Weird article. The actual content is buried somewhat in the middle and you have to wad through irrelevant paragraphs after irrelevant paragraphs to get to it.
Turn out California work laws have an exception regarding hourly wage for shepherds due to the special requirements of the job but goat-herders are not currently considered shepherds. An amendment to correct that is being pushed through but has yet to be voted. As of now in its absence, the activity is not profitable anymore.
$2000 month with food and housing provided is far from exploitation for people who might earn 1/4 that without food or housing provided in their home country.
> It only succeeded through exploitation of labor.
There is no such thing. (Unless you are enslaving people.) People have agency and are are perfectly willing and able to change jobs if they don't like them.
Hiring someene to do something isn't "exploiting" them.
There are a TON of business that only exist if labor costs are low. When costs rise either those business don't exist or they get automated, or they raise prices.
People tend to get upset when services they need are no longer available, or only available to the rich because they are unafordable.
Hard disagree. There is a lot of space between people being completely free to leave a job they dislike, and being held in a job by explicit threats of violence, and there's not a sharp line marking where practices get exploitative.
Consider your own situation, and ask yourself "what must be true for 'I can't afford to change jobs' to also be true?" There are definitely situations where whatever must be true is not that unlikely, and there are definitely employers who use them as leverage against their workforce. Non-compete agreements applied to employees of fast food restaurants, and no-poach agreements between fast food restaurants is a famous example of this.
> and ask yourself "what must be true for 'I can't afford to change jobs' to also be true?"
There's only one thing: I can't find another job.
> There are definitely situations where whatever must be true is not that unlikely, and there are definitely employers who use them as leverage against their workforce.
Except none of that is happening here, they can leave whenever they want. They just don't want to because they feel this is the best job they can get given their particular circumstance.
>Except none of that is happening here, they can leave whenever they want. They just don't want to because they feel this is the best job they can get given their particular circumstance.
This is a non-sequitur both in general and in the specific case of the goat herders from Peru. You're aware that ff you're a goat herder, its not like your decades of skill transfer easily to working in a warehouse? This is not "I happened into goat herding 3 months ago, and now I'm not sure I could do better". This is "I've been living around goats since I was born, and actively raising goats since I could walk".
Well there you go - you made my argument for me. His employer is not "exploiting" him - he's at the maximum employment possible for his skills and knowledge.
So he's going to make exactly that much money. No one taking advantage of him, they are offering him the payment that matches his ability to do work.
To exploit someone you would have to trick them into agreeing to be underpaid, or force him, or in some way act in a shady manner.
None of that is happening here, they are offering fair payment for the labor.
Your point is that, since these goat herders are not being exploited (which is debatable, but I at least partially agree), that worker exploitation does not exist anywhere?
You originally said this:
>There is no such thing. (Unless you are enslaving people.) People have agency and are are perfectly willing and able to change jobs if they don't like them.
>Hiring someene to do something isn't "exploiting" them.
I disagreed, because (as I said), there's a lot of things that are exploitation, even if they clearly aren't chattel slavery.
I also want to draw attention to the distinction between "don't want to" and "can't", because I think you're interpreting the one as the other, when its convenient for your argument.
To point 1: Goat and sheep herding is kind of a weird one, where they are really more akin to H1B workers than your standard exploited immigrant. Raising sheep and goats is a skill that is typically learned as a child, and there are just not enough qualified sheep and goat herders born and raised in the US. This has been an issue for so long that Boise still has the largest Basque population in the US, because even a century and a half ago, it was hard to find shepherds
To point 2: by and large, I'm with you. But the problem stems from the issue that laws meant to protect workers in one operational structure (workers on farms) are being misapplied to a completely different structure. Grazers have more in common with wildland firefighters than fruit harvesters, and not just in the benefit provided to society. There's an argument for raising the salary for a wildland firefighter, but it is truly obscene that the salary of 1 preventative goat herder is potentially double the salary of 1 wildland firefighter. Granted, the cost of the goat herder is probably still less than a crew of firefighters, but if the perverse outcome of this is that it is in fact cheaper to risk the lives of firefighters, residents, livestock, and wildlife than to pay for 400 goats and 1 shepherd, then I'd argue that the worker protection laws failed.
There are about 730 hours in a month. $14,000/month works out to ~$19.17 per hour. Of course, being on-call does not equate to being at work. This sounds like a ridiculous clerical error. Most of us here are used to being on-call for pagerduty, and aside from the occasional fire-alarm, none of us are significantly impacted, and certainly not compensated for these events.
Ah I mean, that's just us on-call tech workers being taken advantage of. You should be being compensated for time that you spend being mostly responsible ie tethered to your laptop being sober because you can't responsible do anything else but wait for a page to come in. Google does this for their SREs (2/3rds base pay for all non-work hours spent on-call), it's embarrassing that most other companies don't, and that we put up with that.
> none of us are significantly impacted, and certainly not compensated for these events
Speak for yourself. If my job insists on forcing me to be (1) awake, (2) sober, and (3) within cell reception I most certainly expect to be paid for those hours, since clearly that is not MY time.
I was on call in the biomed field many many years ago, one week a month. I got a separate line item on my check for that. It wasn't much but I was compensated. Rarely got calls either, because I didn't support operating room equipment and there was a call centre (third-party) that followed a script (honed over time) to root out issues that weren't "emergencies".
Why we as a profession allow for "free labour" by being on call escapes me. No, the salary I got paid wasn't for being on call, it was for doing my normal 9 to 5 functions as a specialist.
I raise goats. They eat though underbrush in a way that is incomplete and at about 1/1000 of the speed a simple controlled burn would clear the same area. Not a serious solution.
Turn out California work laws have an exception regarding hourly wage for shepherds due to the special requirements of the job but goat-herders are not currently considered shepherds. An amendment to correct that is being pushed through but has yet to be voted. As of now in its absence, the activity is not profitable anymore.
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