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Maybe offer better compensation if you can't find workers. No one wants to bust their ass all day for a shit wage. Unless they're desperate.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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day for a shit wage.
Underpaying Immigrants and Outsourcing both tech and design to China has rightfully fucked us. Smarter every day tried to make an OK grill brush here, it has to be $75.
I don't like either of the answers the administration is providing to these problems (nor do I think they're legitimately trying to solve them), But we're going to dead end if we don't do something about it.
Tax the rich, pay generous wages, focus on local manufacturing, fix pricing and force market competition.
Unless the system doesn’t oversee them, because then the standards of the system don’t apply to them, and they can be exploited.
Farmers can go fuck themselves for doing modern day slavery exploitation.
Oh, your profits were based on how little you can pay your employees? HOW ABOUT YOU SUCK MY FUCKING DICK.
"You reap what you sow" originates from farming wisdom. Just putting that out there.
It's weird to think the agricultural workers, who can't vote and don't have legal status and are often living on subsistence wages, deserve to be snatched off the street and fed into a concentration camp system in order to deprive a few agricultural wholesalers of their profit margins.
I don't see that as reaping what you sow at all. Fascism does not fall heaviest on the fascists.
Supporters of facism and their narcissism. Specifically, they use their privilige to moan about their own challenges, seemingly without much thought for those taken into concentration camps. They will only ever understand what hurts them.
Just buy a Musk-branded, doge- approved, exploding slave neck collar and perimeter fence kit. Keeps your child employees motivated, on-task, on-location.
get dog barking e-collars. When the kids beg for humane working conditions, they'll be shocked into getting back to fucking work.
Proles hate this one easy productivity hack, the results will shock you!
Not too long ago, historically speaking, kids were in coal mines, chimney sweeps, etc
And Sarah Huckabee Sanders is trying very hard to get kids back into the workplace.
And she wonders why people hate her.
Arkansas is a failed state.
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I’m surprised that they haven’t considered using prison labour yet.
It is also ironic that people in the US criticize alleged slavery in other countries but ignore their agricultural economy
I'm pretty sure parts the US are actively using prison labor already. It varies by state, but I remember reading about one state where they were basically renting out prisoners to companies. I think they used the term "hiring", but the money the company paid didn't go to the inmate... The prison system has been one of the larger atrocities in the US for a while now.
Prisoners make something like a quarter an hour.
Wow. So much ignorant hate here, as always in the enlightened misinformation age.
Most farms aren't corporations. In America for example more than 80% of farmers are smalltime. They don't dictate their profits or the wages they can afford to pay, or influence the prices of their crops or all the crap they have to buy to do farming. A typical American farmer makes $40-50k a year, and every year they risk going into the red or bankruptcy because of fluctuating prices. I really don't know why anybody in their right mind would keep farming. Family tradition or whatever - apparently it's "in their blood".
As always, a lot of people here have jumped right onto the binary world tailgate, using their vast 3-second attention spans to make a value judgement about who wears the black and white hats in the situation and who's evil, then they thumb-type a few decisive words of irrefutable justice wisdom - in this case about evil farmers treating people like slaves.
It's great that Lemmy is non-corporate and part of the fediverse, but after 7 or 8 months here I'm more and more developing the opinion that it's just another kneejerk ignorance shithole on the social media superhighwqy. Scroll on, brave justice warriors, scroll on! And enjoy your lunch.
False. Median farm family incomes are $97,984 in 2023 while the median family income for the country was $80k. "In 2023, the median U.S. farm household had $1,439,138 in wealth" while the median US family net wealth was $192,000. Farmers on average are far better off than the average American. Note that corporate farm incomes are NOT included in these figures.
Sources: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-well-being/income-and-wealth-in-context https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf23.pdf (page 11)
That sounds like the value of the land and equipment is included as wealth.
For one thing, we're clearly getting our stats from different sources. For another, "household" commonly means one or two people in an urban setting and 5 or more in a farm family. So I would actually hope their incomes are above median. In any case, I srsly doubt that the people here bothered to look up anything before lighting torches and grabbing pitchforks, which was my point.
When bunker people run the country, the country becomes a bunker.
Well yeah. Turns out people who aren't in fear of being deported won't work for a fraction of minimum wage paid under the table.
work for a fraction of minimum wage paid under the table.
The real irony here is that a lot of immigrant workers were here on legitimate visas, in fact a huge portion of the "illegal" immigrants who the Trump administration has deported were here on legit visas that he wantonly revoked, and were therefore paying taxes on the shite wages they were being paid. Taxes that the U.S. is now no longer collecting. Anyone wanna take bets on the deficit increase under Trump?
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They'll start calling to use prison labor soon enough. Prisons are commercial facilities anyway and could use some cash. And there are more African American in prison proportionally so that's a bonus for MAGA. Police will get their cut for putting more people in prison. That way the new racist slave labor gets established.
That is already happening at scale
That's definitely the plan, and they'll be using private, for-profit prison companies. One is a facility in Louisiana that has been closed twice due to abuse and torture of inmates, and has been reopened as an ICE facility they've been stashing the students arrested for pro-Palestinian protests there. The Columbia student who just got released was being held there.
