U.S. farm industry groups want President-elect Donald Trump to spare their sector from his promise of mass deportations, which could upend a food supply chain heavily dependent on immigrants in the United States illegally.
So far Trump officials have not committed to any exemptions, according to interviews with farm and worker groups and Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan.
Nearly half of the nation’s approximately 2 million farm workers lack legal status, according to the departments of Labor and Agriculture, as well as many dairy and meatpacking workers.
I understand what you’re saying and under strict definitions it isn’t slavery. By the same token people working in sweatshops in Southeast Asia don’t fit the definition. Yet colloquially the word is still being used. I think because some of us think that freedom and compensation aren’t as much of a line in the sand as it appears at first glance. You could say that slaves in the US were compensated with food and shelter, and that they didn’t feel the deal was bad enough to mount a rebellion. I don’t think we should determine what the lowest standard for labor is by what some people seem to be okay with. Especially if those people aren’t given an easy path to organize. I’m not saying that’s what you’re saying. I’m merely exploring why I use the term.
BTW we have a lawful system for all of this in Canada. Working conditions aren’t great. Farmers and large corporations are happy to exploit workers in ways that Canadians aren’t willing to accept. Even when it comes to natural born citizens, deplorable working conditions have historically been common prior to workers organizing and literally fighting for better.
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I really don’t think you could reasonably argue that the slaves in the US were compensated and okay with their conditions. For one, there were slave rebellions, and none of them asked to take part in the system or were given the option to leave.
I do get what you’re saying though, and we do seem to be in ultimate agreement.
We have a legal framework for it in the US as well, it’s just slow and inefficient with weird quotas that make people want to abandon the system. It undermines itself.
We do also have at least one prominent union for farm workers, including undocumented farm workers.
https://ufw.org/
The existence of a labor union with a history of real impact, as well as the workers seeking the work, is part of why I think the slavery comparison is misguided.
Equating immigrant farm labor to slavery creates the notion that we should abolish it entirely, which hurts both us and them, when the problem isn’t “immigrants doing farm work”, it’s the massive exploitation hazard which leads to too many opportunities for farm labor to have said terrible working conditions.
