So Georgia is facing a little bit of a problem. No, it's not illegals. They actually cleared that up and ran off all those pesky illegals that were taking the jobs of locals. The problem now is that those open jobs working in the fields are ones that no one in their right True-American mind actually wants.
State officials reaping what they have sown
Jay Bookman; Staff
After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.
It might be funny if it wasn't so sad.
Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars' worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they've done to Georgia's largest industry.
Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal ordered a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.
The results of that investigation have now been released. According to a survey of 230 Georgia farmers conducted by Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, farmers expect to need more than 11,000 workers at some point over the rest of the season, a number that probably underestimates the real need, since not every farmer in the state responded to the survey.
In response, Deal proposes that farmers try to hire the 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers estimated to live in southwest Georgia. Somehow, I suspect that would not be a partnership made in heaven for either party.
As an editorial in the Valdosta Daily Times notes, "Maybe this should have been prepared for, with farmers' input. Maybe the state should have discussed the ramifications with those directly affected. Maybe the immigration issue is not as easy as 'send them home,' but is a far more complex one in that maybe Georgia needs them, relies on them, and cannot successfully support the state's No. 1 economic engine without them."
According to the survey, more than 6,300 of the unclaimed jobs pay an hourly wage of just $7.25 to $8.99, or an average of roughly $8 an hour. Over a 40-hour work week in the South Georgia sun, that's $320 a week, before taxes, although most workers probably put in considerably longer hours. Another 3,200 jobs pay $9 to $11 an hour. And while our agriculture commissioner has been quoted as saying Georgia farms provide "$12-, $13-, $14-, $16-, $18-an-hour jobs," the survey reported just 169 openings out of more than 11,000 that pay $16 or more.
In addition, few of the jobs include benefits --- only 7.7 percent offer health insurance, and barely a third are even covered by workers' compensation. And the truth is that even if all 2,000 probationers in the region agreed to work at those rates and stuck it out --- a highly unlikely event, to put it mildly --- it wouldn't fix the problem.
Given all that, Deal's pledge to find "viable and law-abiding solutions" to the problem that he helped create seems naively far-fetched. Again, if such solutions existed, they should have been put in place before the bill ever became law, because this impact was entirely predictable and in fact intended.
It's hard to envision a way out of this. Georgia farmers could try to solve the manpower shortage by offering higher wages, but that would create an entirely different set of problems.
If they raise wages by a third to a half, which is probably what it would take, they would drive up their operating costs and put themselves at a severe price disadvantage against competitors in states without such tough immigration laws. That's one of the major disadvantages of trying to implement immigration reform state by state, rather than all at once.
The pain this is causing is real. People are going to lose their crops, and in some cases their farms. The small-town businesses that supply those farms with goods and services are going to suffer as well. For economically embattled rural Georgia, this could be a major blow.
In fact, with a federal court challenge filed last week, you have to wonder whether state officials aren't secretly hoping to be rescued from this mess by the intervention of a judge. But given how the Georgia law is drafted and how the Supreme Court ruled in a recent case out of Arizona, I don't think that's likely.
We're going to reap what we have sown, even if the farmers can't.
If you haven't read it, it's well worth the however long it takes you to read an article. It makes you really wonder if you can actually use racism as a weapon in the war against capitalism. I believe we can make it happen.
But I wonder why the unemployed don't want to do crushingly difficult manual labor for far less than minimum wage with no benefits? Clearly they're all just lazy assholes.
What did they think was going to happen? Did they assume that low wages and terrible work conditions would drive people running for the jobs in droves? Why yes, sub-par wages picking fruit, c'mon ma! We gotta pack up the wagon and git before the other okies get wise!"
It's also difficult to envision a way out of this for the state. Georgia farmers could, you know, try to solve the manpower shortage by offering higher wages and all, but that would create an entirely different set of problems, wouldn't it?
Americans finally won. The immigrants have stopped stealing your jobs, so get working already! It's amazing that people are so fucking shocked that no one would be willing to work these farms for the pay they're offering without the constant fear of deportation.
I can't stop laughing at how remarkably dumb the governor comes off in this article. "Well, now that the bill's passed and it's having disastrous effects, we're calling on a study to find out what this bill will actually do."
But hey, it's not like John McCain literally said that the reason illegals immigrants came here was because we didn't want to do farm work.
Why yes.. we might actually have to raise wages from.. well, from barely survivable levels. This just shows that agriculture literally isn't profitable without the use of free labor. Apparently labor cost are only 8% of the total price of food. It's good to know so there's no reason not to pay people a living wage then.
But it also shows that the people of Georgia are bitterly divided over whether Latinos or Blacks are worse. Now wont the native Georgians know the wonders of hard work in the fields in summer. The good thing about working on a farm in the south is that it's so hot that you'll sweat, but so humid that it will have no cooling effect.
Though if native Georgians are working in the fields, who will be working the meth labs?
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