Tate Watkins | October 5, 2011
With unemployment in his state at?8.5 percent?and visa requirements for seasonal workers becoming more frustrating,?Colorado farmer John Harold decided to hire fewer migrant farm workers for his harvest this summer and supplement his smaller-than-usual team with locals.
How did it go? The New York Times reports:
Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard. On the Harold farm, pickers walk the rows alongside a huge harvest vehicle called a mule train, plucking ears of corn and handing them up to workers on the mule who box them and lift the crates, each weighing 45 to 50 pounds.Other farmers in the area that the Times talked to reported similar experiences. And it's not like the local workers they were hiring were a bunch of hipster weaklings. According to area farmers, most of the local hires were Hispanics who probably had a history of doing farm work while they were new immigrants until finding better work in construction or landscaping.
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"Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard"
Relative to what?
The wage offered is my guess, cuss this Harold-dude seems to have a problem with the $10.50 minimum wage .
"The H-2A seasonal foreign worker visa program administered by Citizenship and Immigration Services raised minimum wage by $2.50 per hour this year, to $10.50, which Harold said affected his hiring decisions. "
I dunno, maybe the guy is just a cheap Uncle Scrooge or maybe his crop just isn't that important to him, since he doesn't want to pay to have it harvested ..
I agree. There are a lot of details missing here.This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
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