This sounds quite sinister but it was a common summer job in Iowa for teenagers. You could make enough in a summer to buy a used car. Because of immigration these jobs are not really available for citizens anymore. I haven't heard of any teenagers taking this work in some time. You had to work long hours in the sun and heat but it was "an honest day's work."
Teenagers young and older are definitely still working on fields here in the US[0], and also a good portion now work the processing facilities instead[1][2].
Whether it qualifies as 'an honest day's work' these days - or a cruel and punishing existence - I'll leave for you to decide.
Likewise it reminded me of my first summer job growing up in rural northern Illinois in the 80s: detasseling corn [1]. It was just something we pretty much all did, starting in Jr. High. So, if my math is correct, starting at around 12 or 13. The whole thing was managed via our school counselors, and they even used school buses to haul us out to the fields.
In the years I was doing it we all just lined up on one end of the field and walked the length of it pulling the tassles from the top of every stalk of corn. We started before dawn, soaked in the dew of the fields and freezing cold. And we ended early afternoon, soaked in sweat.
Pretty messed up in hindsight, though I can't say I've spent too much time thinking about it over the years. The only real lasting impact it's had on me is a crippling fear of grasshoppers, after being swarmed by them a few times in the fields.
I worked in strawberry & bean fields (as well as bucking hay) in Oregon when I was a teen in the 70s. It was really common then to work a couple of summers to save up for a used car or for college money.
> Because of immigration these jobs are not really available for citizens anymore. I haven't heard of any teenagers taking this work in some time
I don't think immigration was what killed those jobs for citizen teens. I think it was more like rising prosperity such that they didn't want to do those jobs anymore. I can recall teens regularly canvassing the neighborhood in the 90s asking if we wanted our lawn mowed. But that stopped by around 2000. It's unheard of now. Immigration didn't stop them from doing that, it was more of a cultural shift that caused them not to desire to do that kind of work anymore.
[and sure, immigrants have taken over the lawn maintenance field, but their prices aren't cheap - most of them charge a few $hundred just to start service which is generally in the $200/month range now where I'm at. Teens could undercut these prices easily and still do well, but they don't seem interested]
I live in Minnesota. I hear what you’re saying, but I would say two things: in general, teenagers here are not being somehow denied farm work that they really want but is unavailable; and there’s a pretty big difference between Minnesota/Iowa summer heat and picking cantaloupes in inland California. The big difference being about 20 degrees on average, with more sun.
> This sounds quite sinister but it was a common summer job in Iowa for teenagers. You could make enough in a summer to buy a used car.
Yeah, I got my first job working on a family dairy when I turned 14. It was tough work, especially having to wake up at 3:30am on the weekends to go work outside in negative temperatures over the winters. It did help me purchase my first car and other things that my friends either couldn't afford or had to have their parents buy for them.
It's definitely true that early farm employment can deprive children of opportunity, and cause a knock-down effect on their education. Your naysayers are right to cite how exploitative these illegal farming employments are.
But the rest of the reaction seems a little out of place. Maybe it's a major culture difference: we're mostly cosmopolitan white collars with luxury time & luxury salaries, and they're our rural countrymen working with their hands and having to make ends meet.
A quick look at the profiles of teenagers on TikTok, Instagram and OnlyFans make me believe they have the physical and mental strength and will to work long hours in the sun in maybe the most physically taxing work ever: farm work.
An honest day's work, doing hard labour and getting paid merely nothing in comparison. Teenager's are often used because they lack the experience of what a job should pay. If I think back to the jobs I took and the money I earned, my hard work was never appreciated. Neither on a human level nor financially. But I was shouted at for the tiniest mistakes.
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.
Interesting it was in 1965, around the time of the Cultural Revolution in China which forced masses of non-working class people to leave the cities and work on farms.
(I'm not certain of the exact timing of the farm labor program in China.)
Growing up in Norway, picking strawberries was always a typical summer job for teens. You'd get bussed to the field, be crouched down all day under scorching heat, and...well, it sucked. Just sucked. And the pay was piss poor.
Pretty much any summer job would pay more, and in the end less and less teens decided to pick strawberries. Farmers complained, and then started flying inn south-east Asian rice farmers to pick berries instead. Relative to their pay back home, picking berries in Norway was a pretty sweet deal. Many still go there annually to pick during berry season.
They live cramped in a cottage, and work all day. If it's a good season, they make good money. If it's a bad season, they break even. Unfortunately there are some pretty scummy farmers that will exploit the situation. Here's a short docu following Thai pickers in Sweden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW1QWG3xSNg
Setting aside the moral component, and focusing on the economic; the Trump deportation plan is red carpet invitation for consolidation. Agriculture today is a declining mix of many medium and small growers, with a few mega growers that have increasingly concentrated their market share of output. Deportation will greatly accelerate this trend, consolidating most agriculture under a few mega growers. Small and medium sized farm operations can’t afford the capital for complex automation to replace manual labor - but mega corps can.
Lots of smaller farms are family run. It's the mega farms that excessively rely on outside labor, particularly during critical seasons. They're 4.4% of farms, but 47.6% of production. There's a lot of data here. [1] I think there's a reasonable argument that deportations could instead work to decentralize things by effectively increasing labor costs. Hard to keep massive farms running (and offering cheap crops) without large labor pools willing to work for what is literally pennies per bucket of crops that they harvest.
