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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Failyuh to comyoon'kate

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: Liz <liz@allslash.org>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Failyuh to comyoon'kate
  • Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2008 23:40:05 -0400

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




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