Migrant Agricultural Workers and Institutional Discrimination Midterm Essay
Agricultural work is not only the least paying job with a salary of $11,000 yearly, it is also excluded from nearly al1 federal labor laws. If that wasn’t enough, migrant workers are being exploited by farm owners. Migrant workers suffer discrimination and mistreatment from contractors and society as a whole due to the excluding migrant workers from the labor laws. Institutional discrimination is the unjust treatment towards a person or group by a work place, institution, or society. The United States created labor laws which protect worker in any other workplace except agricultural jobs. This has created many disadvantages for Hispanic migrant workers. The greatest
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Many farm owners or contractors pay less than minimum wage and the job is not secure. Every year migrant workers pack their stuff and travel to agricultural states which will take the little money they have. Migrant workers don’t always have a permeant farm to go to so they may have to go farm by farm to see where they can find work. Once they find a farm to work in their work day is 12 hours long and get paid very little. They are not protected by labor laws so, they don’t get paid for sick time, maternity leave, or overtime. Agricultural labor laws state that children over 12 are able to work in fields only during time that they are not in school. In some cases, children started helping out parents at the ages of 7 and up which they can’t get paid for but it’s a way of having more helping hand. Which means having more crops harvested and a little more money earned. Once harvesting season starts usually in …show more content…
They are human too and their rights are being abuse in plain sight. The agricultural employment system is taking advantage of this people because they know the labor laws do not include them. Child labor is common in agricultural jobs because it is the only job permitted for children under 12. If this job is hard for adults imagine how hard it gets for children. Contractors don’t care if the child gets tired or the job is too hard for them they are still making profit out of what the children are picking. The age requirement for children to work with parents’ permission is the age of 16. The places of employment that employ children 16 years of age are fast food restaurants and other not so strenuous workplaces. These children are not only being discriminated, they don’t have the same educational opportunities as non-migrant children. In that case they don’t have many opportunities to make a better living for themselves because agricultural work is all they get to experience. Migrants way of life has been extremely affected because after so many years of being excluded from equal labor laws there is still no hope things will change for them. Migrant workers are left at the mercy of employers who can exploit, isolate and abuse them without being noticed by government. Contractors take advantage of these people because they see them as a tool to get more money out of their farms. They are
Before the strike for higher wages began, migrant workers worked in very horrible conditions. Men, women, and children would work on these farms for only a dollar an hour. The
Labor trafficking is another form of human trafficking. Labor trafficking happens when employers take advantages of the social problems, economic problems, and health problems of their employees. The story of “The ‘Boys’ in the Bunkhouse” is just one of the many stories about labor trafficking. For more than 30 years, a group of men with intellectual disabilities were working under deplorable conditions. Not to mention that these men receiving a minimum pay of $65 each month for 30 years. I feel angry to see how unethical owners of business take advantage of vulnerable workers, but what makes me feel really annoyed is the fact that they use people with disabilities. People with disabilities have less opportunity to defend themselves. I honestly
... and unsafe. The struggles the migrant farm worker faces are of the most severe of any industry, and yet, they are true to their craft. They always ensure the product they harvest meets the expectations of the American consumer.
Pictures displayed in grocery stores paint a picture of American farmers harvesting only the freshest production for your consumption. The truth is the majority of our food is from factories, not farms. Assembly line production has lead to human and animal abuse. Industrial food began with fast food restaurants. McDonald’s revolutionized food production by introducing factory like production into their restaurants, this was dubbed “McDonaldization”. Employee’s were viewed as replaceable, treated poorly, and paid low wages. Workers were taught and expected to carry a mentality of conformity. Factory production of food uses people in assembly lines to perform like machines performing the same task over and over. Abuse of migrant workers has also been found in many processing plants, hiring migrant workers for less pay and more dangerous jobs is common. Nicknamed “human machines” factory workers in slaughter houses, meat packing plants, and processing plants are required to perform repetitive motions more a meager pay, stripping them of their identity as humans. Workers are abused and used until they can no longer perform their duties and they are let go and replaced. Another reason migrant workers are often used is because they simply won't complain. Big companies seek workers from Mexico to come work in their plants because they know migrant workers are here illegally and will not
The phenomena of Migrant Workers would not be possible if the migrants were able to get jobs elsewhere, but as many come from Third-World Countries with little economic possibilities, this is not possible. What has resulted is an inexhaustible supply of cheap labor to the United States. This willingness on the part of the workers to work for wages otherwise unacceptable in the United States is problematic. Employers in this position are not under any pressure to reveal truthful, or even any information about wage rates, and many workers do not ask how much they will be paid. As a result, workers often do not know how much they will paid until they are thousands of miles away from their homes, and frequently not until they are paid at the end of a week. This is the story for the Mexican blueberry pickers in Maine, and the growing number of apple pickers who are Jamaican.
