was 8.
When I was growing up it was simple. If you lived on a farm you did chores. If you went to play with a friend at their family's farm for the afternoon that was fine. If you ate a meal or slept overnight you were "family" and you did chores. I thought it was a fine way to grow up.
quote:Originally posted by striperbware
No, the bleeding heart liberals love money as much as anybody does. They are hypocrites and don't want the price of the head of lettuce they buy to rise by having to pay a real American to harvest it. The only ones that would bother becoming an activist to expose this would be the Hollywood scum that have millions of dollars but no credibility.
Illegal immigrants harvesting our produce will never go away. Americans are too accustomed to paying the prices we do for produce. If we were to start paying triple that amount because it could only be harvested by Americans with benefits, then there would be an uproar.
Or an awful lot of spoiled produce setting in a dumpster out behind the grocery store.
The parents say they have their kids working because they aren't paid enough themselves.
They also are still developing people being exposed to poisonous herbicides and pesticides.
I don't have any problem with kids working in their parent's businesses but for somebody else to hire a 5 year old girl to haul around buckets of blueberries seems too much.
Today on the farm we can't get teenagers to work even for $15.00 per hour.
tell me about it; that's because they can make $15 an hour (not an exageration; that's exactly what it paid) skipping work to hang out at long john silver's when they're supposed to be swinging a sign advertising houses for sale. it was the best-paying job in town, and i didn't want any part of it. makes no sense to me, that kind of money for that laziness. three years later and i'm doing considerably better than those lazy sign-swinging kids [:D]
growing up on the farm with my two brothers and two sisters in the late 40,s and 50,s we got .50 cents a week and free room and board,so it was not quite slavery. but i would not trade that time for any thing, we were a close nit familey and stayed that way thru the deaths of my parents and one brother. eastbank.
quote:Originally posted by striperbware
No, the bleeding heart liberals love money as much as anybody does. They are hypocrites and don't want the price of the head of lettuce they buy to rise by having to pay a real American to harvest it. The only ones that would bother becoming an activist to expose this would be the Hollywood scum that have millions of dollars but no credibility.
Illegal immigrants harvesting our produce will never go away. Americans are too accustomed to paying the prices we do for produce. If we were to start paying triple that amount because it could only be harvested by Americans with benefits, then there would be an uproar.
Before employing a fear tactic favored by open-borders advocates, why not ask yourself how much of the cost of a head of lettuce goes to pay field workers? According to the University of California, the cost is about 22 cents to grow and harvest a head of lettuce. Of that, about 15 cents goes for farm labor. If we doubled the wages of farm workers, the cost of a head of lettuce would increase by 15 cents - even less if labor-saving machines are justified.
For labor costs to force lettuce to $5 per head, farmers would have to pay field workers $280 an hour. At that rate, it would be the kind of work "every American would want to do."
The problem with illegal immigration is not that labor costs too much; it is that growers compete in a commodity market. If one grower can outdo another by using illegal labor, then his profits will increase. Inevitably, all growers must do the same thing to survive. As recent studies show, illegal immigration is driving down the wages of millions of Americans, while at the same time increasing their taxes.
quote:Originally posted by RtWngExtrmst
Kids have always worked on farms. When they do it in America, it's a family pulling together. When they do it in China, it's explotation of child labor, or slave labor. The first paying job I had was picking strawberries when I was 8.
In Alabama ,the schools used to close 2 weeks for "cotton picking".
Every member of the family was needed to get the crop in .
I also picked tomatoes one summer ----10 cents per bushel !
I could make a dollar per day for my 10 bushel .[V]
Of course I was only around 10 .
Like alot of folks here I spent time overseas. I saw kids working 7 days a week in downtown shops, probably 12 hrs a day and they got maybe 2400 won for a days work - IIRC that's maybe $3.00. I remember because that was how much it cost for - well, anyway ...
I hear folks talking about sweat shops overseas, working conditions overseas, children working and I suppose the intent is good, but it is also presumptuous to impose our mindset on other societies. Telling a kid they can't work, telling someone they shouldn't work 7 days, that their working conditions must be better and what they hear is "you want to take money from my pocket, food from my family. We'll lose these jobs to another country".
Some of these families have to make a choice between the kid working and everyone eating or no work, no eat. Imposing our ethics on them, in effect saying "we've made it now you live by our morality" is off base, I think. Whether that's also the case with these families here I don't know.
I'm not saying it's a a best choice situation, but I think alot of Americans would be surprised, shocked and probably disturbed at how much of the world lives.
didn't read the article......i was out running tractors by time i was in third grade helping tend to livestock before that even .....hell mom and dad couldn't pry me off a tractor....i'd skip as much school as i could to plant crops and ect...they have to come out and pretty much force me to quit at night other wise i would have planted all night![:D]
Comments
The western world talks out both sides of its mouth on this kind of thing.
