What does not working pay?
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driving down to mendota living on fast food or tinned groceries stored in your trunk for two weeks of the melon harvest for the mythical $9.25 an hour pays -$2 per hour.
harvest does not pay by the hour it pays by the piece. last time i did the melon harvest it was 15 cents per case filled.
for the pepper harvest it was 20 cents per case filled.
but they didnt take many gringos in the feilds then either, because they usually expected to be paid for every case filled, and since they did file my taxes they had to send in the withholding from their labours. if you knew somebody (like my grandpappy) you could get the work as long as you kept it under the table, and make decent coin for a few weeks or so in the summer, all tax free. if you live with gramps, and dont have to pay rent or food you can do great at farm work, and several rural seniors got their social security checks, and supplemented their income with seasonal farm work. it's not bad for a kid's summer job or supplemental under the table work for healthy seniors but its not the economic turnaround obama would like it to bbe. in fact the farm labour crunch has more to do with his failure than any improvements in border security or any laziness on the part of american workers.
you continue to display ignorance of how this game is really played.
if a farmer actually paid $9.25 an hour to legal workers for the harvest he would have to:
remit their withholding taxes
remit their payroll taxes
pay for workers comp insurance
pay unemployment insurance
ensure worker safety compliance
be liable for injury lawsuits
actually PAY $9.25 an hour for his harvest!
submit his records and forms to the IRS
hire accountants to manage the payroll
pay local and state taxes based on his actual labour costs instead of the fiction he uses now
actually buy the safety equipment needed by OSHA rules\
pay his day labour for the mandatory OSHA training sessions
and many more costs that i may have forgotten. in short NOBODY pays $9.25 an hour to harvest their feilds. they never even claim that. the press fabricates that "wage" based on the data they are given by the ag dept as an average of how much it costs to harvest crops, and those numbers are a polite fiction developed to help keep farms from going broke under the IRS tax schemes.
harvests are paid by the piece, and its far less than you think. if you think that head of lettuce on sale at safeway for 75 cents got picked for anything more than a penny you are dreaming.
Migrant farm workers from Mexico finish a long day of harvesting organic vegetables (Image credit: Getty Images North America via @daylife)
It's truly sad, we have more casualties here then in Afghanistan.
