Comment by throwaway984393 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway984393 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway984393

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.

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.

> 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.

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