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posted by martyb on Friday August 24 2018, @04:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.

NPR has an August 23rd, 2018 story about the original "A-TEAM" (Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower), a 1965 project to replace migrant workers with high school kids on summer break.

The year was 1965. On Cinco de Mayo, newspapers across the country reported that Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz wanted to recruit 20,000 high schoolers to replace the hundreds of thousands of Mexican agricultural workers who had labored in the United States under the so-called Bracero Program. Started in World War II, the program was an agreement between the American and Mexican governments that brought Mexican men to pick harvests across the U.S. It ended in 1964, after years of accusations by civil rights activists like Cesar Chavez that migrants suffered wage theft and terrible working and living conditions.

But farmers complained — in words that echo today's headlines — that Mexican laborers did the jobs that Americans didn't want to do, and that the end of [the program] meant that crops would rot in the fields.

[...] the national press was immediately skeptical. "Dealing with crops which grow close to the ground requires a good deal stronger motive" than money or the prospects of a good workout, argued a Detroit Free Press editorial. "Like, for instance, gnawing hunger."

[One group] got paid minimum wage — $1.40 an hour back then — plus 5 cents for every crate filled with about 30 to 36 [melons.] [Students] worked six days a week, with Sundays off, and they were not allowed to return home during their stint. The farmers sheltered them in... "defunct housing" [according to one student].

Problems arose immediately... In California's Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers... quit after just two weeks on the job... Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

[Stony Brook University history professor Lori A. Flores] says the A-TEAM "reveals a very important reality: It's not about work ethic [for undocumented workers]. It's about [the fact] that this labor is not meant to be done under such bad conditions and bad wages."

The kids gave up their summer vacations, worked in 110 degree heat six days a week, slept with no air conditioning, and ate subsistence rations, for nearly no benefit; it's no wonder the program was not a rousing success.

In tangentially-related news, the U.S. Libertarian Party published a press release the day before entitled "Immigrants Benefit the United States" that makes the blanket assertion "Immigrants, almost across the board, are a net value to the United States."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @09:26PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @09:26PM (#726032)

    Why was that busload of kids being bombed?

    There is a geopolitical war going on. This is no joke; this is not mere bigotry. The inherent tension between Islam and the West is at the core of it all; Islam is not compatible with the West—it has been an adversary since its very inception, and it has not evolved alongside all the values you hold dear as a Westerner. This is very serious.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday August 24 2018, @11:53PM (1 child)

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday August 24 2018, @11:53PM (#726082)

    Why was that busload of kids being bombed?

    There's a civil war going on in Yemen and has been for almost a decade, and the Muslims who have the support of the US and Saudis are fighting the Muslims who have the support of the Iranians. The Saudis were apparently responsible for targeting said busload of kids, and have provided no official explanation for why they were hit. This all has very little to do with your "clash of civilizations" way of thinking and everything to do with making sure the spiceoil flows the way the US wants it to.

    And your reaction highlights perfectly what I'm on about: If I had told you just "Somebody bombed a busload of kids", most people's reaction is along the lines of "That's terrible! Who would do such a thing?" And if I had told you that somebody from Yemen had blown up an American bus full of kids, you'd probably be thinking something along the lines of "Those monsters! Kill them all!" But since it's "Our" side bombing a busload of "Their" kids, all of a sudden it's "There's gotta be some sort of justification for it". It's the same act in all 3 versions, where somebody engages in violence kills a bunch of kids, but your reaction changes depending on which kids and who pulled the trigger. And that demonstrates how your own group identification is warping your sense of morality. This is exactly the human tendency that murderous organizations exploit to get otherwise ordinary people interested in slaughtering other people.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @03:12AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @03:12AM (#726128)

      You see, I come from the civilized world, where it is understood that a busload of kids getting bombed is a terrible thing, and thus there's no reason to virtue signal by saying so explicitly.

      The reason those kids got bombed is because of Islam.