ok, communism with a twist

well, luckily we are wealthy enough that your statement makes sense in teh US> BUt in countries where people are living on the edge of starvation, whether a child can work or not may be the difference between whether their loved ones starve or not. Child labor laws never stopped child labor. Economics stop it

I see. I also see quite a few replies that are distractions and promote unionization. Unions despite opinions to the contrary are Marxist by nature. Force should not be employed by either side. If the farmer can't attract workers with fair wages and working conditions his farm will fail, or he will be forced to automate. The same result will occur if he can't supply his crop at a marketable price in face of world competition, because of labor costs, or excessive regulation. In either case there would be fewer or no jobs at all. When workers are turned to slaves and have no right to leave or educate themselves for better jobs, that is a different story. The story of Eli Whitney's cotton gin is typical and without it we would find work clothes much less affordable. This would impact the poor laborer the hardest. Technological progress can't be stopped.

I rest my case.

star, I admire you. could you answer my question on the private side? thanks much!!! -- j

The dues goes to fund politicians who then turn around and push for more unions, who get more money for politicians who then.... ... It's a corrupt crony cyclone.

We have discussed force on businesses MANY times in particular detail and you are for forced business interactions...you don't think a business owner has the right to refuse business to anyone because they are in "the public sphere"..btw I read that exact phrasing in Credentialed to Destroy the other day and thought of you. It was a quote from John Dewey. (Marxist much, Maph?)

They did... but asking for a ports-potty at the job site, or drinking water access... isn't exactly an extreme request that a farmer couldn't afford.

The issue is that they were treated as sub-human, and the discontent boiled into confrontation. Any time you have a captive labor force, and an oppressive and organized employer (the farm owners were definitely a cartel), those issues are bound to happen.

Could they have walked to the next farm to get a job? No, because the farmers would refuse to hire someone that was looking for better wages than they were getting down the street... the farmers had formed their own collectives to keep wages low by refusing to compete with each other for labor. Interestingly... Google, Apple, Intel, Sun, etc.. just got sued and lost for the same thing in Silicon Valley... for black-listing each others programmers to never give them an interview if they were working somewhere else within the "agreement" to artificially deflate salaries.

Free markets are supply & demand... but the same people screaming for it never seem to want to be on the wrong side of the demand curve themselves.... and actively seek to manipulate it actually.

some have become millionaires. After all, in the US, as corrupt a crony system we have, there are more than 10 families dominating the stock market. as onerous as our regulations are, we promote a strong patent system and do not (yet) govt own all rights to oil and other industries in the US which are considered private. In all honesty, people who want to immigrate often throughout US History come to find work, a better life. Children being allowed to work was important to those immigrant families to stave off starvation. I am in no way condoning poor working conditions. But when we passed child labor laws, it's not as if these immigrants' problems were solved. From extreme poverty to the next step is a brutal existence including migrant and immigrant workers. I think about the African refugee camps where there is no work and people slowly starve or die of disease. Working out of the Malthusian trap and having an opportunity to do so is preferable.

I had the same debate class assignment when I was a kid... the view of the lumber / timber owner in the California redwoods, versus the environmentalist view.

I learned to see both sides of arguments in those exercises... and it has served me well in business. In the Redwood timber question, the trees are not "replaceable" like they are in the midwest where I grew up... our birch & pine trees in Minnesota grew like weeds and forests renew themselves in 20 years. Redwood forests can take 3 or 4 centuries to re-establish and the trees are critical to the soil stability along the coastline.

At the same token, the lack of harvest tends to lead to dryer fuel conditions and forest fires... so obviously a balance is needed.

Both sides will tend to over-exaggerate their needs... Just as in the labor question, the farmers always over-exaggerate their financial problems, while eluding to there being 'all kinds of options to work elsewhere'... Unfortunately, when you are trapped in a foreign country, 450 miles from the border with a wife and children, don't speak the language, and are legally prohibited from working anywhere else than on the labor contract you were brought here for... and have like $8 in your pocket.. what exactly are your options?

