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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Apply here

Published: July 12, 2010 1 minute 4 comments

Cucaracha

Today's La Cucaracha promotes a for-real website with a for-real, if tongue-in-cheek, offer: Jobs for all those Americans who think illegal aliens are taking the jobs Americans should have.

Forty years ago, when Cesar Chavez was organizing the farm workers, I briefly dated a woman who was working with striking lettuce pickers in Colorado's San Luis Valley and I also did an informational picketing outside a grocery store in South Bend in support of attempts to unionize meatpackers in the poultry industry. And, of course, none of us bought table grapes or non-union lettuce for a decade or so back then. ("None of us" being a purposely vague term, of course, but the boycott went well beyond 20something hipsters and reached into a lot of church groups and suburban homes.)

But even today, in a world where unions have become anathema to a great many loud thinkers, the question of "Who will harvest the crops?" is very much alive. When I lived in New York's Champlain Valley in the 80s and 90s, I did some stories on the Jamaican apple pickers who came each year — one was a profile of them and their program, and then some shorter stories including some when a hurricane hit Jamaica while they were working in the orchards. So I got to see them more than once and more than by driving by while they worked.

They were legal, brought in by the Dept of Agriculture under a program where the apple growers had to pay them a certain wage and, before they came, had to advertise the positions and give preference to American workers. This was something of a pro forma action, because very few Americans even applied for the jobs, which were advertised in the paper alongside other jobs. Even fewer showed up to work after about three days. The Jamaicans had very little competition.

They worked long hours and not every man who came one year would be back the next. But there was a core group who returned year after year, many of them to the same farms. They knew the families and the local merchants and were welcomed each year. They watched the kids grow up, and some even did a little babysitting here and there and got Christmas cards at home from the growers.

I don't know that they made a lot of money by American standards, but they were middleclass back in Jamaica. One fellow I met had a wife who was a teacher, another was using some of his pay to buy a hot water heater for his daughter, who was a hairdresser. They were very popular with the local hardware store owner because apparently price discrepancies were such that they would make some substantial purchases here and ship them back to Jamaica.

The apple growers would also sometimes visit them when they went to Jamaica on vacation, which brings me to this point: The growers were able to hire these legal workers and still take vacations to places like Jamaica. They weren't LA-wealthy-wealthy, but they had nice houses, they traded in their cars regularly and they took nice vacations. They sat on the boards of the United Way and the Chamber, served on school boards and headed up various charities. 

So when I hear that the farmers "have" to hire illegals, I wonder about the honesty of that statement.

Here were farmers who hired legal workers and paid some kind of wage that worked for them, worked for the farmers and satisfied the federal government. (And they also paid for their transportation and to maintain adequate, if unspectacular, housing for them. Some of it was quite nice and modern, some was like living at a cheap motel, but it was all inspected regularly.)

And, before they hired those legal, welcome, responsible, pleasant foreign workers, they advertised the jobs to Americans. Who would not take them.

So, as far as I can tell, it is a lie to say that you have to hire illegals, and it's also a lie to say that the illegals are taking American jobs. We could afford to treat our farmworkers better, but, apparently, even if we did, Americans still wouldn't take the jobs.

And maybe I'm wrong. It could be that, in the current economic climate, Americans would take those jobs. If so, they can apply here.

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Comments 4

  1. I suspect you are preaching to the converted. I’m with you. I too remember those grapeless years. The grocery stores in Toronto had signs up explaining why there were no grapes. And I’m appalled at the attitudes toward immigrants of some in the USofA.
    And thank you for your excellent site. I found you through Cul de Sac and I’m glad I did!

  2. As a teenager, I worked at an Apricot orchard one year, helping pick and pack the crop. I’ve also worked in the restaurant industry, and also worked in a garment factory. When I worked in both of those industries many of the workers were American citizens, but not today. The work was hard and low paying. The only place you will find more citizens than non-citizens is in the customer-facing positions at better restaurants (servers, hosts, bartenders), because customers want to talk to someone with better language skills. But in the back of the kitchen, in the sewing factories (those that haven’t closed and had their business taken over by the Chinese factories) you will find immigrants. Working hard for low pay.
    While it isn’t necessary to hire “illegal” workers to do these jobs, it is necessary to hire people who come from a culture where they don’t think these physically hard and dirty jobs are beneath them, and that means immigrants. American workers won’t do these dirty jobs.
    If you are a large employer who needs a large number of guest workers, it works well to bring in a group for a short time (such as when picking crops). However, when you are a small business and need 1 full-time employee (e.g. a dishwasher), then you hire from the pool of people who show up when you place an ad or put a sign in the window. It’s not the employer’s fault that the best workers for the job are from out of the country. It’s not the employer’s fault that the process for these workers to come here legally is complicated, difficult, has quotas, etc.
    We can’t fix this problem by demonizing the workers who are willing to do these jobs. We need to fix the mind-set of Americans who think these jobs are beneath them. Go into any inner city and you will find people of one (or more) ethnic groups who complain that they can’t find jobs, and people of another ethnic group who are quietly working all the dirty, difficult, menial labor jobs.
    Employers put up with the language difficulty because these workers WORK better than the ones who grew up here, who speak our language. They have a work ethic that many Americans lack.
    We will only fix this problem when we get Americans to drop their attitude that working hard for low wages in dirty jobs is “beneath” them.
    We will never get Americans to pay more for the products of these jobs. Americans are already buying as much cheap crap from China as they can, and our local manufacturing is on a serious decline. We aren’t just competing with aliens who eagerly do better work for lower wages than we will agree to work for, we are also competing with the Chinese workers who will sew a garment or make a computer for less than an American worker will demand. Look at the labels in Wal-Mart – try to find something Made in America. Wal-Mart is simply filling a need.
    The root cause of all of this is that Americans don’t want to pay what it takes for all Americans (and especially those who only have skills for low paying jobs) to have better paying jobs. We want to buy the products made with cheap labor. So that’s what jobs the market has – cheap labor.

  3. Gilda, glad you’re here. Story I’ve told for years that illustrates how close NFLD is to Ireland: I was in St. John’s in 1969 and saw grapes in a vegetable stall by the waterfront. I wondered if word of the boycott had traveled that far east and asked the young fellow working there if they were union grapes. “I dunno,” he replied, “but Himself will be back soon and he could tell yez.” Boy Jazuz, I might as well be in Limerick!
    JC, I wish the “takeourjobs” effort included food workers, motel maids and a number of other low-paying jobs, but the real question I always had is, why do these low-paying jobs also have to be low-respecting jobs? My experience of working in the food industry has been that the work is not so hard as the treatment, that people might stick around if they weren’t treated like garbage. And the issue there is middle-management — the ones who make it through the horrors of the entry-level position tend to have all the personality faults of the stereotypical house slave — Not “I made it, and so can you,” but “I’m better than you, because I made it.”
    You have to be pretty desperate to show up on Day Two at some of those jobs. It wouldn’t take much to change that factor.

  4. (I guess what I’m saying is that the growers in the Champlain Valley treated their Jamaican pickers with respect and dignity, as if they were valued. Pay scales aside, that’s quite an important factor.)

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