Page 4A
East Oregonian
Thursday, August 30, 2018
CHRISTOPHER RUSH
Publisher
KATHRYN B. BROWN
Owner
DANIEL WATTENBURGER
Managing Editor
Founded October 16, 1875
OUR VIEW
Agriculture’s ‘youth movement’
F
inding enough workers for
the busy season is a challenge
for many farms, which try
everything from recruiting local
workers to hiring H-2A visa workers
from overseas.
A blueberry farm near Roseburg
reminds us of the not-so-distant past,
when farmers relied more on teenagers
during the busiest times of the year.
Paul and Sandy Norris, owners of
Norris Blueberry Farms, hire 180
high school and college students each
summer to work in the fields and the
packing and shipping facility. They’ve
relied on their home-grown “youth
movement” for 20 years, and see it as a
win-win for them for their employees.
“The youth who work here are
absolutely amazing and resourceful,”
Paul Norris told EO Media Group
reporter Craig Reed. “They stay with
the job until it is done. They learn
responsibility. We have orders and we
have to get them out. They have to stay
with the job until it is done. The young
adults know that and they respond very
well.”
They pay the students based on their
hard work. They start at minimum
wage, but can receive more —
retroactively — based on how hard
they work and their attitude. The young
workers quickly come to understand
how capitalism operates — hard work
and a good attitude are handsomely
rewarded.
It is a lesson many adults would also
do well to learn.
The Norrises chose to rely on student
workers when they started their farm
two decades ago. Their first recruits
were their three daughters — Amy,
Carrie and Ellie — and their friends
and acquaintances. From there they
built a tradition of hiring local students.
As a result, the Norrises have a
ready-made corps of reliable workers
that return year after year. They hire
itinerant crews for the picking, but all
of the weighing, sorting, packing and
shipping are done by their youth crews.
The low unemployment rate —
3.9 percent nationally — has put
added pressure on many agricultural
employers. Workers who previously
did farm work are being drawn to
construction and other year-round jobs,
leaving many farms struggling to find
enough workers.
With the unemployment rate for
teenagers at 8.4 percent, farmers such
as the Norrises have tapped into a ready
labor market.
But there’s more to the job for the
students than a healthy paycheck.
Craig Reed/For the Capital Press
From left, Sterling Colley, Anthony Buck and Easton Thompson wait at Norris Blue-
berry Farms with electric pallet jacks to load a semi-truck trailer with blueberries.
The farm has been hiring local young people to work in the packing barn for the last
20 years.
There’s the life lesson that hard word
impresses on young people.
“You learn how to work hard here,
you get an idea of what it takes to work
in any company,” said Kristen Beebe,
22, who is in her fifth year at the farm
and leads a crew of 15 youth in moving
pallets. “You have to get along with
people, to be able to talk with both
superiors and people below you in
efficient ways.”
To their credit, other farms and
packing houses also hire young
workers. Grass seed growers and other
farmers hire students to drive swathers
and combines to harvest their crops —
and have for decades.
They know what the Norrises
know. Treated and trained well, young
workers will do a great job, spread the
word to their friends and keep the ranks
filled year after year.
OTHER VIEWS
What if Trump did actually shoot someone on Fifth Avenue?
P
resident Donald Trump stopped
his motorcade in Manhattan today,
jumped out of his limousine and shot
a man on Fifth Avenue who was shouting
anti-Trump epithets. The shooting was
recorded by the White House press pool
as well as by dozens of bystanders with
cellphones and by security
cameras in the area. When
asked for his reaction,
House Speaker Paul
Ryan said, “We will need
more information than is
available at this point.”
Senate Majority Leader
Thomas Mitch McConnell said
Friedman through pursed lips that
Comment
he “was not going to
comment on every up
and down with this president.” House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin
Nunes said he already had information
indicating that the man whom Trump shot
“worked for the Clinton Foundation and
may have been a relative of former Hillary
Clinton aide Huma Abedin.”
Fox News did not cover Trump’s
shooting at the top of its broadcast, which
focused instead on the killing of an Iowa
woman by an undocumented immigrant.
Fox’s only reference to the fact that the
president shot a man on Fifth Avenue was
that “a New York City man died today
when he ran right into a bullet fired by the
president.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham quipped that
“Trump shoots as well as he putts” and
that this incident would not cause the
South Carolina senator to cancel his
coming golf round with the president at
his Bedminster, New Jersey, course.
White House spokeswoman Sarah
Huckabee Sanders told reporters that
she was looking the other way when
the shooting happened so she had no
comment, adding: “I haven’t had a chance
to discuss it with the president. I’ll get
back to you if I have something. But the
president has stated many times that he
could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and
get away with it. So he’s just keeping a
campaign promise. He did nothing wrong.
