AS someone Coming from a farm: Leave us the fuck alone with unskilled workers.
Modern farms are usually optimised to minimise the need for human workers. This means, that those that are needed need certain skills. A lot of the required skills can not be learned in a single year just from working on a farm. The only farming sector that still heavily relies on human workers are farms that produce vegetables. Always having to retrain your entire workforce every single year will cause problems and is not worth it for a lot of farms.
And they and their rich friends will find a way to pay their way out of it
They’ll each own one of the farms, and claim that means they work there every day already.
Are we also nationalizing the farms?
Only the losses!
Next we kill all the birds!
Lol, no
That picture looks like a tobacco field, which is a dangerous crop to pick. Americans would quit immediately if forced to pick their own.
What makes it dangerous?
Supposedly an illness called Green Tobacco Sickness can occur from absorbing nicotine in the tobacco leaves along with heat injuries from working in the fields
As somebody that worked in a cornfield for minimum wage, it sucks. Your feet get heavy with mud, it’s hot, the leaves give you “papercuts”. One summer is enough to make you never want to do it again.
DEAL, however as these farms are worked by the public they should become owned by the public. And the harvest be distributed at-cost to the public.
While we’re at it, nationalize
Monsantofuckin Bayre I guess. Either that or stop letting them fucking copyright seeds.Monsanto has not existed as a brand since 2018. The name of the new baddie is Bayer, who acquired them and got rid of thae name. Same shitty playbook, but let’s focus our anger on things that exist.
Sorry, haven’t kept up with the ever-shifting hydra of corporations well enough I guess 🤷♀️.
Hydra is right. They’re owned by the same group of entities who all have cross-holdings in each other making them essentially one giant megacorp.
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It’s just another example of how great public works programs were. If the workers were housed/fed/paid decent wages, I think people would sign up in droves to travel around and do work that improves their country all the while learning useful trades/skills. And something like publicly owned farms would probably pay for themselves.
Under this plan, would the farms be nationalized, or would people be forced to work for the profit of private farm owners?
You already know
Free labor.
Gavin McInnes even said teenagers should be primarily used for this. This will also be the case when you realize how much child labor laws are being removed by Republicans.
Free profits for the agriculture industry.
Wait until private equity firms get in on this and find a way to buy and gut farms and their assets while also profiting of the “free labour”. You’re gonna love this.
I arguably hate Maoism the most of all popular authoritarian left ideologies. So it makes sense to me that irredeemably evil and stupid conservatives and fascists would unconsciously like it’s policies.
100% guarantee that those who are proposing this will have some sort of exemptions for themselves and their oligarch friends.
This is definitely proposed by someone who runs a farm and wants free labor.
Id cost them so fucking much in repairs. I don’t need the produce to eat, the local varmints will suffice.
Yeah. I’ve read some handbooks and have some ideas. They would not like this idea for long when they start losing thousands a day in repairs.
Oh I would just fuck with the irrigation. If we are talking what I’ve read in books, well all I’ve got to say is “Gooooooood morning Vietnam!” cause that’s about the experience everyone would get.
Like being over 30? Or more than that?
$
Age exemption was right there in the second sentence (18-30).
Guarantee these bastards are all older than that.
i’m proposing this and i’ve already done farm labor twice so far (two seasons). i would recommend it to everyone who’s moderately physically healthy, i’d say.
All “right wing” farmers parties are just agrarian socialists with racism and sexism.
Real farmer here(who has never voted red). I don’t trust the average American not to completely fuck up any harvest and not to bitch constantly about the heat or dirt. It’s bad enough hearing people who work in AC complain about the heat to me.
I worked on an assembly line making CV joints. The inner and outer races had a numbering system based on measured size. The outer races were honed, and there would be size variations we would have to keep adjusting for. 4 inners go with 4 outers, 5 inners with 5 outers and so on. 4 was the most common.
