21,000 Detroiters losing welfare benefits

[SWMAP]

Please read this article from the NYT about farmers trying to hire Americans to do farm work. They say that the Americans are unwilling to labor. The farmers are saying that experience tells them that they need migrant laborers. That's the jist - but the sub-text is that, as they say, "Americans are soft"

Maybe that the case in Michigan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us...dstateseconomy

This year, though, with tough times lingering and a big jump in the minimum wage under the program, to nearly $10.50 an hour, Mr. Harold brought in only two-thirds of his usual contingent. The other positions, he figured, would be snapped up by jobless local residents wanting some extra summer cash.
“It didn’t take me six hours to realize I’d made a heck of a mistake,” Mr. Harold said, standing in his onion field on a recent afternoon as a crew of workers from Mexico cut the tops off yellow onions and bagged them.
Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard. On the Harold farm, pickers walk the rows alongside a huge harvest vehicle called a mule train, plucking ears of corn and handing them up to workers on the mule who box them and lift the crates, each weighing 45 to 50 pounds.

[Novine]

The problem I have with articles like this is that they treat farm work as "unskilled" labor. True, picking fruit and vegetables may not require the same skillset and brain power required of someone doing programming or accounting work or doing a skilled trade. But the idea that anyone can go out there and do this work ignores the fact that many of the migrants who do this work year in and year out start when they are young and when they get old enough, do the work full-time. They learn the most efficient ways to do the work and to offset the wear and tear and effort that comes from doing this kind of physical labor.

An unskilled picker with no experience expends far more energy and effort and doesn't even accomplish the work that a skilled picker does. Are there people who don't want to do the hard work? I'm sure there are many who can't hack it in the fields. But it also oversimplifies the discussion to imply that it's just a difference between those who are willing to work hard and those who are lazy. I'm surprised that the farmers who employed skilled migrant workers don't appreciate the difference.

[SWMAP]

But why aren't American workers interested in picking up this skill of efficient picking?

[Patrick]

Too many Americans have fallen in love with this Horatio Alger-bootstrappy myth that we are all hardworking Quakers and can take care of ourselves. Shit, we can't even pick produce in out own damn fields. All these Tea Party fools in their Medicare scooters running their mouths off about "dem Illegals taking our damn jobs" really make me wonder.

[Scottathew]

All these Tea Party fools in their Medicare scooters running their mouths off about "dem Illegals taking our damn jobs" really make me wonder.

"I don't want your government run healthcare ruining my medicare!"