if 75% of farm workers vanish, that’s the ballgame, good fucking luck *finding* anything on the shelves, let alone buying it, it will take a lot of time and effort to get those workers back, and harvest opportunities will have been missed
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GA and AL tried this a few years ago, which (predictably) lead to a lot of crops rotting in the fields. The relevant statutes were quietly repealed afterwards IIRC.
Those who say "they're just gonna get their workers from private prisons" miss some important points. You need a LOT of (physically fit! it's VERY hard work) people to work farms who can do it without damaging crops. This is more skilled labor than you would think and it has to be done fast.
I’ve worked on farms before getting paid by the basket, box, bushel, etc and I a fit healthy teenager who wanted to be there could do about 1/6th to 1/8 of the picking as the migrants I was working beside. Those prisoners are not young, fit, healthy, and don’t want to be there.
There are not enough prisoners to do this work and there never will be. Most farms will be toast without workers. A lost crop can put a farmer out of business in a hurry. The banks want the loan payments made.
Skill is amount of time spent learning to do the thing, so at the low end you have fry cooks, ascending past low-wage office, big-rig trucking, accounting, and engineering up to like neurosurgeons who need a 7-year residency
Yeah, I mean, all work requires some degree of skill, but if you're in a plane crash and you're helping coordinate the survivors, you're going to care a lot more about training when finding people to treat the injured than when finding people to dig latrines and carry supplies
Filling the chest freezer with as many frozen veggies as it will hold.
Currently testing to see how long it can be unplugged before it gets to 25 degrees, & how much it will drain the solar generator battery to get it back to -4.
and they are mostly concentrated near large population centers - transporting, housing, and feeding those workforces would be staggeringly complex and expensive even if they wanted slave plantation conditions. you'd have to provide for the guards and security apparatus to keep them there too
I’m guessing: farms operate on a cycle of loans at the beginning of the season to plant, paid back after the harvest. No harvest, no loans getting paid back. Banks short on cash leads to a ripple effect across many other sectors.
Well, how much is a house worth? How much of a mortgage can you get on it? That depends on if you can insure it. If we have a bunch of houses that can't be insured, what are they worth, and what are the mortgages backed by those houses worth?
The Ds need to hammer this. Blame Trump’s aggressive terror raids for endangering food supplies and pound the message that the GOP is pursuing a policy of shortages and price spikes.
You want to get on the front foot of immigration? Scare the hell out of people about what Trump’s policy will do.
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RFK's a maniac with no connection to reality. Yes, prisoners are already unfit for this work. Fucking JUNKIES? That's as good as intentional sabotage.
Currently testing to see how long it can be unplugged before it gets to 25 degrees, & how much it will drain the solar generator battery to get it back to -4.
Not to mention the millions of out of work white Americans who are chomping at the bit to pick produce for minimum wage, just out of frame.
You want to get on the front foot of immigration? Scare the hell out of people about what Trump’s policy will do.