One shift, on a Saturday, one of the workers used 4s for everything. Some were failing, inspection at the end of the line, but a lot didn’t. Well, then the 4s ran out. Since that is the most common size, we were down. She intentionally ran us out of parts by building things wrong, potentially making scrap or defective drive train parts because she didn’t want to work on Saturday.
Her job, that she applied for and took, knowing there are times when would have to work weekends. A job with a good union and Healthcare.
I can only imagine the kind of employees you’d get by forcing them to work the fields, for I’m going to guess way less than UAW wages. In the sun. I think you’d see a lot of sabotaged equipment or crops.
Not trying to justify her or anything, but companies do love to abuse shit.
Yes, being expected to occasionally work overtime is a reasonable expectation.
However, most companies will just keep doing it. Im sorry, if I have to work overtime almost every single shift for more than 2 weeks - that is not reasonable. (And that shit happens even with unions)
Seriously, this person is making CV joints. It’s not like they are a doctor or a firefighter. I don’t see the urgency. This world needs to chill.
“That’s right, the 4 goes in the square hole”
~That Lady
I always love that video.
I spent my teens working on farms (labour intensive vegetables) and can confirm. Every spring we’d have a few crew from last year, and new ones; even in gorgeous spring weather people would last a couple days before quitting. And it’s not difficult, but it requires attention to detail, which some people either don’t have or don’t care to have.
Nationalized industry that always produces food at cost and pays all of its workers well and fairly would be a great idea so long as the people setting it up aren’t completely untrustworthy fucks.
Oh wait
This but for the police force.
Turn the police into something of a militia, 80% made of constituents from that jurisdiction, picked at random à la jury duty (exemptions apply)
As a European I think it’s a great idea for USA to enter your proposed perpetual state of civil war
It’s an interesting idea, but a proper police force should consist of trained and capable people (unlike the current states one!), of which random selection will necessarily create it so that many are not.
That is a terrible idea. You already see what happens when they’re “trained”.
this would absolutely turn into a “purge” rotating revenge. We just need the ability to hold our current police accountable when they break the law.
United Statians buy a gun at Walmart and already start wearing camouflage clothing, speaking using walkie talkie lingo, and listening to tactical entry AI generated podcasts.
Do you want to give them power and a badge?
Who’s the “our” in “our farms” referring to? 👀
A very good point.
…right , so only the family farms? Not any farm owned by a corporation, right?
I was thinking more like “farms collectively owned by the populace”…
You know…good people. (Pay no attention to the fact that the definition of good people changes wildly every day based on the moods and whims of Dear Leader.)
Well it talks about Americans so I’m guessing it means American farms
Or, and hear me out here: We could pay people a competitive wage for their labor.
I understand the need for agricultural subsidies. The government inserts itself into the normal supply/demand process to protect the general public against a famine.
What I don’t understand is why those subsidies don’t seem to be flowing past the greedy hands of corporate farmers and into the pockets of farm laborers.
Actually I don’t think it’s that terrible for an idea, as long as things like food and accommodations are provided, and you can’t get out of it by paying (e.g. pay someone to do it for you).
I’d like to see billionaires doing hard labor alongside ordinary people.
If we’re doing it, we gotta add in a rotation of frontline retail/restaurant work.
How about we just add it to curriculum for school. During general highschool educational, you must take at least one Public Service class per year. You can choose from farming, retail, plumbing, electrician, road crew, et cetera. Each kid has to do a certain number of hour per school year, and it’s required even if private school kids. Disability would obviously be an exception, but otherwise you need to be doing at least X number of hours per school year to graduate. Could help people understand how these things work, and hopefully build some empathy in the little sociopaths.
I’m able to have a sense of empathy for all those people you listed, without having done every single one of them personally. I don’t know what the best way to teach empathy is, however.
I’m not suggesting that no one has empathy, or even that most don’t, just that some would benefit from this in that arena
Could also steer some kids into trades instead of expensive college that isn’t a good fit for them.
