Monday, August 6, 2012
this is a topic that is fairly close to my heart and one that i foolishly thought could not still be in practice. how can america be on the wrong side of this issue?? it boggles my mind. My grandma betty and her family used to be migrant farm laborers. she's told me stories of how she would pick cotton with her mom instead of attending school. they eventually saved enough money and started a business and bought a nice house, but how many other people are not so lucky?? This video is worth a watch and brings to light several good points. its definitely worth watching.
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The subject of migrant workers is a sad and complicated issue. I can see both sides of the problem. Foremost, children migrant or not, should not be working period. We live in a society and economy that makes absolutely no sense.
ReplyDeleteThe end goal would be that we didn't have migrant workers at all. That is not to say that immigrants shouldn't have a better life. Simply we should have a economy in which regular Americans could pick these fields, receive good wages and benefits and be able to feed their families. That would negate the need for migrant workers. In an ideal world immigrants wouldn't have to leave their homes to seek better livelihoods.
It seems that the only real solution to this is to come up with labor laws and regulations that are applicable to migrant workers only. One being that children cannot work. I don't think they'd still get the same privileges and rights as the rest of us, and rightly so, if they are uneducated and possible without documentation. But I do think they need to implement a form of overtime, a limit on daily hours, emergency medical provisions, limited preventative health care and a set wage proportionate to quality of life standards. Ideally it would elevate these workers so that over time they could get out of that demographic and work their way up the rest of us.
The solution cannot be that they are paid the same minimum wage we are. It cannot be done. Something like that would completely crash agriculture, food costs would sky rocket, and we'd all be in the same boat. Migrant worker status should be temporary, not a way of life.