U.S. farm industry groups want President-elect Donald Trump to spare their sector from his promise of mass deportations, which could upend a food supply chain heavily dependent on immigrants in the United States illegally.
So far Trump officials have not committed to any exemptions, according to interviews with farm and worker groups and Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan.
Nearly half of the nation’s approximately 2 million farm workers lack legal status, according to the departments of Labor and Agriculture, as well as many dairy and meatpacking workers.
They’re admitting to using slave-like labor to generate their profits. It goes well beyond rhetoric.
So, I do think what they’re doing is shitty, and the way our government handles undocumented farm workers is shitty and immoral, but I also think it’s not quite right to call the arrangement “slave-like”.
The workers are getting paid, and they’re getting paid enough to make them willing to violate immigration law, and in the case of undocumented migrant workers enough for them to enter the country and travel around it, often returning to the same places to work again.
It is very much exploitative and taking advantage of the worse economic situation elsewhere and their willingness to eschew what we consider basic worker protections.
Equating the arrangement to slavery creates the impression that it might be worth it to crack down hard to alleviate the moral injustice of the entire arrangement, despite the impact it will have on everyone involved.
A better tactic that relieves the gross injustice without hurting the people being wronged or ourselves is to make it easier for farm workers to enter the country in a safe way that allows them to benefit from the protections we believe workers should get, as well as the services we provide, like WIC. Amnesty, a path to legal residency or the citizenship process, and a harsher crackdown on businesses that look to bypass those protections.
Even the workers don’t want the arrangement to end, which tells me we need to bolster the protections they’re missing, not end the system entirely.
Children in coal mines also didn’t want child labour to end.
I would say there’s big difference between child labor, where the child can’t consent to work and we’ve societally decided that no child should be working at all, and an adult choosing to work and someone exploiting their need to deny them the worker protections they deserve.
To be clear, I’m not saying to continue allowing farms to hire undocumented workers and eschew worker protections and proper payments.
I’m saying that there’s clearly a need for farm workers that isn’t being met domestically. We should increase our efforts to ensure that the workers filling those roles are protected and not exploited, and are given the opportunity to become permanent citizens, since they clearly play an important role in our society.
We as a society have decided that to be the case and where to draw the line. That line is at a far older age than what nature might dictate.
Under that logic, the adult who is dependent on their employer to treat them fairly because they have no rights on their own can also not consent. Consent requires the option of a true viable alternative choice.
When you say the workers don’t want it to end, what they really don’t want to end surely is their ability to work and earn money in the country, not their status of illegality and their lack of enforceable rights. They just assume that an abolishment of the status quo would result in them not having work at all or in deportation. The question is what alternatives are presented.
Agreed.
100% what I wanted to make clear I was saying in my initial comment that I worried was not clear. The “arrangement” I referred to was “consensual farm work”, not “tacitly sanctioned ignoring of labor laws and worker exploitation”.
Purely for the discussion: I do think the comparison to child labor is off in this case, even though I agree about the point of needing a true viable alternative.
I would draw the comparison more to a worker in a criminal enterprise than to child mine workers.
The work they chose is their best choice, but they could have realistically chosen differently.
Within reason people can choose risky or dangerous things, as long as best doesn’t mean only.
Okay but there were alternatives to coal. There is no alternative to food. We need a better system, but the way to get there isn’t everybody starves while we figure it out.
Starvation isn’t the only alternative.
When child labour in mines was abolished we didn’t abolish coal with it (sadly).
I understand what you’re saying and under strict definitions it isn’t slavery. By the same token people working in sweatshops in Southeast Asia don’t fit the definition. Yet colloquially the word is still being used. I think because some of us think that freedom and compensation aren’t as much of a line in the sand as it appears at first glance. You could say that slaves in the US were compensated with food and shelter, and that they didn’t feel the deal was bad enough to mount a rebellion. I don’t think we should determine what the lowest standard for labor is by what some people seem to be okay with. Especially if those people aren’t given an easy path to organize. I’m not saying that’s what you’re saying. I’m merely exploring why I use the term.
BTW we have a lawful system for all of this in Canada. Working conditions aren’t great. Farmers and large corporations are happy to exploit workers in ways that Canadians aren’t willing to accept. Even when it comes to natural born citizens, deplorable working conditions have historically been common prior to workers organizing and literally fighting for better.
🤷
I really don’t think you could reasonably argue that the slaves in the US were compensated and okay with their conditions. For one, there were slave rebellions, and none of them asked to take part in the system or were given the option to leave.
I do get what you’re saying though, and we do seem to be in ultimate agreement.
We have a legal framework for it in the US as well, it’s just slow and inefficient with weird quotas that make people want to abandon the system. It undermines itself.
We do also have at least one prominent union for farm workers, including undocumented farm workers.
https://ufw.org/ The existence of a labor union with a history of real impact, as well as the workers seeking the work, is part of why I think the slavery comparison is misguided.
Equating immigrant farm labor to slavery creates the notion that we should abolish it entirely, which hurts both us and them, when the problem isn’t “immigrants doing farm work”, it’s the massive exploitation hazard which leads to too many opportunities for farm labor to have said terrible working conditions.