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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Catfish who wrote (120045)	12/30/2000 2:32:45 AM
From: JDN	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Dear Gemini: One of my brothers was a machinist his entire life, of 4 boys I am the only one to have graduated from College. My brother used to say, a man is only worth 25 cents an hour from the neck down. haha JDN

To: Catfish who wrote (120045)	12/30/2000 12:00:46 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Respond to of 769670

Maybe my experience was different, and maybe the situation at the time was different, but my highest paying job before graduating college AND acquiring several years experience as an engineer was migrant farm work in Arizona, Colorado, and California. Physically by far the hardest work I ever did. But also the best paying. I could make $60 a day- -several times what I could get at my minimum-wage university job. The highest paying jobs (loading the trucks) in those fields were also the hardest, but paid several hundred a day- -GOOD money in the mid-60's. I managed to get one of those jobs for the last several weeks in the fields. 12-16 hours a day of tossing 60 pound boxes up to 12 feet in the air. The situation may have been unusual then. The US had terminated its bracero program and significantly cut the number of Mexicans who could come into the US and work in those fields. In response, the companies recruited on college campuses. Initially I couldn't believe the wages they were advertising and thought it must be a trick; it wasn't. I'm also replying to this post: Message 15097458

To: Catfish who wrote (120045)	12/30/2000 12:18:57 PM
From: Sedohr Nod	Respond to of 769670

Many individuals may get trapped into cheap labor situations as a way of life, but in many cases it was a transition period into a better situation. I have been a migrant worker and have employed them in my life time. In most cases, people do that kind of work because it an opportunity to seek a better way. As pitiful as their conditions may seem, it was probably better than what they were used too. In the 50's and 60's many escaped the cotton fields and chopping cotton for 5-8 bucks a day or picking it for 3 cents a pound. What did they have to lose? Most of those folks eventually found better lives in other places and settled in to what most would consider a "normal life". The field work was an important stepping stone for them. The faces and places of origin have changed over the years, but it is still a search for a better chance. Like a Mexican man that worked for me some for a few years, when I asked how long it would have taken him to get the boots he was wearing in his country...he said about a month....when I asked about his old 72 chevy car...he said that would have never been able to have something like that at home. Just like we don't expect a teenager to work for a minimum wage all his life, migrants needed a start somewhere. And what our condition of life is ....seems to be a very relative thing.