The inestimable Megan McArdle has a post on her blog over at The Atlantic where she argues that the work performed by illegal migrant workers requires more skill than we Anglos normally give credit for. Specifically, she writes about her experience at a pick-your-own raspberry farm. She noticed that a lot of the fruit was either missed or wasted, combined that with the aches and pains she felt for days afterward, and voila, picking fruit takes more skill than you realize.
Ordinarily I see Megan's point in everything she writes, and I agree with almost all of it. In this case, however, I believe the pain in her hamstrings has influenced her judgment. By her own admission, purple raspberries are an obscure, not widely grown fruit, which is more difficult to harvest than other varieties. That's probably why so few farmers grow them.
Even so, she lists only five rules for picking the fruit:
1. Get low to the ground.
2. Look under the leaves.
3. Go around to the back side of the bush.
4. A GO condition for the color--it must be purpler than some value of red, or it will be unripe.
5. A NOGO condition for gloss--the fruit cannot be too matte, or dull colored, because that means it is overripe and will mold.
By working with a skilled trainer, a sufficiently motivated trainee could learn these distinctions within about 500 iterations of the task. "That one is too dull. That one is too red. You forgot to look under all the leaves." That is a single basket of fruit. By sufficiently motivated I mean that is you cannot learn to get all of the acceptable fruit, and only the acceptable fruit off a bush, within a couple of hours, we fire you and you go back to unemployment. Once these quality control tasks are learned, the remainder of the job consists of physical conditioning and coming up to standard speed.
One week, or at most two, would be sufficient to master this job. Maybe a couple more weeks for other crops. This means the first farmer to hire an inexperienced picker suffers the losses during the learning curve, but the other farmers in the picking season will benefit thereby.
In my factory, it takes about a month to get signed off at the entry level machine operator position. With the current level of unemployment in our area, we are having no problem filling positions at a starting rate of $8/hour.
All labor is honorable, and some jobs are a lot tougher than others, but picking fruit is still unskilled labor.
2 comments:
If picking fruit is not unskilled labor, then what is?
I mean, give me a break. If illegals were coming over to be surgeons or engineers maybe, but fruit picking..
I guess I should read the blog, but what point was she trying to make?
OK what if she had made a convincing argumant that illegals coming over doing unskilled labor may be more skilled than we think...so what!?!?
So the labor is more skilled, does that make it any less illegal?
I stole this from another blog about illegals and the effect that the new law in Georgia had (driving out all of the illegals leaving no one to pick the fruit)......
Why, the solution is simple.
You may think that the parents' decision whether to send a child to work on the farm is purely private and personal. But it is clearly not.
Georgia's farm products are exported to other states and internationally, and the US government is (directly and indirectly) a large consumer of farm products. Therefore, there is a national interest in the stability of produce prices. Insofar as labor cost is a component of produce prices, the US government also has an interest in the labor cost of farms in Georgia. A parent's decision to NOT send a child to work on the farm would raise produce prices for everyone, and this must be regulated.
We need an Affordable Produce Act (aka ObamaNuts to honor the peanut farmers in Georgia) to levy a charge on parents when they choose to not send their children to work on farms, to make sure selfish parents don't free ride on the benefits of cheap produce prices from working children farmers.
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