Immigration crackdown exacerbates organic-farm labor shortage

Won't You Be My Labor?

Organic farmers are desperately struggling to find workers, caught between rising demand and an ever-more-severe labor shortage. More than half of the 1.8 million farmworkers in the U.S. are here illegally, and increased border patrols have reduced the number of immigrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Service-sector jobs in the city are easy to find, and the work required by organic farms -- pulling up weeds by hand -- is backbreaking. "No one wants to do this work," says California organic ag foreman Eber Diaz. "I've never seen a situation where it was so difficult to find people." Traditional farmers can get by with up to 20 percent fewer workers by wiping out weeds with pesticides, but for organic farmers, it's human labor or nothing. The situation has made immigration reformers out of many organic farmers; they're pushing for a guest worker program like the one currently stalled in D.C. As for actually paying workers what the work is worth, well, what are we, communists?

straight to the source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Associated Press, Juliana Barbassa, 14 Aug 2006

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Cut mercury fluorescent bulbs in trash landfills

Fluorescent bulbs, even compact table-lamp bulbs, contain toxic mercury, up to a gram of mercury in
six-foot fluorescent bulbs. The Syracuse campaign

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Syracusepollution

is aimed at pressuring sellers of fluorescent bulbs to give a 50- cent/$1 credit for old bulbs, which then will be recycled in Buffalo NY, shipped by the Syracuse Onondaga County Resource Recovery Agency
(OCRRA, the county-wide incinerator) that already delivers PCs, TVs, and houselhold batteries for recycling to Buffalo NY.

Seek your info and advice before I speak at the public meeting of the Board of Directors of OCRRA, who've been stalling for two years on the
credit for old-fluorescnet-bulbs idea.

Austin Ted Paulnack

by AustinSyracuse at 1:13 PM on 14 Aug 2006

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