There are no charges against him. And
even though I have no comment, and he
has no comment, we’ve commented on
this extensively.”
Hours later, though, the president
tweeted: “Actually, some people are
saying that a man who looked a lot like
Barack Obama did the shooting. I’m not
saying that — but some people are. It also
could have been somebody sitting on their
bed that weighs 400 pounds who fired that
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the
East Oregonian editorial board. Other
columns, letters and cartoons on this page
express the opinions of the authors and
not necessarily that of the East Oregonian.
shot. Like Rudy said: Truth is not truth —
unless I say so.”
Jerry Falwell Jr., a top evangelical
leader, announced that his movement
would be holding a vigil this evening,
praying that the president had not stressed
himself too much by having to shoot a
man on Fifth Avenue.
Falwell added, “This
would never have
happened if Jeff Sessions
were doing his job.”
The day ended with
Education Secretary
Betsy DeVos declaring
that the fact that the
president could shoot
someone on Fifth Avenue
in broad daylight “only
proves again why we
need to arm all our
schoolteachers.”
My biggest challenge
in writing all of the
above? Worrying that
readers wouldn’t realize
it was made up.
That’s because we
all now know that
Trump was right when
he said he could shoot someone on Fifth
Avenue and his supporters would stick
with him. We’ve seen him get away with
too much by now. No restraint on Trump
will ever come from his party or his base
— especially after the passing of John
McCain. So save your breath. Trump will
be restrained only if his party loses the
House or the Senate. That’s what is at
stake in the midterm elections — so vote
accordingly.
And for those Republican moderates,
independents and suburban white women
who voted for Trump in 2016 and are
considering voting against GOP House
and Senate candidates
in November to put
some limits on the
president and show their
disapproval at GOP
lawmakers’ failure to act
as an independent branch
of government, let me
describe the stakes in
another way:
America, we all know,
won the Cold War. Our
values and economic
system proved superior
to Russia’s. But what
is at stake in the 2018
midterms is who is going
to win the post-Cold War.
Yes, that question
is back on the table.
Because what we are
seeing in the behavior
of Trump and his
toadies in the GOP is the beginnings of
the Russification of American politics.
Vladimir Putin could still win the post-
Cold War.
At the Cold War’s height, noted Marina
Gorbis, executive director of the Institute
for the Future and an immigrant from the
Soviet Union, Americans took seriously
My biggest
challenge in
writing all of
the above?
Worrying that
readers wouldn’t
realize it was
made up.
the notion that we had to serve “as a
contrast” to the Russians.
Because the Soviets claimed to have
built a worker’s paradise, it was important
that we had strong unions, a strong middle
class, less inequality and an adequate
social safety net. The Soviets did not have
the rule of law. So we had to have it more
than ever.
“I came here from Russia in ’75,”
Gorbis added, “and it was remarkable to
me that in this society there were laws and
norms and principles, and people abided
by them. The idea that people actually
paid their taxes was kind of remarkable
to me.” In the Russia she grew up in, said
Gorbis, “we did not have that; if there was
a law, there was always a way to bribe and
get around it.”
But with the Cold War now far back
in our rearview mirror, Trump has not
only insisted on bringing America closer
to Putin’s Russia geopolitically, but also
politically. This, despite the fact that our
intelligence agencies and biggest internet
companies have confirmed multiple times
that Russia interfered in our 2016 election
and continues to meddle.
Trump still refuses to show us his tax
returns long after his “audit,” which can
only mean he is hiding something. His
campaign chairman Paul Manafort is a
convicted tax cheat who was trying to
keep Putin’s stooge in power in Ukraine.
Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen is another
confessed tax cheat.
And the first two House Republicans
to endorse Trump in 2016 — Duncan
Hunter and Chris Collins — were both
just indicted on corruption charges. They
are hardly the first government officials
to be arrested; Democrats have not been
immune to fittings for handcuffs. But one
has a stronger feeling than ever that with
a moral vacuum at the heart of the Trump
White House — and with the president
assaulting the media and the judiciary
on a regular basis, not unlike Putin —
everything goes, so grab what you can,
because no one’s looking. The cat’s away.
“The Russification of America under
Trump, it’s not just about collusion,
corruption and money laundering,” said
Gorbis. “It is about his behavior” — crass
language, simplistic slogans reminiscent
of the Soviet rhetoric, use of terms such as
“enemy of the people,” and his insistence
on personal loyalty over loyalty to the
Constitution or institutions.
■
Thomas L. Friedman became the New
York Times’ foreign affairs columnist in 1995
and has been awarded three Pulitzer prizes.
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