|
|
State Senator Curt Thompson's
Monthly News Letter
August 2011 Vol. 8
Dear Friends and Neighbors,
I hope that summer is starting to wrap up nicely for everyone. It still feels amazing that 90 degree days are considered a relief from the heat! Now, I know that all the big political stories of the summer have been coming out of Washington, but Georgia still has important issues we are grappling with before starting up our next legislative session.
Usually the dog days of summer are quiet times for activity at the Gold Dome. Legislators are back in their districts, connecting with constituents and trying to earn a living, since being a senator is technically a “part time job” in the state of Georgia. That’s why I have to thank my fellow colleagues who were able to join me this last week, on July the 27th, for an important committee hearing on the economic impact HB87 is going to have on the state of Georgia.
We took testimony from a variety of witnesses, starting with representatives of the Georgia Restaurant Association, the Anti-Defamation League, the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials (GALEO), and the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, as well as private citizens. We also got an update on the status of the lawsuit trying to overturn parts of the law. The information was enlightening and sobering, clearly pointing out how bad this bill is for business. Hearing it laid out how the Senators and Representatives pushing this type of legislation failed to anticipate, or failed to care, about the consequences this law would have on Georgia’s rural and metro area businesses.
Across all of the industries that spoke to our committee, there was a common theme: skilled workers have been leaving left and right. Both legal and undocumented employees have moved on to other states. With them went the many legal business owners who catered to them, which has further laid a hurtin’ on some local economies. Many are leaving not because of the provisions of the law itself, but due to fears of a rise in anti-immigrant bias or racially motivated harassment. Both of these social ills are accentuated by the racial profiling provisions put into the law. Some organizations like GALEO are encouraging people to stay and panic has partly subsided due to the Georgia Supreme Court’s injunction on those same sections, but the image of Georgia as anti-foreigner and anti-business remains. Labor costs are starting to go up in industries that rely on skilled, but largely foreign born, labor. In industries like fine dining and farming, those costs have started to be passed onto the Georgia consumer already.
Both the Georgia Restaurant Association and the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association have been polling their members about the effects of this measure since it became law, and the early numbers they have don’t look good. More comprehensive studies are being conducted on how the law has affected their respective industries, however, and I anticipate that the results are going to be similar to what has been told to my committee already. We’ll know more in October when the harvests are largely complete.
What witnesses did want to make clear is that no one is replacing the workers that are leaving these jobs. Both the Restaurant Association and Fruit and Vegetable Growers took great pains to explain that the average citizen is often not applying for these positions and isn’t qualified either. This is true despite the fact that the business community has actively been trying to recruit them. The use of probationers and labor programs, pilot programs that Governor Deal put forward to deal with the lack of crop-picking labor, has been a universal failure according to all who testified. The farms participating in it went through double the number of workers they applied for due to attrition: with people walking off the field or not showing up the next day for work, as well as a lack of sufficient numbers of applicants in the first place. In the meantime, legal workers and farm crews have literally avoided Georgia this year due to our reputation as anti-foreigner. That means we were the only state in the southeast with such labor shortages. An “island”, as one witness put it, in the middle of a sea of states getting their crops picked. The shocking fact is that none of these facts about the labor force that’s left after the passage of HB87 appears to have been taken into account by business conservatives. Instead, it seems that the only issue during HB87’s passage was “getting foreigners out of their schools and of their streets”, as Senator Renee Unterman said during floor debate.
One myth the witnesses wanted to dispel was the falsehood that this type of work is easy work and there is a ready workforce of willing citizens whose only obstacle to working is being displaced by these migrant farm workers. The fact is, as we were told, Georgia would need to go back to the days of share cropping in order to have a sizeable number of citizens willing to deal with the hard working conditions, who have the skills needed to do the work, and are transient and willing to move around all year. This is something the US worker simply hasn’t been in over 50 years. Most Americans aren’t migratory like that, having an established residence, family, and community that they have no desire to leave for most of the year. The unique culture surrounding harvesting makes it close to impossible for your average citizen to actually be involved with it, which means that even if there starts to be a recovery in the labor force for our agricultural industry, it will be heavily stunted.
This is sobering information to learn how a few zealots are hurting Georgia businesses rather than demanding that there be a real solution to the immigration problems our country faces, by combining their efforts at the federal level of government.
HB87's problems are not just related to business. The fact that workers are leaving Georgia is not only significant for labor, but also because no one in America should be afraid of racial profiling. Ever. HB87 is a bill that disproportionately affects my district and my consitutents, and I hope to keep y'all updated on how it might influence us and ours. Remember, you can always contact me with your thoughts and ideas on the issues we face by e-mail through curt@curtthompson.com, through my website at www.makingvoicecount.com, or by calling me at 404-643-2649.
In addition, do not forget that our monthly Citizen Advisory Forum will be meeting August 20th, 2011 from 10:30AM to 12:00PM noon at Cafe 45 South, located at 45 South Peachtree Street in historic Norcross, 30071. We will have another discussion on redistricting since we will be in the middle of the Legislative Session. The discussion will be about what happens to us as a community, so please come and bring your friends and questions. I look forward to coffee and fellowship with you all.
Thanks for all you do.
Curt
|
|
|
|
Curt at July 2011 CAF meeting.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Connecting to Facebook
