Sounds like you buy into the urban myth that ALL farmworkers in CA are exploited, poor, and illegal. While many are, many also are not. Some are highly productive, and with piece work pay, can make a lot in a day’s work. The above posts prompted me to talk to a relative in Clovis who hires for their grape harvest and asserted their best workers can make over $20 per hour. Some are valuable enough and dependable enough for their company to move them around to different farms in CA and AZ as the different crops mature, paying their housing as well. I have several such tenants in my Yuma apartments, and one, to my amazement, drives a Cadillac SUV. Not the wisest expenditure, but its his choice. (Their company regularly wants to rent a block of apartment units for Yuma’s Oct. through May season, then move them to CA’s central valley for the rest of the year. I usually discourage this, because it leaves me with vacancies in the hard-to-fill summer months.)
No one is claiming these workers are to be envied–I couldn’t last 30 minutes doing that kind of labor. And for most of them, their bodies are used up after age 50. For most, the pay is much closer to minimum wage & with no benefits.
I am saying that workers in some occupations can often control whether they take a job or not, that they can raise and lower their threshold as to what is acceptable or not depending on their U-comp benefits, and can derive maximum annual earnings as the system is constructed. This applies to construction workers, actors, and many seasonal workers besides farmworkers. My brother is a union carpenter who never works for less than $32/hour (on the books), and works officially about half the year. His annual income for the past 20 years is 1/4 to 1/3 unemployment benefits.
The tax employers pay to fund the benefits are loosely adjusted for that employer’s layoff experience. But the connection is insufficiently correlated, so that some employers are indirectly subsidized in that the annual income of their work force is paid by the employers who never have layoffs.
I’ll admit the term “remarkably high” in the previous post was a misleading choice of words. Farmworkers still don’t make much. “Higher than commonly thought” was what I meant.
