Word: worker
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Earl Deal's Smokey Holler Tree Farm in western North Carolina won the arboreal equivalent of American Idol in 2005 when one of its Fraser firs was chosen as the White House Christmas tree. Many of Deal's guest workers come back year after year. In turn, they are given decent housing and a legal way to earn a good wage. But when I visited them last year, many were jealous of the one worker at the farm who said he was in the U.S. illegally (like most other employers, Deal is simply unable to tell a good...
Back in North Carolina, the tobacco farmers are fighting a very different enemy: U.S. bureaucracy. The Senate plan has some provisions designed to cut through the reams of paperwork. But the U.S. consulates in Mexico, which have to interview and approve each worker before every season, are already swamped. Last June the Department of State, in an effort to speed up visa processing, began to outsource the appointment scheduling to the Computer Sciences Corp., a FORTUNE 500 company that handles everything from IT to fighting wars for the U.S. government around the world. According to Eury, the outsourcing actually made...
...devastate farmers. Crops rotted on the vine across the U.S. in a ripple effect from last year's slight uptick in immigration enforcement; imagine what a wholesale move to a perennially backlogged system could bring. David Card, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley, says guest-worker programs are simply too stiff to fit with the dynamic U.S. market, both inside and outside agriculture. "Our strength is that our economy is fluid," he says. "If we need labor all of a sudden in New Orleans, the workers just show up. Once you rely on a guest- worker program...
...populist wing of the Democratic Party made two vigorous attacks on the guest-worker provision in the Senate bill, succeeding in cutting in half the annual allotment of workers. The anxieties of these Democrats are driven in part by the fact that the main area of expansion in the proposed bill would be for guest workers outside agriculture--in the service sector, in construction, in factories. By law, any guest-worker position has to be offered to Americans first, but the fear is that a flood of guest workers would drive down salaries in those industries, as they already have...
...truth about whether these workers really endanger traditional American jobs is a bit more complicated, though. For many factories, guest workers can do little more than delay the inevitable shutdown that comes from dying demand or global competition. In the quiet shore town of Oriental, N.C., for instance, the Garland Fulcher Seafood Co. turned to guest workers after locals stopped applying for jobs as pickers, who are given the cruelly repetitive task of prying blue-crab meat out of the shell. But the company is now out of the crab-picking business altogether: not even a guest-worker program could...