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Health Risks To Farmworkers Increase As Workforce Ages (npr.org)
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.
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?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
they've reconfigured their farms to make picking easier. Things like planting in a way so that you don't have to bend over as much. That plus their more generous subsidies for the poor, better education systems leading to higher wages in general and stronger Unions have kept food prices in check relative to wages.
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.
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?
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.