They had none, the option was to "keep plugging away" until they were awarded a permanent residency card... as was the case for my wife's parents... She was born in Los Angeles, but grew up living in a 3rd world country... despite the fact she was a US citizen and spoke perfect English, public schools barred her from participation or entry. She applied for and was granted a scholarship by the Catholic Diocese for parochial school and by the time she reached high school, worked year round to pay her own tuition. It saved her life, I'm very sure.

...and to think that when I was young I would actually have succumbed to this communistic nonsense.
This is simply an exercise of emotion over reason in a venue where the children have no mental power to see through the veil of rhetoric.
I would put my child in private school. Children need to be taught to think. They already know how to emote.

Some considerable inaccuracies in the second one... the "wages" for the worker were actually for the entire family... the wife & kids also had to work to get that income... Since it wasn't a full-time job (only a few weeks from harvest season), the families had to move from farm to farm with whatever crop all year. The kids generally attended 17 schools (the average) in a given year. They were 'slow' because they had no idea what was going on, and were only there for 2 weeks anyway. My wife ended up self-schooling herself, as she learned nothing in school until her father finally escaped from the farm worker labor contracts and got a job in construction. (keep in mind, a contract is not "at-will"), the labor is required, as is the payment for it. Most of them were multi-year with whatever the farming labor contractor was.

of course the Communist Party today swears Alinsky was anti-communist. They say he was capitalist/progressive.

I agree, while Labor Unions are a component of the labor market in a communist country, its not really any different than say a guild or a skilled-labor plumbers' union or equipment operators labor union here for example. The linkage is the popularity of communist beliefs among organized labor proponents. Otherwise, one has little to do with the other from a functional perspective.

In all honesty, in a situation like that, the only way the conditions would probably improve would be to stop the stem of people coming across the border... otherwise, you wouldn't be able to organize the labor.

I'm not a huge fan of unions, and I think they are mostly ridiculous for office workers or IT in the public sector, but the working conditions were not any better for immigrant labor as late as the 60's than they were for say Irish textile workers during the industrial revolution. In both cases, the families had no choice but to take 7 year olds out of school and put them to work in the mill to be able to afford food and pay the rent for the shared room also owned by the mill owner. Incidentally, the farmers were charging rent and deducting from the wages for the farm workers to live in the plywood shacks.. They had their choice, live in the camp, or pay "more" than the rent, for the daily ride to the fields from living elsewhere. Since the communities refused to allow migrant workers to live in their neighborhoods, living in the shacks out in the fields were the only option.

Obviously, you don't advertise that in a labor contract brochure overseas... so I highly doubt the expectation was there. In fact, the "rumors" that were circulated in Mexico at the time were that American roads were paved with gold (literally). All they had to do was move to America and they would be millionaires.

YES!!

I have a friend who's husband owns a construction company. He's seriously flirting with the idea of selling his business for a dollar to his son in law just to get out from under the union....otherwise it will cost him a million bucks to get rid of them. Mafia anyone? Btw...whenever my friend talks about this she yells"IT'S COMMUNISM!!!" Wake up maph. A=A.

Bra-vo!!!!

I certainly am not promoting a noble farmer angle, but it's not like there are not large farms and ranches in Mexico. The fact is, they were paid more. I cannot speak to the conditions at the fields, but were there even porta potties back in the early 60s? I am sorry for the hard life your wife had, but sounds to me as though overall her opportunities were better than staying in Mexico and I congratulate her on her success. I am certainly willing to watch the PBS production about her uncle, but I notice you don't mention that Mr. Chavez was recruited and trained by Alinsky and sent back to get people to join a union. Striking is one thing, force keeping other people from working and damaging property another.
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/...
"Cesar's cousin, Manuel Chavez, working for Chavez and the UFW, hired thugs to beat up migrants at the border in Arizona and bribed local police to let the vigilantes do their work, a project, as Pawel notes, decidedly at odds with Cesar's "steadfast commitment to nonviolence."
Slaves in US History outside a farm. railroads and mining and dock workers and servants