Farming out Canadian jobs

The sad fact is that we are a lazy culture and we see a lot of important jobs demeaning at best, but they are often the most necessary jobs in order for our spoiled society to function.

Bullshit. Its because its illegal to work Canadian employees 80 hours a week and for good reason.

The temporary foreign worker program is just a modified and legalized form of slavery. Its not the fault of us citizens who refuse to spend 2/3 of lives doing gruelling manual labour for min wage, its the fault of greedy business interests who created those job conditions. Pay a decent wage and a reasonable work week and you won't need to import labour. Look at the migrant workers who died on the BC mushroom farm or the ones on the Ontario mushroom farm who were basically frog-marched onto a plane tbe same day they became eligible to unionize and you can see the shitty conditions that keep Canadians at bay.

Temporary workers for farms is here to stay. The family farm, rural economy and low food prices are dependant on it. The alternative is to pay quite well, like northern bush camps. And it's the exception to the rule for temporary foreign workers as it works well. A problem with temporary foreign workers is they keep wages at the bottom low and thus sustain businesses that would otherwise disappear, to everyone's approval.

More bullshit. Given that half the food inventory on supermarket shelves is going straight to dumpster, I have a hard time believing any of that. The western world overproduces food like nobody's business and our food market is distorted beyond belief thanks to big agri-business and the gov't subsidies they lobby for.

And "the family farm" is also a myth. Most of your food doesn't come from Ol' Macdonald or Farmer Brown and his family, it comes from big industrial intesnive farming operations owned by multi-national corporations who just pretend to be family farm for marketing purposes. They also uses this phoney image to help them lobby for government handouts and sub-standard work conditions for their imported slave labour.

The real reason we have migrant workers and food laced with chemicals, growth hormones and pharmaceuticals or worse is not because we're saving family farms. Its because Big corporations have price/earning ratios they have to meet in order to keep their stock prices up so the multi-millionaire CEO can get his multi-million dollar bonus.

Slave is a harsh term, I like to think of it as under payed over worked desperate individuals who come from shit countries and put up with our capitalist bullshit for a chance to live the american dream.

Theres no chance of living any dream under those conditions, and I don't think theyre under any illsusion. They come, do their work, collect their crumbs then get sent home at the end of the season.

Fine, "slave" is hyperbolic term, but I used it to illustrate how discriminatory and exploitative the temp worker program is.

Never in my life long have I heard that Big Business has successfully moved in on the individual farms industry. They do the seeds, fertilizer and chemicals bit but not the actual farming. While I've read and liked some of your other posts try to keep your feet on the ground when posting for public consumption.

How many of you would give up your job, or if you are out of work, and go work in the fields picking fruits and vegetables? Take care of children and clean houses all day?

Somebody has to do it!!!

People would do it if the price was right. The nanny program is just a little subsidy for the well off middle class. It's been accepted for a long time. However Harper is expanding the Temporary Foreign Worker program to a wider function. Service and hospitality jobs where the price of labour would go up otherwise. It's a stiff tax on less well off workers.

Bruce, are you saying you've never heard of factory farming? The disappearance of the family farm and the rise of factory farming is one of the hallmarks of the modern age. Sure, there are still family farms out there, but they no longer define the industry.

I have never heard of corporate farming, with the exception that cattle feed lots might be corporate. I've heard of 10,000 acre grain farms and livestock are now raised in "factory farms" but these are not corporations rather my understanding is they are entrepreneur individual farmers. And until the price of grain went up two years ago all we heard was farmers were barely making ends meet, the economics were not inviting to businesses. I have never heard of a General Farms Inc. and if you know one tell me what to Google.

Sorry for the late reply,

The number of farms is rapidly decreasing while the average farm size has grown dramatically. Many large "family farms" produce under contract to corporations, who then distribute nationally and internationally under a recognizable brand name, effectively making the family farmer a type of franchisee.

Independent family farmers indeed barely make ends meet, which further drives agriculture into the arm of multinationals like Taiwan Sugar Corporation and Tyson Foods.

In addition to farms themselves, the entire landscape of agricultural economics has shifted as major multinationals dominate both upstream and downstream of the farm, i.e. pesticides, fertilizers, processing, packaging, distrubtion and retail and farm financing. And now that we increasingly see the new generation of family farmers with university degrees in Farm Economics, the profit-maximizing ethos of the business schools (and their ties with the business community) are further spread among the farming community through journals, publications, and classroom lectures.




http://jci.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/28/1/63

http://www.pmac.net/AM/farm_fear.html

http://www.scribd.com/doc/6303027/A-Fac ... nto-Europe

http://www.spcottawa.on.ca/ofsc/bellyup.htm

I have to side with the Beav's sentiment on this one. I may or may not agree with all of his points but I can understand where he is coming from.

As a person who has previously dealt with corporations, I have watched people quit for two reasons and they were either they couldn't get a decent full time job (real 40 hours a week and not this "big store" full time plan) and because they were treated like crap from the manager and the coporation. What's the point of working a part time job where your hours change weekly preventing you from getting a second job or making it difficult to spend time with your family.

I have seen people injured on the job and then their doctors' notes were refused or they were fired because they called in sick. I have heard of someone told they didn't get a certain position (with beauty products) because they were not pretty enough. I have seen things which were left undone, suddenly fixed or cleaned when the corporate bigwigs plan to pay a visit. Then when they leave, things go back to the same old way.

Unfortunately, it's a sign of the times with corporations to make the most profit partly off the backs of their employees. It's up to the avergae person wether they wish to support such a system and so far people are saying it's okay to treat ourselves like crap as long as we get what we want in the end.

If you feel like you want to work for such a company, don't bother to drop off your resume to a human being. You have to answer a questionaire on the internet before they'll deem you worthy for a interview. Good luck.

It's called economy of scale and specialization. That's a good thing.