Health Risks To Farmworkers Increase As Workforce Ages (npr.org) 77
An anonymous reader shares an NPR report: More than 90 percent of California's crop workers were born in Mexico. But in recent years, fewer have migrated to the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Researchers point to a number of causes: tighter border controls; higher prices charged by smugglers; well-paying construction jobs and a growing middle-class in Mexico that doesn't want to pick vegetables for Americans. As a result, the average farmworker is now 45 years old, according to federal government data. Harvesting U.S. crops has been left to an aging population of farmworkers whose health has suffered from decades of hard labor. Older workers have a greater chance of getting injured and of developing chronic illnesses, which can raise the cost of workers' compensation and health insurance.
Thanks captain obvious?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Watch me do this half pipe - ooops there goes me dentures!
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They have automated the driving of mining trucks. The human drivers are now located in air-conditioned offices, ready to take over if something goes wrong:
https://www.oemoffhighway.com/... [oemoffhighway.com]
They are making mining equipment like drills and rock crushers remotely operated. Same with the cranes used to load containers into ships
https://www.ericsson.com/asset... [ericsson.com]
https://www.ericsson.com/en/pu... [ericsson.com]
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And it's at least partly due to an insistence we increase border security to keep out undocumented workers from stealing jobs. Jobs, it turns out, that no one wants but need to be done in order for us all to not starve.
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an insistence we increase border security to keep out undocumented workers
It is likely that increased border security keeps UDWs in rather than out. When border security is loose, UDWs can move back and forth easily, and often leave their families back home in Mexico, where the cost of living is lower. With tighter security, that is not possible, so they all come across and stay.
Before the latest crackdown, net migration from Mexico was negative. More people were returning for improved job opportunities in Mexico.
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I don't have a problem with that.
I"d much rather pay for US citizens to have an honest job, than underpaying some person here illegally.
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If you like citizens better than non-citiziens, I guess I'd ask why. They're people, we're people, where you're born should make about as much difference as your sign.
But that's beside the point. This is what we eat. Run this experiment for nationalism on an industry less vital than food. Try it with the restaurant industry first? See if getting rid of undocumented workers makes wages rise enough that comparatively lazy citizens will bus tables e
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Bullshit.
Every goddam marketing firm in, literally, the whole fucking US says you're wrong.
We want cheap stuff and fuck the issues.
Re:Thanks captain obvious?! (Score:4, Insightful)
No we won't. If the cost to harvest certain crops in the US becomes prohibitive, we'll just import from some cheaper country. Or we'll switch to crops are that more amenable to mechanical harvesting.
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Sourcing the oil we need is a national security nightmare. You're talking about decreasing our national independence.
Costs will rise with either outcome you suggested, and it will affect every breathing american.
To top it all off, we'd be doing this not out of necessity, we'd be doing this for no reason beyond "LOL, fuck you mexicans!"
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Its really you who is trying to fuck over mexicans. No one should have to suffer a lifetime of debilitating manual labor just so you can have some strawberries in your Cheerios.
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I guess they didn't make the important part obvious enough: you are going to be paying for that increased price.
And it's at least partly due to an insistence we increase border security to keep out undocumented workers from stealing jobs. Jobs, it turns out, that no one wants but need to be done in order for us all to not starve.
It says here [nationalgeographic.com] that raising the wages of produce pickers to $15/hour would cost American households an extra $20 per year. If that's true, I wouldn't expect an uprising over increased produce prices due to increased farmworker wages.
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I guess they didn't make the important part obvious enough: you are going to be paying for that increased price.
And it's at least partly due to an insistence we increase border security to keep out undocumented workers from stealing jobs. Jobs, it turns out, that no one wants but need to be done in order for us all to not starve.
There is no shortage of people who want these jobs. Come to the central valley of California and see for yourself.
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professional skateboarders when they get around 45?!
Watch me do this half pipe - ooops there goes me dentures!
Ahem, dentures at 45 won't be from getting being a mere 45 but because of being a skateboarder.
Dang ageist kid.
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I'd be willing to wager that a lifetime of sedentary behavior leads to more health risks than hard labor. the average office drone at 45 is a walking corpse.
Well....send'em back... (Score:4, Interesting)
And for all the US folks that can't seem to get a job after being on the dole for a couple years, let's start "farming" them out to the picking jobs, eh?
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That's silly.
Make the welfare losers pick strawberries if Mexicans are "too good" for that job any more.
Hunting them is fun but not very productive.
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Well let's be honest. If things were like they were back in the 1980's and early 90's when I worked during the summer(and late fall for tobacco harvest) on a farm, you'd see more people doing it. Back then you were paid an hourly rate. Now you're paid based on weight that you pick. It was the state and provincial governments of the day that allowed it to happen because the big corporate farms started crying "but we can't pay them an actual wage..." so the laws were changed to weight. Then they cried "b
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"The," is "us," you insensitive clod.
Quit subsidizing farmers (Score:1)
You want this problem fixed? Get the government out of farming; they're subsidizing the old guard, rather than letting that old guard come to the conclusion that they need to sell their assets to someone who is more capable.
