It’s also work that takes considerable skill of body and mind to do well at any rate of speed. I used to teach farm interns to do some of it; it wasn’t unusual for them to give up within the first few days, possibly not believing me when I tell them they’ll feel a lot better once their bodies get used to it (and sometimes refusing to listen to me when I try to tell them how to do a given job while minimizing strain on their bodies and damage to the desired plants/fruit, because they can’t believe there’s anything that needs to be learned about such work). And it generally took them most of a season to get up to my speed – and, even at my fastest (I’ve slowed down again considerably as I age), I was nowhere near as fast as a professional picker who’d been doing the job since they were in their teens.
Towns used to close the schools and turn out teenagers and teachers to help in harvest season, yes – but they’d grown up doing this, and the older ones helped teach the ones just old enough to start working. If you turned out most modern classrooms, or for that matter offices, to try to get a crop in if the usual crews didn’t show up: what would be accomplished would be mostly destroying the crop.
If the work were set up in a different fashion, so that workers kept switching off different jobs, had shade and water, weren’t overly rushed; and if in addition they were not only well paid but also well respected: then you could get people to do it.
I expect the same is true for everything from construction work to dishwashing. The problem is much less the work than the shit that goes along with it.
But we would still need the people to do it. And everything else aside, we’re still not going to have them without immigration.
– plus which: it would probably be an even greater wrench for US society to provide all workers with genuinely good working conditions, pay, AND RESPECT than it would be to open the borders entirely.
Americans will do backbreaking work, provided the compensation is appropriate for the effort. Farming is one example. Owning a farm is backbreaking work, but the farm owner gets the compensation from the market value of their product. The compensation they get from picking produce is the market value of the produce. The compensation they get from stacking hay is the market value from their livestock. And there are traditional jobs that are backbreaking, such as movers, oil field workers, loggers, miners, and so on. In those jobs, the total compensation of those jobs make them worth it for Americans even though the jobs may be more physically difficult and dangerous than picking produce.
The only reasons migrants fill these low-paying, backbreaking jobs is because our current immigration situation doesn’t give them any other option. Those are the best jobs they can get. If they don’t do those sorts of jobs, they won’t work at all. Not wanting to starve provides them the motivation to do these jobs which are under compensated for the effort and physical toll they take. If they could, I’m sure they’d rather make $50k/yr as an oil worker rather than $20k/yr as a migrant field worker.
I read a story about an apple orchard that hired local professors to pick their crop. They only needed the labor for a week or two. In addition to wages, they put everyone up in a nice b&b, and served good dinners with wine every night.
They successfully made it a social thing that was hard work, but was also fun, and they got most of the same pickers back year after year.
Of course, picking apples is more fun than picking stuff on the ground, as the bending over gets old fast.
Picking something like strawberries is an absolute nightmare. Scorching sun, backbreaking posture, and it’s very easy to damage the produce (which is why it hasn’t been automated yet).
If @DrDeth is right, and without such jobs being among the only jobs an undocumented worker can get it would be difficult to find anyone willing to do the job even at minimum wage. If so, maybe that’s the incentive needed for someone to invent an automated strawberry picker!
Or to rethink our values entirely. Food, and the preparing and sharing of food, are central to all human cultures. The more we automate and cheapen it, the more we weaken our culture. I realize we’re all about chasing that dollar, and damn the consequences to people who aren’t me, but as mentioned upthread, if we could let people work at a sustainable pace with breaks for shade and water, suddenly the work gets a LOT more palatable. If we paid them a decent wage, more palatable still.
Produce prices would double or triple, but there are ways that we, as a society, could absorb those labour costs if we really wanted to.
These methods all come down to the same think - having a significantly higher portion of our society working in food production. That means less people making life saving medicine, creating art, making scientific discoveries, etc…
Or less people making plastic tchotchkes for tourists, less people working in healthcare insurance (because, in our newfound respect for humanity, we’ve gone to national healthcare), less people selling guns and drugs…
In reality, any such change would probably have both positive and negative impacts on our other economic sectors. But we do have plenty of jobs that aren’t super beneficial to society as a whole, except in their economic impacts.
Picking strawberries for a couple of hours can be kind of fun. Cite: successful UPick operations all over the place, plus my own experience.
Picking strawberries, and doing nothing but picking strawberries, all day long for days on end, is another matter entirely. Personally, if I were say between 15 and 45, I’d still rather do that than work in a windowless cubicle all day long for days on end. But that may well be a minority opinion, even for people who’ve done some of both rather than relying only on the fact that they’ve heard all their lives that physical labor jobs are terrible.
Very much so. And, again, switching the work off with other jobs during the day can make a large amount of difference. That would require genuinely diversified farms. There are of course other arguments against monocropping.
Or fewer people sitting in windowless cubicles calling up other people to try to sell them things they don’t want and don’t need. As well, of course, as the examples @Dr.Drake gave.
If that’s truly all that you or @Dr.Drake see modern society as, nothing stops you from finding a place to live off-grid. If you’re willing to forgo electricity, running water, or medical care, and you focus all your efforts on growing enough food to live, you can get by, just as our ancestors did for ten thousand years.
I mean, that’s the Jeffersonian ideal, right? Split the country up into self sufficient farming estates?
It doesn’t sound that great to me, but I guess unlike Jefferson I don’t own hundreds of human beings who can farm for me, so maybe that colors my perspective on agriculture.
Of course it isn’t, and of course I don’t. But we don’t need to have 100% or anywhere near it of the population farming in order to do it differently. Currently less than 2% of the labor force is working in agriculture. We could triple that and still have 95% available to do other things.
I’m sorry, but… no. I reject this logic. You could say the same about infant mortality and dying in general. The fact that something has, by virtue of biological necessity, become ingrained in human culture does not mean it should be preserved.
More on topic, I think @filmore’s assumption that undocumented migrants will shift to other occupations if they are allowed to freely immigrate to be… misguided. First, I doubt very much that the majority of them could easily pivot to other jobs: many will lack the skills/education to take on other jobs. As far as what their children might do, well… okay. Maybe their children, will enter the wider work force. In which case, that’s not sudden change, that’s just the march of time. Gradual change. Something I suspect we can accommodate well enough.
I also think @filmore underestimates the significance of the seasonal and migratory nature of farm work. It’s not just that US citizens don’t want to do hard jobs, it’s that they don’t want to work six months of the year in 2 to 3 months stints in disparate locations, and then return to trying to find an apartment where they grew up in New York City, Dallas, Austin, Denver, etc.
Plenty could work as actuaries. There are educated and skilled people who become refugees. But they have to start at the ground floor, because the actual skills are somewhat nation-dependent.
If language was an issue, what would likely happen is that a business owner would be bilingual so the workers could just speak their native language. Businesses like nail salons are like this. The owner and front-desk person speaks English, but the workers may just speak their native language. Businesses like auto repair, trucking, dry cleaning, restaurants, bakeries, etc. would lend themselves to this model. Immigrants who are on a H-2A farm visa or no visa at all cannot legally work those jobs. But if there was open immigration, then immigrants–even those who didn’t speak English–would have a wider selection of jobs they could take. Migrant farm worker and similar jobs wouldn’t be their only job option.
Right. Most professions are hard for immigrants to enter, because they often require US certification done through US (expensive) degrees. The actuarial field is easier, because the certification is exam-based, and you can be employed as you work through it. IT is also generally accessible to immigrants. But most professional fields have extremely high barriers to entry for already-trained immigrants.
One of my actuarial managers worked for a while as a cab driver, though, while he got stuff sorted out and before he found a job as an actuary.