A well rounded graduate of highschool, having experienced multiple different kinds of work environments could help our society feel a little more connected, lead to kids better able to determine what it is they want to do with their lives. If you had to do this once per year during highschool, and you had to pick a different one each year, you’d end up with at least 4 different experiences by the end. That’s a lot better than our current system of “you’ve never been allowed to make a decision before. Now, my child, on your 18th year, decide your career for the rest of your life, and blindly take our 200 thousand dollars worth of loans to do it”
If you think this is truly beneficial you should be able to hire people to do it. If you can’t convince people to do this what right do you have to force them?
That’s fair, honestly. I was going to make a quip about kids not wanting to learn math, so what right do we have to force them to learn it. But in all honesty, you’re right. We treat kids like little machines who must do and say as we command, and that’s a problem. I still stand by saying that experience with the working world would be beneficial, and that it should be part of standard education, but as far as the ethics and morality of it goes, it’s a sticky area that would need much discussion.
I would agree with it if it was working on publicly owned farms. I don’t support any kind of “drafted” labor that ultimately benefits private owners, or even a system where the government reaps the profits. If people are made to work in any fashion, every cent of value generated should go back to them.
You can get out of it by paying
See The Rich doing hard labor
Pick one
you can’t have competitive wages on a free market as long as somebody else is willing to do it for less. That’s why migrant labor would have to end first.
Yes you can. The issue is that it isn’t one market, it’s two: the legitimate market and the under-the-table market.
Didn’t we try that here after Brexit? From what I remember, farmers were having to let crops go to waste because Brits didn’t want the jobs, even after wages were raised. Most farm work is seasonal, people don’t really want that instability.
yeah, there’s a serious argument to be made here that the people in england, USA simply don’t want these kinds of jobs.
then again, the thing isn’t so simple. Why would people in the USA not want these jobs, but mexicans are fine with them? is it because the people are spoiled? is it for other reasons?
Personally, the job itself I wouldn’t mind, but it’s what comes with it. It’s seasonal work. How would I consistently support myself outside the season? How would I get a stable home if I’m living in farm accommodation while working?
In the UK at least, these were often men coming in from the EU. They could send money back home to their families, where it would go further.
A resident Brit with kids to support isn’t going to go for this kind of job. As I said, no stability. They’d have to pay enough to make up for months of no work over winter. Which they can’t do as their margins are already low and supermarkets don’t pay enough and so much produce goes to waste because it’s a bit blemished or wonky.
Sounds like they didn’t raise wages enough to fairly compensate workers for tolerating that instability.
Tbh, I’m not convinced that this would really happen. There’s not that much price elasticity to a lot of agricultural products. If the strawberries cost too much, most people will just not be able to afford strawberries and thus will just not buy them but instead buy less labour-intensive produce instead.
One could argue that if strawberries cannot be produced in a way that earns everyone involved a living wage then we shouldn’t produce strawberries, and that’s a totally valid point to argue.
It’s also fair to argue that we need to cut out capitalism’s inherent inefficiency of having to feed the capitalists in the process who did contributed nothing in terms of labour. But on the one hand, this hasn’t worked out that great in the past and on the other hand this would require more of a change than to just kick out migrants.
What would be more likely to happen (since we’ve seen it happen during Covid already) is that the wages will go up, but the locals still won’t do the work, thus strawberries will rot on the fields, the shelves will be empty, the prices will go up, but not enough to cover the losses for the farmers and the farmers will plant something less labour-intense next season.
(Wages would have to go way, way up before people will voluntarily quit their job in an AC’d office to work on a field.)
We are contemplating compulsory service by all Americans. “Free Market” is not a factor here. Against that alternative, we can consider a wide variety of non-free options for influencing market behavior.
You describe workers exploiting themselves: being willing to “do it for less” than a living wage. Correcting minimum wage to be a living wage keeps their slave-like desperation from influencing the labor market.
Beyond that, directly subsidizing American ag laborers corrects the follow-on market effects of anti-famine subsidies on agriculture. Ag subsidies depress food prices and tank farm revenue, forcing farmers to exploit workers. Ag subsidies directly to ag laborers corrects that undue influence on the labor market.
