Another unintended consequence: Alabama immigration law reveals dirty little secret (al.com)

By John Archibald -- The Birmingham News

Jesse Durr leaned back in the tomato fields of Chandler Mountain Wednesday and raised his arms to the heavens.

"When I get another job I ain't gonna have a problem with nobody," he swore -- or maybe prayed. "After these tomato fields, any job is a good job."

After those fields, any job is a great job.

Forget, today, all you feel about Alabama's controversial immigration law. This is not about that. Not about the rightness or wrongness of it.
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Durr, through the Grow Alabama program that puts people to work on farms, began picking tomatoes last week. His first day, earning a dollar for every 25-pound box he filled, he made $23. He kept coming back.
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more: http://blog.al.com/archiblog/2011/10/another_unintended_consequence.html



4 cents a pound? Wow, that really jacks up the price for consumers.





















:sarcasm:

Its true for all the stuff we import too.

If we do what we need to we won't be able to afford as much stuff.

That is what it takes to bring jobs and manufacturing back.

BRING THE JOBS BACK

We need to make American jobs available and livable so that Americans will take them.

And there is honor in hard work and yes there is a learning curve as with anything.

Throughout history providing food used to be the focus of most people's labor. This disdain we seem to have acquired is just wrong.

the quality NOSE-DIVED so it's just cheap GARBAGE

They started getting cheap in high school so I don't think I've ever seen the really good stuff.

and maybe we can afford more stuff, anyway.

between us customers and pickers and farmers. Prices are high(er) to accommodate the middle men grocery distributors, not the producers.

I would gladly pay a majority of the prices now to producers and pickers, not the middlemen. We need to flatten out distribution structure.

I know that the price of an item (sometimes much less than in the grocery store) goes to the farmer.

these tomato pickers?

Just curious what we are talking about, 'cause they are going to need to be able to make enough money to go buy some food at the mart to put in the shopping cart they live out of. (Well, the upscale families, anyway. Unless they have had their stuff stolen).

Me? I think in the areas where we have driven the poor brown-skinned people out, (institutionalized bigotry is a marvelous thing, eh?) and growers are complaining of a labor shortage, we should bus students out to the fields to work at least 1 day a week. The value it would add to their education would be priceless.

Junior high through college, there is a ready group of "schooled" people, ought to be reasonably easy to control.

If he were paid five dollars for every 25 pound box, he'd have made $115 and it would cost 20 cents a pound to pay him. That works out to $575 a week, assuming he's not working on weekends. That puts him at $29900 a year, or well above the average income for this state. Which is well deserved, because picking tomatoes really sucks.

The problem is the people that own the farms don't want to pay a living wage. If they jack the price up 20 cents a pound, they're sure as hell not going to pass it on.

Over $.10 a lb. with $.05 a lb. strike breakers. AL is the epitome of conservative economic policy. Bet they're proud.

and you call this low slave wage "conservative." Yet it is us liberals who have made sure that the tide of cheap foreign labor coming and thus keep field wages low.

Both liberal and conservative doctrines in america are rightwing economically, just in different ways

I have family in Alabama and I live only 14 miles from the border. The fact that the hardest-working people I know - lower income people in rural areas - are supportive of these Republican policies breaks my heart.

The stuff that causes obesity is heavily subsidized, the stuff that's good for you isn't. At 82 calories per pound, it would take an awful lot of tomatoes to make someone fat. Enough that I think it would literally kill anyone that tried it.