From: Zero Powers (zero_powers@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Aug 19 2001 - 21:53:19 MDT
>From: "Lee Corbin" <lcorbin@tsoft.com>
>Olga wrote
>
> > I wish the store managers who stayed up nights thinking about how they
>could
> > improve their supermarkets in order to beat the Safeway down the street
> > would also come up with some ideas about how best to treat farmworkers.
> >
> > I wish the "immense concentration of knowledge [taking] place in the
>minds
> > of a few people who have an enormous incentive to improve the quality of
>the
> > stores" would also develop some incentive to improve the quality of
>people's
> > lives - people who provide the basic foodstuff and products for their
> > stores.
>
>Well, as we say, "wishes don't make horses". What possible incentive
>would anyone have to lie awake at night thinking of the best way to
>treat farmworkers? Now, yes, it's easy to imagine "a man on horseback"
>as a recent poster put it, or a "Stalin" whose heart would be in the
>right place; but over and over we learn what happens when that approach
>is tried.
Hmmm. What to do. My heart says "right on Olga!" But my head says Lee is
mostly right. The farmworkers' basic problem is that they are not paid
enough. Yeah I know they probably have lousy health coverage and other
"fringe" benefits, etc. But if they were paid a decent living wage that
would go a long way toward ameliorating the other problems. But the fact is
farmworkers, like most of the rest of us (other than some government and
municipal employees and contractors), get paid what the market will bear.
-Zero
"I'm a seeker too. But my dreams aren't like yours. I can't help thinking
that somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man.
Has to be." -- George Taylor _Planet of the Apes_ (1968)
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