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These guys are certainly the landlords of our time
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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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.
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.
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.
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.
"You reap what you sow" originates from farming wisdom. Just putting that out there.
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.
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.
Just buy a Musk-branded, doge- approved, exploding slave neck collar and perimeter fence kit. Keeps your child employees motivated, on-task, on-location.
get dog barking e-collars. When the kids beg for humane working conditions, they'll be shocked into getting back to fucking work.
Proles hate this one easy productivity hack, the results will shock you!
Not too long ago, historically speaking, kids were in coal mines, chimney sweeps, etc
And Sarah Huckabee Sanders is trying very hard to get kids back into the workplace.
And she wonders why people hate her.
Arkansas is a failed state.
Finding new and different applications for the Musk RTO technology!
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.
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.
You're not gaslighting anyone into thinking $17 an hour is worth much of anything. What the fuck does "some farmers have tried raising the pay to attract more workers, it rarely works" mean?? Oh no, farms are paying more, better not work there. Are you retarded? You don't see rednecks passing up oilfield work because it's out in the middle of nowhere. Couldn't possibly have anything to do with the six figure paychecks those jobs have. Nope. Hell, I bet if you dropped their pay to $17 an hour, every roughneck in the field would sprint as fast as they could over to thank you personally. What a fuckin genius idea.
So what amount of pay would YOU want to do that type of work for? And what would you be willing to pay for the food produced at that wage level?
You guys were bitching about the cost of eggs being $5 a dozen not too long ago. And just a few years ago it was the cost of Doritos and cornflakes because of high corn prices. So make up your minds. Either you can pay the temporary fieldworkers $50 hr, or YOU can have cheap food. Which is it going to be?
I've been running my own garden for three years now on a community plot. I don't ask anyone to work for me, and I don't pay anyone. I pick what I want and everyone else does the same. Sometimes they help, sometimes they don't. It doesn't change anything for me.
I can't fix your busted local economy for you. I do know that paying $30/hr will get a lot of people out doing something they don't necessarily like, even if they have to drive for it. Even in a place with ridiculous cost of living like California.
I knew guys who left their house at 1 in the morning to be 120 miles away for the start of work at 4. I asked one of them why they did it. They said "Where we live, you either go out and get a real job, or you work in the fields". It's not even about the money. It's mostly about the benefits. How many farmers offer medical, paid holiday, or sick pay?
These guys worked 10s and 12s every day. They work hard, and they want that work to mean more for them than someone else's profit. That's ALL you are offering.
The funny thing is that if they used the 100k/year for labor, they would be able to pay out $87,600 after 12.4% employer tax, this equates to ~$42.11/hr. I absolutely promise workers will line up for that wage.
Course that still doesn't provide healthcare. That being said, the farmer is pocketing more money by paying the employee so little than what the employee actually makes, and this money is not at all earned by the farmer, but a handout from taxpayers. The employer gets to profit from the fruits of their labor on top of making more money simply by paying them the legal minimum they can pay with the program.
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It makes plenty of sense when you realize that grift and sensationalism were the goals all along
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.
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.
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
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.
Prisoners make something like a quarter an hour.
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.
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)
That sounds like the value of the land and equipment is included as wealth.
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I heard this story during his last administration. Assclowns never learn.
When bunker people run the country, the country becomes a bunker.
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