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submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

These guys are certainly the landlords of our time

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Been farming most my life - and f*ck those guys, let them fail.

Industrial ag was always built on the premise of a slave labor force, and cannot sustain without it.

These men, poison their land, strip their topsoils, blame everything else when crops fail and are first in line for some big-daddy socialism, whist decrying anything progressive or sustainable as hippy commie shit.

[-] [email protected] 38 points 5 days ago

Maybe offer better compensation if you can't find workers. No one wants to bust their ass all day for a shit wage. Unless they're desperate.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

day for a shit wage.

Underpaying Immigrants and Outsourcing both tech and design to China has rightfully fucked us. Smarter every day tried to make an OK grill brush here, it has to be $75.

I don't like either of the answers the administration is providing to these problems (nor do I think they're legitimately trying to solve them), But we're going to dead end if we don't do something about it.

Tax the rich, pay generous wages, focus on local manufacturing, fix pricing and force market competition.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

Unless the system doesn’t oversee them, because then the standards of the system don’t apply to them, and they can be exploited.

Farmers can go fuck themselves for doing modern day slavery exploitation.

Oh, your profits were based on how little you can pay your employees? HOW ABOUT YOU SUCK MY FUCKING DICK.

[-] [email protected] 36 points 5 days ago

"You reap what you sow" originates from farming wisdom. Just putting that out there.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 5 days ago

It's weird to think the agricultural workers, who can't vote and don't have legal status and are often living on subsistence wages, deserve to be snatched off the street and fed into a concentration camp system in order to deprive a few agricultural wholesalers of their profit margins.

I don't see that as reaping what you sow at all. Fascism does not fall heaviest on the fascists.

[-] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago

Supporters of facism and their narcissism. Specifically, they use their privilige to moan about their own challenges, seemingly without much thought for those taken into concentration camps. They will only ever understand what hurts them.

[-] [email protected] 76 points 6 days ago

These red voting MAGA fucks were receiving grants to hire labor and they claim socialism is bad. I have zero sympathy for their problems and this is another classic FAFO situation.

[-] [email protected] 21 points 6 days ago

they claim socialism is bad

They mean compassion for the out-groups.

[-] [email protected] 22 points 6 days ago

Yes but if the farm work doesn't get done you are looking at the next thing which will be the great American famine, which I expect somewhere this summer. If the US food production falters and importing food is made very expensive though tarriffs, Americans are not going to have enough food.

It's going to be like post revolutionary China in so many ways.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago

AND ITS ALL BIDEN'S FAULT!

/S, so you don't think I'm one of those MAGA Nazis who actually, truly believe that.

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[-] [email protected] 64 points 6 days ago

Well yeah. Turns out people who aren't in fear of being deported won't work for a fraction of minimum wage paid under the table.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago

I mean, it's not so much the fear of deportation so much as the fact that lower wages go farther in Mexico. Most Mexicans who illegally immigrate do so simply because it makes economic sense. If the wages were so low that it didn't make economic sense to them, then they would simply return to Mexico voluntarily.

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[-] [email protected] 61 points 6 days ago

They'll start calling to use prison labor soon enough. Prisons are commercial facilities anyway and could use some cash. And there are more African American in prison proportionally so that's a bonus for MAGA. Police will get their cut for putting more people in prison. That way the new racist slave labor gets established.

[-] [email protected] 39 points 6 days ago

That is already happening at scale

[-] [email protected] 28 points 6 days ago

That's definitely the plan, and they'll be using private, for-profit prison companies. One is a facility in Louisiana that has been closed twice due to abuse and torture of inmates, and has been reopened as an ICE facility they've been stashing the students arrested for pro-Palestinian protests there. The Columbia student who just got released was being held there.

They are also building a 30,000 bed facility at Guantanamo Bay. The $250 million dollar contract has been awarded, and it's underway. For context, the average maximum security prison hold 800-1200 people, with the largest in Angola, LA holding about 8400. So this new facility is nearly 4 times larger than the largest prison, which is already several times larger than average. Clearly, they intend to house MANY people there.

It's my belief that they will eventually take the position that if you can't stay actively employed (due to AI, robotics, automation, discrimination, etc.) and require the help of the government to survive, then they will house and feed you in exchange for renting you out as slave labor. That way, they can say they solved the homeless problems, even though all they did was turn them into slaves.

And the MAGA followers will go along with it, happy that the "parasites" are being forced to work. Besides, they've been hoping for slavery to return since 1865. The only legal slavery in America is prison labor, and like MAGA always does, they intend to exploit the shit out of that Amendment.

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[-] [email protected] 59 points 6 days ago

This is part of the plan. Small farms will be run out of business and then bought for a low price and consolidated by mega farms.

Big Agriculture wants this and lobbies for it to happen.

[-] [email protected] 25 points 6 days ago

What a coincidence that the VP has a financial interest in independent farms going bankrupt.

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[-] [email protected] 23 points 6 days ago

Just buy a Musk-branded, doge- approved, exploding slave neck collar and perimeter fence kit. Keeps your child employees motivated, on-task, on-location.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago

get dog barking e-collars. When the kids beg for humane working conditions, they'll be shocked into getting back to fucking work.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

Proles hate this one easy productivity hack, the results will shock you!

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[-] [email protected] 54 points 6 days ago

Repeat with me, class: There are no bad jobs, only bad conditions

[-] [email protected] 39 points 6 days ago

No shit jobs only shit wages.

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[-] [email protected] 27 points 6 days ago

Importing workers to make 16.84/hr. Just what American is going to accept that kind of wage when the boss is getting grants of hundreds of thousands of dollars?

