Georgia Again Tries To Replace Immigrant Farm Workers With Inmates

[ProSense]

Georgia Again Tries To Replace Immigrant Farm Workers With Inmates

By Amanda Peterson Beadle

Last year, after Hispanic farm workers fled the state because of a far-reaching anti-immigrant bill the Georgia legislature passed, Gov. Nathan Deal (R) suggested replacing them with inmates. The plan only had mixed success, with many inmates walking off the job early, and farmers still lost millions because of crops that rotted in the field before they could be harvested.

Ahead of this year’s Vidalia onion harvest, farmers are still seeing a shortage of workers a year later because of Georgia’s immigration law, so state officials are again sending inmates to help farmers despite the failure of last year’s plan:

The Corrections department has sent ten transitional inmates from Smith State Prison to work in a packing and grading facility run by an onion grower in Glennville, which is near Vidalia. Transitional inmates are in the process of completing their prison sentences.

Grower Wayne Durrance says he’s used transitional inmates, and says it’s been a success so far. Durrance says they’re motivated and work hard.

At best, however, this is a patch over a larger problem created by Georgia’s immigration law. State lawmakers approved a harmful immigration law that drove workers out of the state without having a plan in place to replace them. Now, as farmers report difficulties bringing in Hispanic workers through the guest worker visa program and other problems retaining workers, farmers are again on track to lose millions in unharvested crops because of the lawmakers’ failed policy.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/04/19/467496/georgia-farm-workers-inmates/

Ah, the Republicans' America, where the rich get richer, the rest become underemployed and unemployed, and the goal is prison labor. Yeah, "inmates walking off the job early" is a sound business model in Republicans' America.

[Taitertots]

1. The "millions they are going to lose" are the profits from exploiting immigrants

Georgia Farmers get no sympathy from me.

If you can't find workers you are the one with a problem, not the people who don't want to work for you.

[ProSense]

2. What exactly

"If you can't find workers you are the one with a problem, not the people who don't want to work for you."

...is up with that? Why is it that these farmers can't create working environments that attract workers?

[Taitertots]

3. It is an aphorism

About how employers need to create working environments that attract workers. They are going to let food rot in the fields because they won't accept the economic realities of the labor market.

[Jello Biafra]

4. They won't stop at farm workers....

in some places they already using inmates for call center jobs. Cheaper than outsourcing........

Makes you want to leave this country and live elsewhere.

[RZM]

5. That would be a good move if you actually want one of those call center jobs

[DBoon]

6. I prefer the Russian name for this concept

"Gulag"