Thread: American Citizens Picked Vegetables and Fruit in 1959

So I was chatting with mom today on mothers day about making strawberry smoothies this morning and she mentions off the cuff to me: "Your Grandma and I used to pick strawberrys at the Driscoll farms back in 1959, they used to pay us .10 a pint."

I almost spit up my coffee all over the cell phone.. I was like, Whaaaadya say mom???? Uhhhh... mom, did you just say that American Citizens used to pick strawberrys, uh.. and got paid a decent wage for it?

Now, .10 a pint doesn't sound like a lot, but a pint is tiny! And if you picked 20 of those in an hour, 2.00 an hour in 1959 was not a bad wage at all and certainly wasn't a slave wage either!

So, how is it that back in 1959 strawberrys cost around .50 a pint at the store, citizens were working those jobs and companies stayed in business?? To listen to these corporate talking heads these days you'd think that hiring a citizen to do anything would put them out of busines!

Keep up the good fight everybody. We all know what liars these jerks are.

And happy moms day.

They still do today. Most of the orchards in Northern Illinois are picked by returning crews of College students and housewives.

Patriotman

I grew up in a small farm town in upstate NY in the 70's and the only way I could make money before the age of 18 was by picking apples. I and several of my friends did it every fall.

Originally Posted by BobC

I grew up in a small farm town in upstate NY in the 70's and the only way I could make money before the age of 18 was by picking apples. I and several of my friends did it every fall.

In western Kansas, when we turned 13 (around 1977) we could go to work for Garst and Thomas Seed working in cornfields on "rogueing" crews. This was lining up in a wide row, and going back and forth thru cornfields with machettes removing male plants from certain rows, and female from others. In fact, at 14, you could drive a truck carrying wheat from the fields to the Co-op.

We also bucked hay and shocked corn. Most companies cannot hire kids for such jobs anymore due to liability and lawsuit risks.

I was picking fruit in the late 1980's and early nineties. There were 0 Illegals picking.

Are farmers not hiring kids these days for that reason? I'm a little far removed from farm work these days. I'd be in favor of a guest worker plan for migrant farm workers but I am absolutely against retro-fitting it as in amnesty.

Yeah, I always get insulted by this line of reasoning from the Open Borders lobby that we "need" to be importing millions of cheap immigrant laborers to pick our food. Correct me if I'm wrong, but for the first 200 years of America's history we managed to feed ourselves quite easily and we didn't need millions of immigrants to do it. People say: "We need these immigrants because people like you aren't willing to work in the fields like these immigrants." Hell yeah, I'm not going to toil under the hot sun like a quasi-slave laborer breaking my back for pennies. But people forget: Just 50 years ago, the single-family farm was the backbone of the American economy. Thats been pretty much wiped out these days. And I suspect that one of the reasons is that the small farmer can't compete, economically, with huge Agri-biz and the immigrant workers that they exploit. They keep telling us that "these immigrants do the work that native American citizens won't do." Which in this case is probably true. Most of us don't want to work as slave laborers for Agri-biz. But I suspect a lot of us would relish working on our own farms.

Hell yeah, I'm not going to toil under the hot sun like a quasi-slave laborer breaking my back for pennies.

My pickers (college students, housewives, and retirees) earn $9-18 and hour.

Specialty pickers earn up to $20 an hour.

Patriotman

Specialty pickers earn up to $20 an hour

I do videogames for a living and there are days when I'd love to be doing the "slave labor" of farm work again. I have great memories of the farm life.