He mentioned that workers weren’t turning down the jobs because of low wages, but because they wanted full-time employment.

When my wife was a kid, she had the daughter of migranmt workers in her scool class in Ohio part of the year — then the family would move to Florida. When I went to middle school in Arizona and south Texas, migrant workers were a regular feature — in fact, I don’t remember anyone using the phrase “illegal aliens”; they usually said “migrants” to mean essentially the same thing.

It strikes me that soon after WWII, it became culturally unacceptable for white Americans to be migrants. Prior to WWII, we had a large lower class; after that, and esp. from the 50s on, the American dream was a ranch house in the ‘burbs, a 2-car garage, etc. You don’t get that being a migrant worker — it keeps you permanently in the lower class. Today, our own lower class is either aspiring to raise itself, or to some extent wants to be fed on the dole (cf. families living in housing projects for multiple generations). The only people seemingly willing to take seasonal jobs of this nature are those to whom an American lower-class wage is still a big boost over what they get at home.

The premise of the argument was that if we could offer Americans year-round work, they’d take the farm jobs — that wages weren’t the problem.

I don’t know how much of this is correct. And the seasonality applies mainly to agriculture jobs, not e.g. construction or housecleaning or gardening, etc. But I don’t hear the point argued much at all, and I recognize the dynamic as a real one. Any thoughts on this aspect of the problem?

At least, that’s how the PTB saw it then – and how modern historians have taken the side of the ancient plutocracy describing the revolt of the Legions, too…

The answer was to beat them down and bring in laborers who didn’t speak English, every time. First from Canada, then from across the sea. And every time again they would forge Solidarity and start fighting back, and every time the media would back the Owners and so would the police and most of the mainstream churches, until finally they just moved the mills away down south where there were enough desperate helots white and black in the wake of the [un]Reconstruction that they didn’t have to worry about them getting uppity…for a while. And by then international outsourcing was feasible.

In the 1400s, the Black Death put peasants in a position to demand better pay. They did. The nobles responded by oppressing harder. Eventually you had the peasants’ revolts – the capitalists of the proto-early modern era, inefficient capitalists as they might have been, nevertheless saw the threat of Liberation Theology (q.v. Rev. John Ball) and Historic Class Consciousness (“when Adam delved and Eva span/Which then was the gentleman?” and stomped it down hard.

Back in antiquity, the Romans kept their bloated economy with its top 5% of staggeringly wealthy plutocrats and their boughten senate going by military expansion to subsidize their need for cheap oil and food, and by “insourcing” cheap labour with slavery, much of it from people who sold themselves or their kids because there was nobody paying a living wage (Vicious Circles R Us!) and much of it also imported helots caught in those foreign wars (it’s not a bug it’s a feature) – and the Cunninghams of the day were too many for even the most diligent of emperors, like Diocletian, to successfully fight the profiteering and corruption…

Nothing new under the sun.

Yeah, my uncle got one of those fucking loans, although he was specifically told not to by every member of my extended family. Now he owes the government a shitload of money, can’t file bankrupsy because of the conviniently recently-passed bankrupsy laws, and because Nebraska’s liability laws are the most thoroughly fucked bunch of bullshit imaginable, everyone who that stupid man has ever looked at is now being named in a lawsuit to extort said debt.

I’m not afraid to say that I hate this country sometimes. We work 16-hour days to grow your food, and in response you kick us in the gonads, again and again and again.

Yeah, my uncle got one of those fucking loans, although he was specifically told not to by every member of my extended family. Now he owes the government a shitload of money, can’t file bankrupsy because of the conviniently recently-passed bankrupsy laws, and because Nebraska’s liability laws are the most thoroughly fucked bunch of bullshit imaginable, everyone who that stupid man has ever looked at is now being named in a lawsuit to extort said debt.

I’m not afraid to say that I hate this country sometimes. We work 16-hour days to grow your food, and in response you kick us in the gonads, again and again and again.

It’s not anything new in this country by any means – farming and the economy associated with it are very cyclical items. Agribusiness as we know it today is virtually identical in form and function to the factory farms of yesteryear, by which I mean Southern plantations. Huge agricultural establishments operated under the control of one person or small group of persons, reaping a huge amount of money for those persons thanks to nearly-free labor and a system of laws fixed in their favor – that’s the basic formula that agriculture in America was based in until nearly fifty years after the Civil War (think sharecropping).

Our image of the small-time, successful family farmer is really based 50% in fantasy and 50% on the agriculturalists of the Midwest between 1880 and 1940, when the area was being settled, mainly by immigrants accustomed to the family-based farming economies in Germany and Ireland. They were actually considered a fairly pioneering bunch (no pun intended), introducing the radical notion of ecologically sound farming practices like crop rotation, and getting firmly involved in the labor movement.

Farming cooperatives were the equivalent of trade unions, only they weren’t bargining with bosses – they were getting involved in local government to protect the “free market” from the legislative fingerfucking that occured in the South a half a century earlier, which as we all know became such a clusterfuck that we fought a war over it.

Sadly, I have a hard time believing that this century’s situation will be any different. We might not fight a war over it, but the people with money (big agribusiness) will keep greasing the pockets of the people with power (our government) until everyone who doesn’t own their own multi-billion-dollar corporation is starving, jobless and itching for any kind of fight (see pre-Civil War non-plantation-owning Southerners for reference). Whatever form it takes, it will not be pretty and it will be volatile.