Just a reminder that history is more than you think it is.
Just a reminder that history is more than you think it is. For example did you know the US government tried replacing Mexican agricultural workers in the 1960s? The program quickly failed as the white highschoolers quit when they realized the farmers were stealing their money.
Originally shared by Chris Kim A
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 Bracero Program meant that crops would rot in the fields.
Wirtz cited this labor shortage and a lack of summer jobs for high schoolers as reason enough for the program. But he didn't want just any band geek or nerd — he wanted jocks.
[ The original A-TEAM ]
"They can do the work," Wirtz said at a press conference in Washington, D.C., announcing the creation of the project, called A-TEAM — Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower.
...
Students from across the country began showing up on farms in Texas and California at the beginning of June.
...
Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California's Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. "We worked three days and all of us are broke," the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.
This experiment quickly disappeared into the proverbial dustbin of history.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/when-the-u-s-government-tried-to-replace-migrant-farmworkers-with-high-schoolers?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social
Originally shared by Chris Kim A
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 Bracero Program meant that crops would rot in the fields.
Wirtz cited this labor shortage and a lack of summer jobs for high schoolers as reason enough for the program. But he didn't want just any band geek or nerd — he wanted jocks.
[ The original A-TEAM ]
"They can do the work," Wirtz said at a press conference in Washington, D.C., announcing the creation of the project, called A-TEAM — Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower.
...
Students from across the country began showing up on farms in Texas and California at the beginning of June.
...
Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California's Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. "We worked three days and all of us are broke," the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.
This experiment quickly disappeared into the proverbial dustbin of history.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/when-the-u-s-government-tried-to-replace-migrant-farmworkers-with-high-schoolers?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social
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