Posted on 01/07/2009 6:39:47 AM PST by Tennessee Nana
A Tennessee woman has filed complaints with three government agencies alleging that a local farm discriminated against her for being an American.
Sabrina Steele, 28, says that when she applied for work at Pope's Plant Farm in Greenback, Tenn., a man she believed to be the farm's owner discouraged her from taking the job so that he could hire foreign workers instead.
Critics say the case demonstrates that changes to the government's H-2A foreign worker program will make it harder for Americans to find work.
In November 2007, Pope's Plant Farm applied to the Department of Labor for 75 foreign worker visas. In the application, the farm said its workers would work 40 hours a week for $8.65 an hour.
Steele, a mother of two elementary-school-aged children who has worked on her family farm for years, says she was looking for supplemental income when was referred to the farm by the Tennessee Careers Center in December 2007.
When she went to the farm to apply, Steele said, Mike Pope offered her a job, but he told her she'd be working 80 hours a week and would be the only English-speaking American employee besides the office workers.
Steele says in her complaint that she later learned that the jobs that were available at the farm were in connection with the H-2A application filed by Pope.
"I also learned that in the clearance order, the work offered to temporary foreign workers was for 40 hours a week," she wrote. "If the work offered to me had been the same as that offered to the temporary foreign (and apparently mostly male) workers, I would have accepted."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
PING
A migrant worker advocate taking the side of the American worker in this dispute...amazing. Blind squirrels and acorns and all that.
My personal guess is that the farm owner was going to hire the H-2A Mexicans and work them 80 hours instead of the promised 40, at half the wages, so it netted out the same amount of money but he got twice the productivity. It’s the low-tech lettuce-picking version of what a lot of IT employers do with high-tech Indian workers and the H-1B visa, I’ve seen it firsthand.
}:-)4
Doesn’t this woman realize that she was applying for a job that American’s don’t want to do! What’s wrong with her? Sounds like a radical troublemaker to me. She should be investigated. Probably a relative of Joe the Plumber.
This story cannot be true because I’ve read over and over that Americans are not willing to take actual jobs.
When I worked in Japan, they had a fairly sensible law in place to discourage this sort of thing: a company could hire foreigners but had to pay them at least 10% more than the prevailing wage. This had the positive effect of making sure they were not playing games to hire cheaper labor and that the shortage which they claimed were real. As a side note, it also helped raise the wages in the industry and ensured that the foreign labor they hired was worth the premium.
Farm work isn't a 9-5 job with fixed start/end times for a shift. It's not a job for a woman with small kids to take care of.
If businesses and government can’t discriminated based on nationality, that SHOULD include ours!
From personal experience, I believe the farm owner/manager was doing her a favor. When my husband and I encountered hard times, I worked for a short spell on a flower farm in South Florida. The workers were all uneducated hyphenated-Americans. I had no experience fitting in with groups who have not had similar life experiences as myself and soon several of the were preparing to beat me up. Perhaps, if I had been able to keep my mouth shut and just do the work, I may have stayed longer. I could not contain myself from expressing the beauty of being in a field of flowers, in full bloom, at sunrise in South Florida - it was a glorious sight. Those who felt trapped in that dead end job and life could not see the beauty and hated me because I could. I do not blame them, I was immature and should have been more discreet. In retrospect, perhaps they hated more that I was only there temporarily.
The farm however, deducted taxes from my weekly checks but never intended to give a W-2. So the employees had reason to be miserable.
It is not a matter of being abel to do the work that a manager must evaluate, it is the employees ability to fit into the crew and now make waves.
TL
ping
Mike Pope of Tennessee...Traitor and AH.
Now you know why parents of teenagers, and young people themselves, don’t want to work in restaurants and fast food places, along with the 40 year old, illiterate illegal aliens.
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