They are also building a 30,000 bed facility at Guantanamo Bay. The $250 million dollar contract has been awarded, and it's underway. For context, the average maximum security prison hold 800-1200 people, with the largest in Angola, LA holding about 8400. So this new facility is nearly 4 times larger than the largest prison, which is already several times larger than average. Clearly, they intend to house MANY people there.
It's my belief that they will eventually take the position that if you can't stay actively employed (due to AI, robotics, automation, discrimination, etc.) and require the help of the government to survive, then they will house and feed you in exchange for renting you out as slave labor. That way, they can say they solved the homeless problems, even though all they did was turn them into slaves.
And the MAGA followers will go along with it, happy that the "parasites" are being forced to work. Besides, they've been hoping for slavery to return since 1865. The only legal slavery in America is prison labor, and like MAGA always does, they intend to exploit the shit out of that Amendment.
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These red voting MAGA fucks were receiving grants to hire labor and they claim socialism is bad. I have zero sympathy for their problems and this is another classic FAFO situation.
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This is part of the plan. Small farms will be run out of business and then bought for a low price and consolidated by mega farms.
Big Agriculture wants this and lobbies for it to happen.
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You mean that the job isn't worth what you pay to do. They always pretend it isn't the money. But of course its the money. If I'm going to work my ass off I expect better pay. Those immigrants were working their ass off for minimum wage and the farmers knew they were exploiting them.
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Importing workers to make 16.84/hr. Just what American is going to accept that kind of wage when the boss is getting grants of hundreds of thousands of dollars?
The immigrant would have to work 11,876 hours to earn the 200k handout that the boss gets for hiring him seasonally for two years. How is this sustainable? Are we all going to be working to subsidize farmers by 100k/year to hire a single foreign farmhand?
Not to mention the program for that grant has only 141 members... it just doesn't make sense.
It makes plenty of sense when you realize that grift and sensationalism were the goals all along
The system has been set up to extract as much wealth from the workers while offering the thin illusion of ultimate freedom to distract from said extraction.
OK, so, I live in farm country and there's some problems with what your saying. 1. It's actually good pay. In fact some farmers have tried raising the pay to attract more workers, it rarely works. Farms are in the middle of nowhere. There's no city. MAYBE there's a post office and a store that sells exclusively Croation gass station fare. MAYBE. It's temporary work. You get a few months pay. So. Remote, physically demanding, and temporary. That's what makes it a ''no thanks'' job for every American. We live hand to mouth, we live in a stack of cards that requires constant payments. That's not a problem in Latin America for the most part, they live hand to mouth but they can save up money, they are maxed out on payments and debt, they just throw extra money in a jar and only live of what they really really need. So working a few months in the US, then Canada, then Mexico, it's OK. That's why they're called seasonal farm workers. When you close to boarders you trap them out of their job and create insane problems. I don't know why Americans can't figure out how the food gets to the Walmart, but they have been failing up grasp this for a long ass time.
You're not gaslighting anyone into thinking $17 an hour is worth much of anything. What the fuck does "some farmers have tried raising the pay to attract more workers, it rarely works" mean?? Oh no, farms are paying more, better not work there. Are you removed? You don't see rednecks passing up oilfield work because it's out in the middle of nowhere. Couldn't possibly have anything to do with the six figure paychecks those jobs have. Nope. Hell, I bet if you dropped their pay to $17 an hour, every roughneck in the field would sprint as fast as they could over to thank you personally. What a fuckin genius idea.
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I thought that Covid would have been enough of a trial run for that.
At least in my country it was that. You know, it was Covid, with the highest unemployment rate since quite a long time, and farmers ran nation-wide ads looking for workers. They increased the pay sometimes up to 2-3x. They promised housing in nice hotels. And still, nobody wanted to do the job and that year there was just no strawberries on the shelves.
The only way working as a farm hand makes sense is if:
- The workers have no decent other option
- Working on a farm is safer than working at home
- Money is worth a lot more where they are from, so that the meagre salary they make in the target country is worth multiple times of that back home, so that the €1000-1200 they make over here turn into the equivalent purchasing power of €4000-6000 back home.
I wouldn't mind being a crop worker...provided I get at least minimum wage, breaks, healthcare, and reasonable quotas that ensure my wellbeing.
...crickets...
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- Farmhands deported, can't find replacements
- $200k labor grant suspended indefinitely
- Lost subsidies, making less money on product
- Tariffs jacked up equipment prices and repairs
- Depends on Medicaid, no insurance if it's cut
Oh boy, way to seriously fuck yourself from every conceivable angle, smart guys. Sumo wrestler lookin leopards after this one.
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What's that? Southern states running on cheap labour can't cope with the loss of that labour? Where have we heard that before?
Fool me once and all that, but they actually voted for it this time round...
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Maybe these morons should stop voting to remove their employees. Too smart for these MAGAts.
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So ... Pay the Americans more. That is why they are leaving, my farming friends. It really is that simple.
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The idea is so badly implemented... you have to raise back Unions and decent salaries, what they expecting is that actual born americans will do the same job for the same shit money that desperate migrants who have absolutely nothing.
So in essence they want the new slaves to be US born, yeah fuck that.
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