BREAKING
Farmers say they can’t find workers to harvest their crops, and the Labor Department has now admitted in writing that unemployed Americans won’t take the jobs.
Farmers say they can’t find workers to harvest their crops, and the Labor Department has now admitted in writing that unemployed Americans won’t take the jobs.In an October 2 filing in the Federal Register, the Labor Department wrote that the near-total halt of immigrant labor plus stepped-up enforcement creates “a sufficient risk of supply shock-induced food shortages” to justify immediate action. The same filing said unemployed Americans will not make themselves available “in sufficient numbers” to replace the workers being removed, and estimated 42% of the U.S. crop workforce is now blocked from entering, facing deportation, or leaving the country.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has said the farm workforce will one day be “100% American.”
On March 18 in a federal courtroom in Fresno, a Labor Department attorney defending a new farm wage rule conceded “there aren’t enough Americans to take these jobs.” That rule, challenged in court by the United Farm Workers, classifies 92% of farmworkers as unskilled and sets their pay at the 17th percentile of American wages. The minimum for many would drop to an estimated $13.70 an hour, down from an average of $17.43. U.S. District Judge Kirk Sherriff asked whether paying nearly all farmworkers far below comparable workers would drag the whole market down. “Isn’t that just math?” he asked. The government’s attorney answered, “I’m not good at math, your honor.”
A survey of 2,250 farm workers across 16 states, released July 31 by the UFW Foundation, found 92% say raids and deportations have hit their employment and 90% fear being separated from their families. Sixty-one percent are shopping less. Twenty-nine percent have skipped medical care they needed. Eighty percent have lived in the United States more than ten years, and 41% more than twenty.
Yazmin, a California farm worker and DACA recipient who has been here over two decades, said her family didn’t go out to celebrate when her daughter turned 11, and that she has already sat her small daughters down to make a plan for what happens if she doesn’t come home.
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