The immigrant would have to work 11,876 hours to earn the 200k handout that the boss gets for hiring him seasonally for two years. How is this sustainable? Are we all going to be working to subsidize farmers by 100k/year to hire a single foreign farmhand?

Not to mention the program for that grant has only 141 members... it just doesn't make sense.

[-] [email protected] 25 points 6 days ago

OK, so, I live in farm country and there's some problems with what your saying. 1. It's actually good pay. In fact some farmers have tried raising the pay to attract more workers, it rarely works. Farms are in the middle of nowhere. There's no city. MAYBE there's a post office and a store that sells exclusively Croation gass station fare. MAYBE. It's temporary work. You get a few months pay. So. Remote, physically demanding, and temporary. That's what makes it a ''no thanks'' job for every American. We live hand to mouth, we live in a stack of cards that requires constant payments. That's not a problem in Latin America for the most part, they live hand to mouth but they can save up money, they are maxed out on payments and debt, they just throw extra money in a jar and only live of what they really really need. So working a few months in the US, then Canada, then Mexico, it's OK. That's why they're called seasonal farm workers. When you close to boarders you trap them out of their job and create insane problems. I don't know why Americans can't figure out how the food gets to the Walmart, but they have been failing up grasp this for a long ass time.

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[-] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago

It makes plenty of sense when you realize that grift and sensationalism were the goals all along

[-] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

The system has been set up to extract as much wealth from the workers while offering the thin illusion of ultimate freedom to distract from said extraction.

[-] [email protected] 28 points 6 days ago

I thought that Covid would have been enough of a trial run for that.

At least in my country it was that. You know, it was Covid, with the highest unemployment rate since quite a long time, and farmers ran nation-wide ads looking for workers. They increased the pay sometimes up to 2-3x. They promised housing in nice hotels. And still, nobody wanted to do the job and that year there was just no strawberries on the shelves.

The only way working as a farm hand makes sense is if:

  • The workers have no decent other option
  • Working on a farm is safer than working at home
  • Money is worth a lot more where they are from, so that the meagre salary they make in the target country is worth multiple times of that back home, so that the €1000-1200 they make over here turn into the equivalent purchasing power of €4000-6000 back home.
[-] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I’m surprised that they haven’t considered using prison labour yet.

It is also ironic that people in the US criticize alleged slavery in other countries but ignore their agricultural economy

[-] [email protected] 17 points 5 days ago

I'm pretty sure parts the US are actively using prison labor already. It varies by state, but I remember reading about one state where they were basically renting out prisoners to companies. I think they used the term "hiring", but the money the company paid didn't go to the inmate... The prison system has been one of the larger atrocities in the US for a while now.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago

Prisoners make something like a quarter an hour.

[-] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Time for Mexico to pump up its own agriculture to supply the goods that will be needed on the other side of the fence. Labor is plenty now.

[-] [email protected] 16 points 6 days ago

Mexico and Canada have been investing in agricultural infrastructure for decades now. The only reason that the U.S. farmer can compete is due to shenanigans in import requirements. Imports are held to a much higher standard than domestic production. It's why the majority of foodborne outbreaks are from American production.

American farmers have been conditioned to rely on cheap labor and expensive equipment. There's been only been minor infrastructure investment since the 1970's.

Without government subsidies and cheap labor, the majority of the farmers business models in the us is not sustainable.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 6 days ago

Mexican farm produce at American farm prices. That's how capitalism works, right?

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[-] [email protected] 34 points 6 days ago

The idea is so badly implemented... you have to raise back Unions and decent salaries, what they expecting is that actual born americans will do the same job for the same shit money that desperate migrants who have absolutely nothing.

So in essence they want the new slaves to be US born, yeah fuck that.

[-] [email protected] 19 points 6 days ago

Society needs more unions period.

[-] [email protected] 13 points 6 days ago

I'm a medical student applying for residency this year, and the top program I'm interested in is at the top of my list partially because the residents have a union.

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[-] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago
[-] [email protected] 26 points 6 days ago

In a place where local, legal help was nearly impossible to keep<' the Post is reporting before adding, "But then Trump,

At least three typo mistakes in this article. The degree of publish-fast-don't-edit in our "journalism" is off the scale. I hate it.

Anyway, this is what you voted for, asshole.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Wow. So much ignorant hate here, as always in the enlightened misinformation age.

Most farms aren't corporations. In America for example more than 80% of farmers are smalltime. They don't dictate their profits or the wages they can afford to pay, or influence the prices of their crops or all the crap they have to buy to do farming. A typical American farmer makes $40-50k a year, and every year they risk going into the red or bankruptcy because of fluctuating prices. I really don't know why anybody in their right mind would keep farming. Family tradition or whatever - apparently it's "in their blood".

As always, a lot of people here have jumped right onto the binary world tailgate, using their vast 3-second attention spans to make a value judgement about who wears the black and white hats in the situation and who's evil, then they thumb-type a few decisive words of irrefutable justice wisdom - in this case about evil farmers treating people like slaves.

It's great that Lemmy is non-corporate and part of the fediverse, but after 7 or 8 months here I'm more and more developing the opinion that it's just another kneejerk ignorance shithole on the social media superhighwqy. Scroll on, brave justice warriors, scroll on! And enjoy your lunch.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

False. Median farm family incomes are $97,984 in 2023 while the median family income for the country was $80k. "In 2023, the median U.S. farm household had $1,439,138 in wealth" while the median US family net wealth was $192,000. Farmers on average are far better off than the average American. Note that corporate farm incomes are NOT included in these figures.

Sources: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-well-being/income-and-wealth-in-context https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf23.pdf (page 11)

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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
1056 points (98.6% liked)

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