Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Liz <liz@allslash.org>]

At 03:53 PM 3/29/2008, you wrote:
> When we use money to determine the value, then there isn't much 
> difference between the prison slaves and the immigrant slaves. When 
> the payment to labor is so low that local people don't want to do 
> the work, something is wrong with the system of food production that 
> isn't going to be fixed by dumping cheap labor into it.

I get very irritated to hear that "Americans won't do this kind of 
work." When I was a child and my self-employed parents had trouble 
finding work, we picked fruits and vegetables. There was a whole 
group of retirees who moved up and down the west coast picking 
various things, with high school and college students added in during 
the summers. We picked potatoes in Idaho, prunes in Washington, 
cherries in Oregon and citrus in California, and while we didn't get 
rich doing it, we made enough to eat. Those people got priced out of 
the jobs when it became possible to hire immigrant labor for a 
fraction of what we were paid. No, Americans won't do that work for 
slave wages, but oddly enough it costs a whole lot more now to buy 
those goods in the supermarket than it did when agricultural workers 
were making a halfway decent wage.

That's trickle-down economics for you--most of the money ends up at 
the top, and just a little bit trickles down to the rest of us.

Liz in SW VA
http://life-as-a-spectator-sport.com