The Trump team has already stated they are limiting deportations to criminal illegals, so I guess just people who are in the US illegally and have committed a separate crime. This is before any real opposition has been mounted where it’s expected he’ll cave anyway. Trump is more likely to start a war with Iran than he is to do any sort of mass deportation.
Also a weird thing is happening with automation, it’s getting a lot cheaper, bespoke tooling and machines are going through a substantial revolution. And that is not including any AI stuff. The price of small batch electronics and machines are dropping fast.
is "Migrant" a euphemism here for "illegal migrant"?
If your business needs illegal labour, then it's not a viable business, and it should die. If your pay is so low that no one wants to do your work, why should you be able to break the law with impunity because your business can't compete? Innovate, or die.
Road construction could come to a halt in some portions of the US. It is estimated that ~13% of all construction workers in the US are undocumented. I would be willing to bet they are more concentrated in certain states (Texas).
If you're center-left like me, here's something you might not have realized yet. The conventional wisdom is that racial cleansing is the goal and that the economic cost of mass deportations is the price. It's actually the other way around.
The economic cost is the goal. The racial cleansing is just how that cost is initially justified to the base.
Once the economy really starts heading south, blame Democrats and other phantom enemies. It's much harder to jail the opposition and overturn democracy when things are going well. The blueprints are Venezuela and Argentina.
ipnon|1 year ago
emidoots|1 year ago
Whether it qualifies as 'an honest day's work' these days - or a cruel and punishing existence - I'll leave for you to decide.
[0] https://youtu.be/41vETgarh_8?si=S0dBolFjv04SSprh&t=497
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/09/25/1201524399/child-labor-perdue...
[2] https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20230217-1
bitbuilder|1 year ago
In the years I was doing it we all just lined up on one end of the field and walked the length of it pulling the tassles from the top of every stalk of corn. We started before dawn, soaked in the dew of the fields and freezing cold. And we ended early afternoon, soaked in sweat.
Pretty messed up in hindsight, though I can't say I've spent too much time thinking about it over the years. The only real lasting impact it's had on me is a crippling fear of grasshoppers, after being swarmed by them a few times in the fields.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detasseling
UncleOxidant|1 year ago
> Because of immigration these jobs are not really available for citizens anymore. I haven't heard of any teenagers taking this work in some time
I don't think immigration was what killed those jobs for citizen teens. I think it was more like rising prosperity such that they didn't want to do those jobs anymore. I can recall teens regularly canvassing the neighborhood in the 90s asking if we wanted our lawn mowed. But that stopped by around 2000. It's unheard of now. Immigration didn't stop them from doing that, it was more of a cultural shift that caused them not to desire to do that kind of work anymore.
[and sure, immigrants have taken over the lawn maintenance field, but their prices aren't cheap - most of them charge a few $hundred just to start service which is generally in the $200/month range now where I'm at. Teens could undercut these prices easily and still do well, but they don't seem interested]
projectileboy|1 year ago
nozzlegear|1 year ago
Yeah, I got my first job working on a family dairy when I turned 14. It was tough work, especially having to wake up at 3:30am on the weekends to go work outside in negative temperatures over the winters. It did help me purchase my first car and other things that my friends either couldn't afford or had to have their parents buy for them.
hitekker|1 year ago
But the rest of the reaction seems a little out of place. Maybe it's a major culture difference: we're mostly cosmopolitan white collars with luxury time & luxury salaries, and they're our rural countrymen working with their hands and having to make ends meet.
Is it our place to judge them so harshly?
begueradj|1 year ago
7bit|1 year ago
cpach|1 year ago
throwaway984393|1 year ago
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.
mmooss|1 year ago
(I'm not certain of the exact timing of the farm labor program in China.)
titanomachy|1 year ago
TrackerFF|1 year ago
Pretty much any summer job would pay more, and in the end less and less teens decided to pick strawberries. Farmers complained, and then started flying inn south-east Asian rice farmers to pick berries instead. Relative to their pay back home, picking berries in Norway was a pretty sweet deal. Many still go there annually to pick during berry season.
They live cramped in a cottage, and work all day. If it's a good season, they make good money. If it's a bad season, they break even. Unfortunately there are some pretty scummy farmers that will exploit the situation. Here's a short docu following Thai pickers in Sweden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW1QWG3xSNg
glial|1 year ago
Afforess|1 year ago
somenameforme|1 year ago
[1] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
cjbgkagh|1 year ago
Also a weird thing is happening with automation, it’s getting a lot cheaper, bespoke tooling and machines are going through a substantial revolution. And that is not including any AI stuff. The price of small batch electronics and machines are dropping fast.
LAC-Tech|1 year ago
If your business needs illegal labour, then it's not a viable business, and it should die. If your pay is so low that no one wants to do your work, why should you be able to break the law with impunity because your business can't compete? Innovate, or die.
galleywest200|1 year ago
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/19/undocumented-workers-immigr...
jldugger|1 year ago
nipponese|1 year ago
Stevvo|1 year ago
throw2021|1 year ago
kylehotchkiss|1 year ago
friend_Fernando|1 year ago
The economic cost is the goal. The racial cleansing is just how that cost is initially justified to the base.
Once the economy really starts heading south, blame Democrats and other phantom enemies. It's much harder to jail the opposition and overturn democracy when things are going well. The blueprints are Venezuela and Argentina.
titanomachy|1 year ago
That seems less likely to me than either simple racism or a poor understanding of economics.