Update: Last night Stephen Colbert welcomed UFW President Arturo Rodriquez onto his show to discuss immigration and the TakeOurJobs.org campaign. It was revealed that thus far a full THREE people have used the program, designed to give work that usually goes to undocumented workers to US citizens. Not 3,000 or 300. Three. But Colbert announced he'd make it four, saying he will go work in California's lettuce fields. It's in the last segment of this episode
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A few years back I was in a church basement in Oklahoma City preparing a meal for a busload of Florida farm workers on their way home from California. They had gone there to stage a protest at Taco Bell parent corporation Yum! Brands HQ. Their humble request? Two cents more per pound of tomatoes picked by their compatriots in and around Immokalee, Florida, so that they might be lifted out of near-and-actual slavery.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers eventually won that fight and many others like it, but their lives in the tomato fields there are still by no means easy. It's backbreaking work in the hot Southwest Florida sun, with long hours, poor housing and little to no free time.
Recognizing though that there are unemployment and immigration problems in this country, the Godfather of a farm worker movements - The United Farm Workers - has come up with an innovative solution. Their suggestion: Take Our Jobs! That's right, all the folks who are out of work and feel that undocumented workers are taking jobs that should go to American citizens like themselves are invited to apply online and join the exciting field of manual farm labor! Apply now!
They have even enlisted just the right spokesperson to help them in this tongue-in-cheek campaign: none other than Stephen Colbert, the whip-smart, piercing wit of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, who will feature the campaign in his July 8th broadcast. Known for his uncanny ability to make a point by arguing sardonically for the opposite side of that point, Colbert is just the person to take up this issue.
The point of all this of course is that migrant workers, roughly 75% of whom were born outside the US and an estimated half of them undocumented, are not in fact taking away jobs from Honest-to-Glenn-Beck Americans. They are doing jobs that are vital to our national economy and that no one else will do. For better or worse, this has always been the lot of the new arrivals in this country - they end up doing the grunt work, and those that do it well eventually make it possible for their kids and grandkids to have a better life. It's what my great grandfather did when he was an immigrant to our shores over 100 years ago, and very likely what some of your ancestors did as well.
While they are using humor, the point is a serious one, and they mean it when they say they will connect applicants with actual jobs in the fields - the one place where there is still a serious labor shortage in the country. It's put-up-or-shut-up time for the anti-immigrant front.
Next I hope they will find a way to extend the program one more notch up the food chain into the slaughterhouses, where conditions are no less abhorrent. Shining a light on that industry is long overdue.
So if you know people who are looking for work, be sure to tell them that the UFW says, "Take our jobs, please!" Henny Youngman would be proud.
Originally posted @CivilEats
Follow Kurt Michael Friese on Twitter: www.twitter.com/KurtMFriese
Danielle Nierenberg: Fighting for Farmworkers' Rights for More Than 40 Years
Daniel Klein: Did A Slave Grow Your Tomato?
Rabbi Jill Jacobs: Rotten Tomatoes: Trader Joe's and the Jewish Ethic for Farmworker Justice
We have more than enough resources and technology to give everyone a chance to live well, but not enough to think that some person who works to create production- be it feeding many others, by harvesting, or by flipping burgers- should be looked at as lucky to get a minimum wage while those who help wreck an economy are always due their bonuses. Think about it
So I get it, life here is better even if the work is hard.
Now here's the flip side.
It isn't just "work Americans won't do."
It's also construction, plumbing, electrical - the jobs that built the American middle class.
I've competed for work with immigrants, and they do drive down wages.
If it were "just" farm work, I'd say cool.
But it's also regular blue-collar work that Americans need.
There's no easy answer. But I stand with my fellow American citizens. Hire American first.
That's where all the dishonesty comes in. If Americans cared about their fellow man, they would demand that the corporations pay fair wages, but if they have to pay fair wages, then the price of food goes up.
So they let the companies pay peanuts to migrant illegal immigrants and everyone shuts up... BUT then the really ugly people come in and complain that the illegals are taking all the jobs... And here we are!
Our meat packing plants laid off all the citizen workers and brought in migrants.
Back then they were probably legal migrants but those jobs were lost forever to Americans.
We need more locally grown food, less imports, and smaller farms that don't go broke competing against ecology-destroying factory farms.
TRANSPORTATION costs (1500 miles avgs) are probably at least 1/3 of the total cost. Eliminate transportation and you can force down costs. Besides which, local farms tend not to be the ones gouging us.
If we plan to do anything about anything, I think it has to be based on Think Globally but ACT LOCALLY.
This isn't about immigration. It isn't about farm workers. It is about illegal entry into the country through open borders and the criminals who are part of that in-migration.
They also don't pay minimum wage because they house them run down mobile homes from the 60's that are is such poor condition it makes a Haitian shanty look like the Ritz Carlton.
Maybe we need a few secessions, a la Palin's Alaska....
Now, in California just try to get a job in a restaurant kitchen if you are not a migrant worker. It ain't gonna happen. A lot of Americans used to work in kitchens. You cannot say that migrant workers didn't displace Americans in the food service industry.
I think the anti-immigration lies have been well documented on HP. But, let's be honest there just lies all around.
BTW - I grew up in Nebraska and had 3 brothers/sisters do exactly this, but we moved before I was tall enough.
I probably would have wanted minimum wage at least, and perhaps water and a place to go to the bathroom.
The cheap food you are eating is what we have decided is more important than working conditions
I don't know about Neb, but in Iowa you brought your own water. My cousins always said "go before you get on the truck because there is nowhere to go." So, American teenagers worked in the same conditions that migrant workers now work in.
I guess I don't get the correlation between cheap food and conditions. The conditions are the same as they have always been. Migrants have it no worse than Americans had it in the industries I mentioned. Not that it is right, just that it is another canard from pro-immigration groups, that somehow migrants work in conditions that are so much more horrible than what Americans work in.
Just a side note on the cheap food, if they are using migrant labor it should actually be a lot cheaper than it is. However, that savings is not passed on the the consumer it is kept for profits.
I couldn't agree more. It's absurd. Hard to believe anybody would seriously suggest that when millions of Americans are jobless, they would not take a job (whatever job) to feed their families.
I wish we'd have the real discussion, which is why do some American businesses feel they need cheaper labor and to lower wages?
My experience says when people have a fair argument they are proud to make, then they hold their head high and just put it on the table along with the facts. This secrecy, manipulation and vagueness in matters that affect the good of the country and the well being of other citizens is what I tend to distrust.
I wish that too. My take is that there is so much money involved, and we, as a society, have become so focused on money that none of these groups, pro or anti, want to be honest about it.
Creating an artificial standard of living allows people to reject jobs that they find beneath them.
As for those who are unemployed because of the economic situation, times will get better. Until then there are a lot of people taking jobs that pay less, or aren't ideal, or even something that they are overqualified for, just so that they can pay the bills and feed the family until the economic situation improves.
The challenge of starting your own farm won't be wages it will be finding the millions of dollars to buy enough land to compete with Dole, Del Monte, and all the other massive operations that will shut you out of distribution.
And key here is that once the job is done they leave. We are already out of water in many states. We have no places for landfills. We import most of our energy. We have aging infrastructure. We allow more legal immigration then the rest of the world combined. This roach motel is full.
If a empoyer has a legal worker E-verify can quickly cross check it. If that person is not legal the employer will be notified and asked to double check the info and if needed ask the employee about the situation. If the employer fails to do any of these things it is easily proved and they in turn are easily fined and jailed. There would be no "how could I tell the ID was fake?"