208
'These guys work six 12-hour days': VT dairy farms anxious after migrant workers arrested
(www.burlingtonfreepress.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
208 points (100.0% liked)
News
29006 readers
3827 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have a dairy farm. A few years ago I asked my employees if we should add a third shift and do 8 hours instead of 12. They work hard, is seemed like a reasonable idea.
They hated that I even brought it up. They want money and they want to work. I was specifically told by one of my leads that if we were to go to 8 hours, they would work a shift and a half. I'm paying over the average rate for dairy work, and everyone gets vacation days based on tenure. And 90 percent of my employees will work their vacation days and take the paycheck. They don't want less hours. They have bills to pay and family to support and shorter hours are less money. Same as most Americans I know. I get it.
I'm not saying it is everyone, but the guys I work with have incredible work ethic and a priority to make money and get ahead in life. And I'm all for that.
What I'm tired of is my people being scared of American politics and the potential for their work and investment in this country to get ripped away on the whim of some scared Karens and the policies maga has enabled. I hate it.
This isn't praise of how hard everyone wants to work. It's a damning sign of how shitty the pay and quality of life has gotten in the US.
Yep, people don't understand that these guys are moving temporarily to work, not to hang around and go on leisure walks or whatever (hell, they possibly rely on their employer to travel any kind of distance which in some cases means that they're stuck in a super rural location because they also live on the piece of land that they work on). I mentioned it in another comment but they might even want to work more than 72h and it might be their boss setting some limits.
What’s your starting and average per hour pay for them? And are they getting four hours of OT on those twelve hour shifts?
My lead feeder makes 75k a year. That's more than I take home for myself. I personally sponsored him to get a visa, as I have for over 20 of my other employees over the past five years.
The lower positions take home 160 a day to start. But there is a pay scale based on time employed, and vacation days accrue and improve based on tenure.
These are my employees, but they are also my neighbors and my friends. I go to their birthday parties and their kids graduations. The quincienetas and baby showers.
I know whose hard work and sweat makes my money, and I work along side them every day. I appreciate and try to return that in kind. We are all in this world together.
Nice, thank you for the circle back and additional information, that was interesting to read!
Your experience is like mine. I feel like all the conservatives that hate immigrants have never really hung out with them. Yes their cultures can be different but they are neat cultures. There are good and bad immigrants just like any other group of humans but they are overwhelmingly good on average.
Depending on jurisdiction OT might not be payable on time that isn't outside of their regular schedule. I used to work 12h shifts and by law it was ok because that's the schedule I was assigned and I agreed to, past that it would become overtime and after 4h of OT I could simply refuse to do more (by law).
So yeah, labor laws vary, keep that in mind.
Oh weird, I hadn’t realized that but guess I should have since nurses work 12 hour shifts too and don’t get OT for that. Thank for the info!
Yes, like trucking, agriculture is exempt from OT, not that some employers don't choose to still pay it.
Again, don't talk about labor laws as if they were the same everywhere, even in the US there's federal and state laws, in my case in Canada it's federal and provincial laws and OT exists in the agricultural sector outside of harvest season in my province (which doesn't apply to greenhouse work since it's always harvest season, so no OT in that sector unless it's not agricultural work you're asked to do)...
This story isn't about can Canadian jobs.
If you read again and pay attention this time you'll realize that I mentioned the US and gave a Canadian example of agricultural labor laws because the same logic applies, it's not centralized in the federal government's hands.
My bad, it's federally exempt in the US. The map here is clickable and has state-by-state laws. https://www.farmworkerjustice.org/overtime-map/