Occupy Wall Street

[heganboy]

I don't believe people when they say they can't get a job.

Many folks agree with you:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us/farmers-strain-to-hire-american-workers-in-place-of-migrant-labor.html

From

OLATHE, Colo. — How can there be a labor shortage when nearly one out of every 11 people in the nation are unemployed?

That's the question John Harold asked himself last winter when he was trying to figure out how much help he would need to harvest the corn and onions on his 1,000-acre farm here in western Colorado.

The simple-sounding plan that resulted — hire more local people and fewer foreign workers — left Mr. Harold and others who took a similar path adrift in a predicament worthy of Kafka.

The more they tried to do something concrete to address immigration and joblessness, the worse off they found themselves.

"It's absolutely true that people who have played by the rules are having the toughest time of all," said Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado.

Mr. Harold, a 71-year-old Vietnam War veteran who drifted here in the late '60s, has participated for about a decade in a federal program called H-2A that allows seasonal foreign workers into the country to make up the gap where willing and able American workers are few in number. He typically has brought in about 90 people from Mexico each year from July through October.

This year, though, with tough times lingering and a big jump in the minimum wage under the program, to nearly $10.50 an  hour, Mr. Harold brought in only two-thirds of his usual contingent. The other positions, he figured, would be snapped up by jobless local residents wanting some extra summer cash.

"It didn't take me six hours to realize I'd made a heck of a mistake," Mr. Harold said, standing in his onion field on a recent afternoon as a crew of workers from Mexico cut the tops off yellow onions and bagged them.

Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard. On the Harold farm, pickers walk the rows alongside a huge harvest vehicle called a mule train, plucking ears of corn and handing them up to workers on the mule who box them and lift the crates, each weighing 45 to 50 pounds.

"It is not an easy job," said Kerry Mattics, 49, another H-2A farmer here in Olathe, who brought in only a third of his usual Mexican crew of 12 workers for his 50-acre fruit and vegetable farm, then struggled to make it through the season. "It's outside, so if it's wet, you're wet, and if it's hot you're hot," he said.

Still, Mr. Mattics said, he can't help feeling that people have gotten soft.

"They wanted that $10.50 an hour without doing very much," he said. "I know people with college degrees, working for the school system and only making 11 bucks."

A mismatch between employers' requirements and the skills and needs of the jobless — repeated across industries — has been a constant theme of this recessionary era. But here on the farm, mismatch can mean high anxiety.

The H-2A program, in particular, in trying to avoid displacing American citizens from jobs, strongly encourages farmers to hire locally if they can, with a requirement that they advertise in at least three states. That forces participants to take huge risks in guessing where a moving target might land — how many locals, how many foreigners — often with an entire season's revenue at stake. Survival, not civic virtue, drives the equation, they say.

"Farmers have to bear almost all the labor market risk because they must prove no one really was available, qualified or willing to work," said Dawn D. Thilmany, a professor of agricultural economics at Colorado State University. "But the only way to offer proof is to literally have a field left unharvested."

Mr. Harold's experience is a repeated refrain where farm labor is seasonal and population sparse. And even many immigration hard-liners have come to agree that the dearth of Americans willing to work the fields requires some sort of rethinking, at least, of the H-2A program. Indeed, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, a conservative Republican, is pushing a bill that would greatly expand the number of foreign guest workers admitted to the country each year.

In Colorado, the unemployment rate in many rural counties is also significantly lower than in the cities — two neighboring counties here, for example, had 5.5 percent and 6 percent unemployment rates in August, according to state figures, compared with 9.1 percent for the nation as a whole. The big increase in the wage rate for H-2A workers, meanwhile, up nearly $2.50 an hour — calculated by averaging what farmers had to pay last year — also suggests that labor demand was already rising.

Mr. Harold usually hires about 50 local workers for the season — regulars who have worked summers for years — and most returned this year, he said. Finding new employees was where he ran into trouble. He was able to recover after the season started, he said, by rushing in another group of H-2A workers from Mexico.