Many of the products produced in China are done so with slave or very low paid workers.
Heck as a kid growing up on a dairy farm I cannot remember when I didn't have to help out in the milk parlor. After I got some size on me I was out plowing fields, making hay, chop, filling the silos you name it I was doing it.
Maybe if they publicize this enough the bleeding hearts will want to get rid of the illegals.
Illegal immigrants harvesting our produce will never go away. Americans are too accustomed to paying the prices we do for produce. If we were to start paying triple that amount because it could only be harvested by Americans with benefits, then there would be an uproar.
I guess back then that was just growing up on the farm as nothing was any different with the other kids I grew up with.
Today on the farm we can't get teenagers to work even for $15.00 per hour.
Cry me a river to the tune of give me some government handouts for the illegals.
No, the bleeding heart liberals love money as much as anybody does. They are hypocrites and don't want the price of the head of lettuce they buy to rise by having to pay a real American to harvest it. The only ones that would bother becoming an activist to expose this would be the Hollywood scum that have millions of dollars but no credibility.
Illegal immigrants harvesting our produce will never go away. Americans are too accustomed to paying the prices we do for produce. If we were to start paying triple that amount because it could only be harvested by Americans with benefits, then there would be an uproar.
Or an awful lot of spoiled produce setting in a dumpster out behind the grocery store.
Allen
They also are still developing people being exposed to poisonous herbicides and pesticides.
I don't have any problem with kids working in their parent's businesses but for somebody else to hire a 5 year old girl to haul around buckets of blueberries seems too much.
They can legally hire them at 12....not five.
Today on the farm we can't get teenagers to work even for $15.00 per hour.
tell me about it; that's because they can make $15 an hour (not an exageration; that's exactly what it paid) skipping work to hang out at long john silver's when they're supposed to be swinging a sign advertising houses for sale. it was the best-paying job in town, and i didn't want any part of it. makes no sense to me, that kind of money for that laziness. three years later and i'm doing considerably better than those lazy sign-swinging kids [:D]
No, the bleeding heart liberals love money as much as anybody does. They are hypocrites and don't want the price of the head of lettuce they buy to rise by having to pay a real American to harvest it. The only ones that would bother becoming an activist to expose this would be the Hollywood scum that have millions of dollars but no credibility.
Illegal immigrants harvesting our produce will never go away. Americans are too accustomed to paying the prices we do for produce. If we were to start paying triple that amount because it could only be harvested by Americans with benefits, then there would be an uproar.
Before employing a fear tactic favored by open-borders advocates, why not ask yourself how much of the cost of a head of lettuce goes to pay field workers? According to the University of California, the cost is about 22 cents to grow and harvest a head of lettuce. Of that, about 15 cents goes for farm labor. If we doubled the wages of farm workers, the cost of a head of lettuce would increase by 15 cents - even less if labor-saving machines are justified.
For labor costs to force lettuce to $5 per head, farmers would have to pay field workers $280 an hour. At that rate, it would be the kind of work "every American would want to do."
The problem with illegal immigration is not that labor costs too much; it is that growers compete in a commodity market. If one grower can outdo another by using illegal labor, then his profits will increase. Inevitably, all growers must do the same thing to survive. As recent studies show, illegal immigration is driving down the wages of millions of Americans, while at the same time increasing their taxes.
Kids have always worked on farms. When they do it in America, it's a family pulling together. When they do it in China, it's explotation of child labor, or slave labor. The first paying job I had was picking strawberries when I was 8.
In Alabama ,the schools used to close 2 weeks for "cotton picking".
Every member of the family was needed to get the crop in .
I also picked tomatoes one summer ----10 cents per bushel !
I could make a dollar per day for my 10 bushel .[V]
Of course I was only around 10 .
I hear folks talking about sweat shops overseas, working conditions overseas, children working and I suppose the intent is good, but it is also presumptuous to impose our mindset on other societies. Telling a kid they can't work, telling someone they shouldn't work 7 days, that their working conditions must be better and what they hear is "you want to take money from my pocket, food from my family. We'll lose these jobs to another country".
Some of these families have to make a choice between the kid working and everyone eating or no work, no eat. Imposing our ethics on them, in effect saying "we've made it now you live by our morality" is off base, I think. Whether that's also the case with these families here I don't know.
I'm not saying it's a a best choice situation, but I think alot of Americans would be surprised, shocked and probably disturbed at how much of the world lives.