Saturday, June 11, 2016

Bring Back Manufacturing Farm Jobs?

There's lots of (bipartisan) angst over the loss of manufacturing jobs.  Trump talks about Carrier moving from Indiana to Mexico (it also closed its Syracuse operation years ago),.  The idea is these jobs were good ones, ones which high school grads could do and which would support a family, perhaps even a single-earner family.  Liberals point to the loss of union jobs, the UMW, the UAW, the steelworkers unions are all shadows of their former (circa 1970) selves.

What neither Trump nor liberals mourn is the loss of farm jobs.  (That's not totally true--the food movement often talks about the need for more farmers, but that's somewhat different than farm jobs.)

My own feelings are represented by this piece from Modern Farmer, a person who remembers the farm life fondly, but doesn't want it for herself.

2 comments:

rupello said...

thought you'd find this article on UK Farming and BREXIT interesting, if you haven't read it yet http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n12/james-meek/how-to-grow-a-weetabix

Bill Harshaw said...

Very interesting--thanks for the lead.