But the broader story of labor in agriculture, economists and historians said, is that through good times and bad and across socioeconomic lines, people who find better lives off the farm rarely return. Mr. Harold and other H-2A farmers said that most of the local residents who tried field work this summer, for example, were Hispanic, many of whom, they said, had probably immigrated in years past for agricultural work before taking better-paid jobs in construction or landscaping.

Other farmers left in the lurch by local workers conceded that what they had to offer was a tough sell — full-time but temporary work. About 56,000 foreign workers came into the country with H-2A visas last year, according to the most recent federal figures, down from 60,000 in 2009.

Heath Terrell is one of the few new local residents who stuck it out. Mr. Terrell, a former hay hauler, was hired to drive a corn truck. That job kept him out of the fields, and out of the sun. Now, as the season has shifted from corn to onions, Mr. Terrell, 42, said he might just stay on with Mr. Harold through the winter, or at least onion season.

[seafoid]

$10 an hour is no use to anyone under threat of foreclosure. What sort of healthcare does $10 an hour buy?
Th whole system in the US s broken.

[heganboy]

10.50 > 0

[seafoid]

http://www.progressive.org/one_percent_barbara_ehrenreich.html
The Guys in the 1% Brought This On | Barbara Ehrenreich

By Barbara Ehrenreich, October 12, 2011

At the risk of being pedantic, let me point out that "99% versus 1%" is not a class analysis, not in any respectable sociological sense. Shave off the top 1% and you're still left with some awfully steep divides of wealth, income and opportunity. The 99% includes the ordinary rich, for example, who may lack private jets but do have swimming pools and second homes. It also includes the immigrant workers who mow their lawns and clean their houses for them. This is not a class. It's just the default category left after you subtract the billionaires.
Some of the diversity of the 99% is clearly on display at the variations occupations around the country. I've seen occupiers who look like they picked up their camping skills on vacations in the national parks, as well as those who normally make their homes on the streets, even when they're not protesting. Occupy Wall Street has attracted contingents of airplane pilots, electricians and construction workers -– the latter often from the new World Trade Center being built a block away. You'll also find schoolteachers, professors, therapists, office workers and, of course, the usual crusty punks of indistinct provenance and profession. In Washington, I met one occupier wearing a crisp blue dress shirt and a tie emblazoned with tiny elephants. He said he was a Republican, a lawyer, and he'd had enough.
Then there are the poorest of the poor – the unemployed, the foreclosed upon, the chronically homeless. In Los Angeles, traditional residents of Skid Row have begun to join the occupation encampment. When about 150 people met to plan their local occupation in a union hall in Fort Wayne earlier this week, they solicited advice from already-homeless people in the crowd, who had first-hand experience of where the police are most heavy-handed and where you're most likely to find a nutritious dumpster or a public toilet. For the homeless, joining an occupation brings instant upward mobility: free food -- not entirely vegan, I have been relieved to discover -- and, in some cases, Port-a-potties and the rudiments of medical care.

