[uxp100]

I'm not sure why strawberry pickers are always the example. Is there really a shortage? When I was a teenager, in the country, that was a common minimum wage job mostly done by 14 year olds. It really does suck, almost any job would be better, but I didn't think better jobs were more available now than the late 90s. If anything I would have expected more people to be in the job pool for picking now.

Reading you other replies, I'm not sure if I understand the perspective you're coming from, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I'm curious. Do you consider yourself anti-union?

[mozumder]

There really is a shortage of willing workers. There's all sorts of stories of companies in various industries not being able to find people willing to do actual hard work. And why should they? The public doesn't spend thousands of dollars to educate Americans to learn Calculus, ancient history, & Russian literature, only to end up picking strawberries like they're oxen? We'll have to figure out something else for this new class of citizens.

The perspective I'm coming from is "it's complicated". An example is about the Wal Mart here in the DC area, which tried to ban them a few years ago. You'd figure an wealthy liberal city like DC would forever ban them in favor of some fancy locally grown organic co-op farmers market or some crap like that. When the city council meetings came up to approve/disapprove them, the people that came up speak requesting approval were all the poor and the elderly, that relied on their low prices to make ends meet. Wal Mart in DC was approved.

And I would consider myself strong-union. At the very least every incorporated company that has any employee should have an employee representative on their board-of-directors.