Leopards Ate My Face

Wow. So much ignorant hate here, as always in the enlightened misinformation age.

Most farms aren't corporations. In America for example more than 80% of farmers are smalltime. They don't dictate their profits or the wages they can afford to pay, or influence the prices of their crops or all the crap they have to buy to do farming. A typical American farmer makes $40-50k a year, and every year they risk going into the red or bankruptcy because of fluctuating prices. I really don't know why anybody in their right mind would keep farming. Family tradition or whatever - apparently it's "in their blood".

As always, a lot of people here have jumped right onto the binary world tailgate, using their vast 3-second attention spans to make a value judgement about who wears the black and white hats in the situation and who's evil, then they thumb-type a few decisive words of irrefutable justice wisdom - in this case about evil farmers treating people like slaves.

It's great that Lemmy is non-corporate and part of the fediverse, but after 7 or 8 months here I'm more and more developing the opinion that it's just another kneejerk ignorance shithole on the social media superhighwqy. Scroll on, brave justice warriors, scroll on! And enjoy your lunch.

Maybe offer better compensation if you can't find workers. No one wants to bust their ass all day for a shit wage. Unless they're desperate.

"You reap what you sow" originates from farming wisdom. Just putting that out there.

When bunker people run the country, the country becomes a bunker.

Just buy a Musk-branded, doge- approved, exploding slave neck collar and perimeter fence kit. Keeps your child employees motivated, on-task, on-location.

I’m surprised that they haven’t considered using prison labour yet.

It is also ironic that people in the US criticize alleged slavery in other countries but ignore their agricultural economy

Importing workers to make 16.84/hr. Just what American is going to accept that kind of wage when the boss is getting grants of hundreds of thousands of dollars?

The immigrant would have to work 11,876 hours to earn the 200k handout that the boss gets for hiring him seasonally for two years. How is this sustainable? Are we all going to be working to subsidize farmers by 100k/year to hire a single foreign farmhand?

Not to mention the program for that grant has only 141 members... it just doesn't make sense.

Well yeah. Turns out people who aren't in fear of being deported won't work for a fraction of minimum wage paid under the table.

They'll start calling to use prison labor soon enough. Prisons are commercial facilities anyway and could use some cash. And there are more African American in prison proportionally so that's a bonus for MAGA. Police will get their cut for putting more people in prison. That way the new racist slave labor gets established.

I thought that Covid would have been enough of a trial run for that.

At least in my country it was that. You know, it was Covid, with the highest unemployment rate since quite a long time, and farmers ran nation-wide ads looking for workers. They increased the pay sometimes up to 2-3x. They promised housing in nice hotels. And still, nobody wanted to do the job and that year there was just no strawberries on the shelves.

The only way working as a farm hand makes sense is if:

• The workers have no decent other option
• Working on a farm is safer than working at home
• Money is worth a lot more where they are from, so that the meagre salary they make in the target country is worth multiple times of that back home, so that the €1000-1200 they make over here turn into the equivalent purchasing power of €4000-6000 back home.

This is part of the plan. Small farms will be run out of business and then bought for a low price and consolidated by mega farms.

Big Agriculture wants this and lobbies for it to happen.

These red voting MAGA fucks were receiving grants to hire labor and they claim socialism is bad. I have zero sympathy for their problems and this is another classic FAFO situation.