The evident poverty of so many of the occupiers has left the right sputtering for apt denunciations. In the '60s, neoconservative intellectuals looked at student protesters and saw the political avant-garde of a "new class" or "liberal elite," bent on taking power and imposing their own twisted combination of sexual libertarianism and Soviet-style Communism. The neocons accused the protestors of being the privileged, "spoiled" children of a "permissive" upper middle class, and utterly alien to salt-of-the-earth working class Americans. There was just enough truth to this accusation to make a few of us young radicals flinch.
I saw one community organizing effort crash on the class divide between earnest Marxist professors, who thought meetings were a good site for "political education," and blue collar recruits who thought meetings should be social occasions adequately lubricated with alcohol. In the '70s, Minneapolis was the site of the "twinkie wars," in which a food co-op was torn apart between the conflicting demands of working class omnivores and middle class organic purists. At the absolute nadir of New Left-working class relations, in 1970, 200 union construction workers attacked a student anti-war protest near Wall Street—not far from where construction workers now take lunch breaks with the protesters in Zuccotti Park.
For decades, as Tom Frank and others have documented, the right exulted in its clever diagnosis: Anyone who raises his or her voice on behalf the downtrodden is in fact an "elitist." "Real" Americans loyally align themselves with the wealthy and their corporations. And, at least for a couple of years, the Tea Party seemed to make the fantasy come true. Although heavily funded by billionaires and thickly populated by prosperous suburban business owners, the Tea Party did manage to attract some representatives of the unemployed and uninsured, like the financially shaky California man I interviewed in 2009 who told me he would happily forgo health insurance if that's what he had to do to "stop socialism."
But today, even the college-educated among the occupiers no longer fit the sloppiest notion of an "elite." This is the student debt generation, which graduated with five- to six-figure dollar debts and no jobs in sight –- people like thirty-three-year-old Cryn Johannsen, who has MA's from both Brown and the University of Chicago and now works as an unpaid full-time "warrior for the indentured educated class." Forty years ago, someone with Cryn's credentials would be settling into a tenure track academic job, complete with health insurance and maybe even a housing subsidy. When I first met her about two years ago, she was working as a sales clerk in a department store. Now she lives with her in-laws and hustles for bits of money to keep her on the road, organizing occupations.
The class contours of American society (and no doubt Greek and Irish and many others as well) have been redrawn since the last great outbreak of mass protest in the '60s. True, a college education still offers a lifetime earnings advantage; the unemployed lawyer faces a brighter future than the laid-off sanitation and call center workers she confers with at an occupation encampment's general assembly. But the parts of the middle class once lumped together by the right as a "liberal elite" have been severely eroded, its core occupations go underfunded and exploited. Promising young academics end up as adjuncts earning near the minimum wage; social workers face starting pay in the neighborhood of $12 an hour; lawyers from non-Ivy League law schools may find themselves toiling in basement "legal sweatshops."
So the "99% versus the 1%" theme is beginning to look like an acute class analysis after all, and it's the guys in the 1% who made it so. Over the years, they have systematically hollowed out the space around them: destroying the industrial working class with the outsourcings and plant closures of the '80s, turning on white collar managers in the downsizing wave of the '90s, clearing large swathes of the middle class with the credit schemes of the '00's—the trick mortgages and till-death-do-we-part student loans.
In the '60s we dreamed of uniting people of all races and collar colors into "one big working class." But it took the billionaires to make it happen.

[The Iceman]

$10 an hour is no use to anyone under threat of foreclosure. What sort of healthcare does $10 an hour buy?
Th whole system in the US s broken.

The same attitude exists all over the world Seafoid - its called laziness. There's plenty of work for anyone who wants it. $10 buys a lot more healthcare than $0
Too many people have no work in them and think the world owes them......

[J70]

$10 an hour is no use to anyone under threat of foreclosure. What sort of healthcare does $10 an hour buy?
Th whole system in the US s broken.

According to a quick wiki search, $10.50 is just 40 cents an hour below the median income for a male in that town, assuming a 40 hour week, 52 week year. Not great, but nothing to sneeze at either if you're out of work in that area. In terms of cost of living, it certainly isn't New York or San Francisco.

[DrinkingHarp]

$10 an hour is no use to anyone under threat of foreclosure. What sort of healthcare does $10 an hour buy?
Th whole system in the US s broken.

According to a quick wiki search, $10.50 is just 40 cents an hour below the median income for a male in that town, assuming a 40 hour week, 52 week year. Not great, but nothing to sneeze at either if you're out of work in that area. In terms of cost of living, it certainly isn't New York or San Francisco.

It is only during harvest, July to October 4 months according to the article.

[J70]

$10 an hour is no use to anyone under threat of foreclosure. What sort of healthcare does $10 an hour buy?
Th whole system in the US s broken.

According to a quick wiki search, $10.50 is just 40 cents an hour below the median income for a male in that town, assuming a 40 hour week, 52 week year. Not great, but nothing to sneeze at either if you're out of work in that area. In terms of cost of living, it certainly isn't New York or San Francisco.

It is only during harvest, July to October 4 months according to the article.

I know, but it would certainly beat being on the dole and in terms of pay rates for the region, its not bad at all. Plus, you never know what doors might open. And at least one person they interviewed was staying on past the initial harvest.