No. of Recommendations: 5
Absolutely a brilliant idea to screw with California’s farm economy. What could possibly go wrong?
Don't worry, the needed labor will come from US citizens. Just kidding, we are all too spoiled to take on those jobs.
This is a real problem. It's hard work and low wages. When there have been labor shortages in the agricultural sector, USians have not been there to fill the gap. Thus undocumented workers.
In the 1960's when I was a teenager in central California my friends and I (and really most of the high school kids) found summer jobs in the ag sector. I worked in a peach cannery, a packing shed for tomatoes and peppers, an onion and garlic dehydrating plant, hoeing grape vineyards, and picking peaches. (I'll admit I did not last long picking peaches).
Maybe the most interesting of those jobs was the onion and garlic dehydrating plant. This was summer work and the already high temps were made hotter by the huge gas jets that were used to heat enclosed conveyer belts where the onions and garlic were dehydrated. As a new hire I was given some of the worst jobs: standing at a station where the product would jam up and using my hands to keep the masses of product moving; climbing through an opening in the big ducts to clear out jams when the onions would pile up and stop moving, this done with a big snow shovel and in a space just barely big enough to work on hands and knees. Fun. It took a week or so after the end of that job for the garlic smell to finally get flushed from my pores.