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You'd have to get farming state congressmen on board, and good luck with that.
And really--there is a lot of work going on to make produce-picking robots now. Farm labor is a job that deserves to be killed, quite frankly. It is much worse than typical factory assembly-line work.
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Re:The typic of the one true house. (Score:4, Insightful)
*clears throat*
Why the FUCK THIS IS ON SLASHDOT.
Europe's already dealt with this (Score:3, Interesting)
I suspect you'll start to see at least some of this in the US (minus the educations & Unions, we don't seem to like those anymore). Our government will push it through. You'd be surprised how tightly regulated and controlled our food supply is. It's like what Mao and Stalin would have done if instead of being idiotic psychopaths they'd just put real agricultural scientists in charge.
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Contrast that to the US where Libertarian principles are at the helm, the best tax package in history for US citizens is about to get passed, the US stock market is at its highest ever, and there is full employment.
Lets see - a minimum trillion dollar increase in the deficit - solid Libertarian principle there! And the Tax Policy Center finds that the richest 1 percent of Americans would reap 48% of the benefits (they pay 36% of Federal taxes). Yep. That sounds Libertarian alright.
Oddly, 10 months ago when it was those lousy Socialist principles at the helm, we also had the highest U.S. stock market ever [macrotrends.net], and full employment.
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crops like grapes and others must be harvested by hand.
20 years ago, you had to pick strawberries and blueberries by hand too. These days you don't. You don't even need to pick grapes by hand unless you're in the ice wine business, you can buy the equipment to automate most grape harvesting too. Brand new machines can be picked up for around $500k, used(2-3yrs old) on the market as low as $40k.
Er, what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm wait, I thought it was all robots, all the time? The employment problem was caused by robots?
So there are human jobs that need to be filled, then? And which were being filled by illegals? Oh, you don't say? Really?
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Time is an important concept. The threat of robots and AI is in the future, which will be here sooner than you'd like.
Where's the story? (Score:2)
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This is news? (Score:2)
It sucks to be poor. Getting old tends to lead to getting sick. Hard labor is hard on the body. Health care can be expensive, especially when people delay their care. None of this is news.
Not surprising, on several fronts (Score:4, Interesting)
This would happen whether or not the workers were foreign or domestic. One thing that a lot of people who advocate for gutting retirement and disability benefits don't get is that different jobs age people differently. Even skilled jobs that are more physical in nature tend to wreck people's bodies...think about an electrician crawling around everywhere or a plumber. So, it is very possible that someone is disabled enough by the time they're in their 40s or 50s that they can't or don't want to do physical work anymore. Contrast that with your average office job where people can easily work into their 70s and beyond.
The other thing the article mentions is that a growing domestic middle class means fewer young people are willing to risk coming here for unskilled farm work. Also not a surprise...and I wonder if this is coming to the offshore outsourcing market as well in other countries. As a population gets wealthier, parents tend to steer their kids into higher-paying professions and everyone ends up getting forced through some sort of secondary education. I grew up in a reasonably blue-collar town, and even in the early 90s it was very rare to have a new high school grad just walk down to the nearest factory or farm and punch in for a lifetime of work. 50 years ago, there wouldn't be the "shame" of doing a blue-collar physical job, and students were separated into vocational and academic tracks. Apply this to somewhere like India where hundreds of thousands of new grads are looking for work...do they beg and grovel to work for IBM or Accenture or (insert US company's India development house here), or do they go after domestic work for Indian companies? Just a while back, a job with a US outsourcer was a big prize...less so now.
Now the question is what to do...either raise food prices, raise wages and offer better working conditions, or invent robots to handle the notoriously hard to automate task of harvesting food.
Driving out to the barrios... (Score:2)
....trying to find day workers to pick their artisan heirloom tomatoes.
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From the original Washington Post article:
So the number may be increasing, as opposed to decreasing, as it has over the last 70 years, but the number is tiny. Over a five year period the number was 2384, or about 475 per year, (there are about 2 million farme
U-Pick Farms (Score:4, Funny)
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Capitalism, baby!
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Really? Do you have any conception of the scale of farming? Getting enough doofus hipsters into your fields so they can destroy the plants they are picking food off isn't exactly a bright concept. But I'll bet it works really well for a few acres a "farmer" doesn't care about.
Older workers have more health issues (Score:3)
News at 11.
Summary Leaves Out the Single Biggest Factor (Score:2)
All of the listed reasons for the drying up a pool of young illegal-immigrant farm workers for those Trump-voting farmers to illegally employ for profit are valid.
But the most important reason is not mentioned.
Demographics. [blogspot.com]
The birth rate in Mexico is now below the replacement rate, as it is in the U.S.
The average (and median) age of illegal border crossers is 20. So a border-crosser today was born in 1997 when the fertility rate in Mexico had already plunged 60%. So the oversupply of young people willing
Drought wasn't ... (Score:2)
... listed?
It's kind of a big deal.
Machines. (Score:2)
It's about time we developed cheap machines to do this work. Seriously, we have the knowledge to make soft robotic pickers for any type of fruits or vegetable. We have the technology, it's time to start putting it to good use.