Posted on 06/01/2006 11:22:23 AM PDT by SJackson
The current formula is based on wages in the overall agricultural sector, he said, which can set artificially high wages for field work. ...Kuegel and Hornback said they pay their H2A workers $8.24 an hour and cover housing, utilities and transportation costs for the field hands.
Not to worry, more legal laborers, costs will go down.
ping
If you only offer a wage that migrants will take, then you will only get migrants.
Al Gore, comes to mind, he is just rambling around aimlessly on a few global warming gigs, and could use full time work... he boasted of his experience raising tobacco, all phases of the work...
That's what I thought. How much money are they offering?
Seems to me that $8.24/hr is pretty good if you also provide housing, utilities, and transportation costs.
In the midwest, farmers have no problem getting many high school kids to work in fields for minimum wage or a big more. Detassling corn is not an easy or fun job, but it's almost a rite of passage for rural midwest kids.
So, are tobacco farmers not paying minimum wage? Is this all a ploy to keep cheap labor and avoid taxes and insurance costs?
I believe all these stories by the pro-ILLEGAL press about as much as I believe in their polls, which is to say, I don't.
One summer in HS (early 1980's), I worked harvesting tobacco for $2.50/hr with no housing, utilities nor transportation costs included. Hard work, but I was seriously pumped that summer. It burned my a$$ to see taxes taken out of my tiny hard earned paycheck which in part helped make me a conservative.
I wish journalists would be more specific. The word 'migrant' can mean lots of things, including US citizens coming from other states.
Dare I say that if access to cheap labor evaporated that these farmers would be forced to modernize and use machinery? The article then goes on to say how these guys are trying to pay less for this immigrant labor. The point is, that they are using outdated methods of harvesting and they will never be able to increase their productivity using these antiquated labor intensive means. That is one of the reasons you saw the rapid rise in the use of robotics in the auto industry - the cost of labor.
Finally, it is not legal migration that is the issue. (This farmer sounds like he is using legal means.) It is the illegal migration issue that is of concern.
Kick able-bodied folks off welfare and other freebies and many of these jobs would have waiting lines of Americans.
That's my take. (See my post #11).
During his time interning for Sir Walter Raleigh, he took the initiative in hybridizing the first tobacco plant.
Ok, I thought the libs wanted to do away with tobacco? Why are they worried that someone can't get laborers to harvest it? If there really is a problem, which I very much doubt, it is due to the bad press tobacco gets and the brainwashing that the young kids who would be doing these jobs get against coming in contact with tobacco in any form!
Then Mexico will have an illegal migrant problem. Ha ha ha.
Yes, his tobacco is getting picked. Increasing the supply of labor and depressing wages is an option though, the one I suspect he'd prefer.
I'll pluck tobacco worms for $50/hour.
An estimated $20 billion American dollars was taken out of the American economy and sent back home by immigrant workers to be fed into the Mexican economy in '05, and the amount will no doubt be even higher this year. Taxing American workers to pay other able bodied Americans not to work and put their paychecks back into the American economy while at the same time paying to haul in Mexicans who will send most of their paychecks home to Mexico doesn't make good economic sense to me.
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