Illegal immigrants in the United States usually come from less developed countries or at least poorly developed regions of these countries. These illegal immigrants carry a totally different knowledge of culture, legal system and human rights when they came into this country. The most these people are victimized is when they are working, sometimes, these people can't even realized when they have become victims. Because of their status, illegal immigrants, it is very rare that they can find good positions in considerably big companies to start with. Usually, small businesses will take the risk to hire illegal immigrants, sometimes it may be because of these small businesses are trying to help those illegal immigrants who share same nationality with them, but, for most of the time, these undocumented migrant workers are much cheaper and easier to manipulate.
Throughout time children have worked myriad hours in hazardous workplaces in order to make a few cents to a few dollars. This is known as child labor, where children are risking their lives daily for money. Today child labor continues to exist all over the world and even in the United States where children pick fruits and vegetables in difficult conditions. According to the article, “What is Child Labor”; it states that roughly 215 million children around the world are working between the ages of 5 and 17 in harmful workplaces. Child labor continues to exist because many families live in poverty and with more working hands there is an increase in income. Other families take their children to work in the fields because they have no access to childcare and extra money is beneficial to buy basic needs. Although there are laws and regulations that protect children from child labor, stronger enforcement is required because child labor not only exploits children but also has detrimental effects on a child’s health, education, and the people of the nation.
First of all, the opportunities the Mexican immigrants are presented with are very poor. This is due in part to the fact that they "are willing to work hard for much less than they deserve" (Perea 2). So naturally, companies are going to take advantage of this. The normal available employment to the Mexicans is often so bad, as Harris points out, that is characterized by "harsh working conditions, enormous amounts of physical labor, and minimal remuneration" (190). This work, although not constantly, is often seasonal, like field work, picking fruit, and other such things that bring to mind slave labor. One man, picks strawberries for a living, at only $4.00 an hour (Ungar 137). Not only are the jobs horrible, the pay is worse. Most of the time, if "minimum wage is attained, then the worker can consider themselves lucky" because it is rare (Alexander 78). The wages for...
As people immigrated to the United States, legally and illegally, particularly Hispanic workers, they began to look for jobs to provide for their families. They took jobs that Americans did not want: they accepted the low-paying, physically-demanding, and temporal agriculture jobs. Since many did not speak English and were uneducated, some even illiterate, they were easy targets for farm owners to exploit. Immigrant workers were often not paid, had low wages, and because of such conditions, some even died. In addition, they also lived and worked in appalling conditions, some workplaces did not even have suitab...
If the farmers cannot sustain an efficient labor force, the farmer does not have any other option other than to shut down the operating business and sell out. This means even the people on government assistance will no longer need those food stamps or the EBT card, because there will not be any food supplies, clothes, or textiles available. Without migrant workers, the agriculture industry, which is the backbone of this country, would come to a sudden halt. Immigrants not only help fill the labor force, but migrant workers also spend money here, and put money in the local, state, and federal economies. Immigrants eat, bathe, and drive vehicles that must have a source of fuel to operate.
Child Labor is not an isolated problem. The phenomenon of child labor is an effect of economic discrimination. In different parts of the world, at different stages of histories, laboring of child has been a part of economic life. More than 200 million children worldwide, some are as young as 4 and 5 years old, are slaves to the production line. These unfortunate children manufacture shoes, matches, clothing, rugs and countless other products that are flooding the American market and driving hard-working Americans out of jobs. These children worked long hours, were frequently beaten, and were paid a pittance. In 1979, a study shows more than 50 million children below the age of 16 were considered child labor (United Nation labors agency data). In 1998, according to the Campaign for Labor rights that is a NGO and United Nation Labor Agency, 250 million children around the world are working in farms, factories, and household. Some human rights experts indicate that there are as many as 400 million children under the age of 15 are performing forced labor either part or full-time under unsafe work environment. Based upon the needs of the situation, there are specific areas of the world where the practice of child labor is taking place. According to the journal written by Basu, Ashagrie gat...
While farming can mean growing anything from artichokes to wheat,or raising livestock such as emu and cattle, the activities that most farmers perform and the skills they have are similar. Farmers are usually awake and ready to work as early as 6:00 AM. During the winter, this means getting
The questions based in this variable are what are the roles of family, government and community in facilitating migrant workers to secure a contract job? And Are the government channels are more likely than community channels and family channels to find migrant workers’ a full time job? Other Variables: Birth cohorts, education, marital status and
Presently, about 11 crores children of age group 9 to 14 , are working as child labours. This makes 10% of our total population. All these children have missed out pleasant moments of their childhood and ultimately they will remain away from the mainstream of social development. If we as a society ignore these facts and neglect this situation, it may prove to be harmful to all of us.
Since the definition varies drastically in different parts of the world it is hard to decide what is child labour and what is labour. For example the minimum work age in Egypt is 12, this would therefore constitute the 12 year old as an adult in the workforce and therefore would not be put in the child labour category.16 However the basic minimum age recommended by the International Labour Organization is 15.17 The Convention on the Rights of the Child defines child as any person under the age of 18 therefore constituting the full time employment of 12 year olds as child labour.18 While the definition of child may be disputed, I still firmly believe that the full time work of persons under the age of 18, which puts them in harms way and distracts from education, and life outside of work constitutes as a human rights violation.