Earlier this month, a farmer in Olathe, Colorado, declared he had made a colossal mistake in trying to hire local workers to pick onions and corn and opined that American workers were getting soft.

John Harold, who farms 1,000 acres in western Colorado, told the New York Times that he decided in the past year that he would try to hire local workers, considering that the nation’s unemployment rate has been hovering around 9 percent for some time.

Ordinarily, Harold would hire about 90 Mexican workers through a federal program (H2A) for the harvest, from July through October. This year, he only hired about 60 Mexican workers and figured that he would find the rest from local workers. He figured it would be easy, since the minimum wage for such work in the farm worker program had pushed the wage to about $10.50 an hour.

Apparently, it came as a surprise to Harold and others, including the newspaper of record, that local folks were not snapping up the jobs. In fact, Harold told the Times that some local workers came to work at 6 a.m. and left the farm at the noon break. Most did not even say they were quitting, although some reported that the work was too hard.

Left unsaid, of course, is that the work was “too hard” for the relatively low wages, and that’s worth a closer look. Whenever stories are written about these matters, it should be routine to compare the working and living conditions of the workers. That is, the Mexican (or other) workers are willing to do hard work for low wages, while the Americans are not.

Rarely, if ever, is it noted that the foreign workers usually live in “migrant housing,” meaning that they are living in rough housing on the farm or are living six to a motel room that is intended for one or two persons. They work and try to sleep and eat, before they start their next cycle of work-eat-sleep, and they send much of their money to their families back in the home country. They need little money to live in such circumstances and, therefore, they can send what, to their families, is a good amount of money each week or month (that is, if they are not defrauded by their employers or labor contractors).

It’s a different matter for local workers. Even if they have a small house with what today is considered a small mortgage, say, $500 a month, they have a long list of other expenses, just like other Americans: insurances, taxes, food for the family, clothing, school-related expenses or college tuition, transportation, and health care. For these Americans, $10.50 an hour would have been a good wage in 1965, but it is now 2011 and $10.50 an hour, with no benefits, is a poverty wage. When a real comparison is made between migrant workers and local workers, there is virtually no similarity in their circumstances.

However, it is now in fashion to blame American workers for everything that is wrong with the country and with the economy. Some Republicans in Congress have actually said that they are against extended unemployment benefits because program benefits of $300 or $400 a week is a disincentive for them to look for a job. Right wing politicians have blamed the workers for all manner of problems and would take away even the paltry jobless benefit after six months and leave millions of families with no means to live. They say this even as there are five job applicants for every job that is available.

Public workers have been blamed for budget crises in most states, but the winner of the bash-the-workers carnival for 2011 is the Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, who declared war on workers, and even on collective bargaining. He became a hero to other Republican governors and GOP leaders across the country for his attacks on his state’s own workers and the unions of any and all workers.

Lest anyone think that Walker’s attack is some new phase in the battle between capital and labor, this is rather a continuation of the class war that has been waged by Corporate America against the working class, since a few years after the end of World War II. That was a time when the unions, which had been bottled up during the war, were coming into their own and there was a great organizing surge. American workers were beginning to see that unions indeed leveled the playing field and brought the living standards of all workers up rather sharply.

The rich and corporations looked at that development with horror and decided that enough was enough. Their wholly owned think tanks and other propaganda machinery started to crank out anti-union propaganda by the ton, distributing it to schools, colleges, and universities, as well as newspapers, radio stations, and magazines and the nascent television news business. The message was simple: corporations good, unions bad.

It was a struggle for them to keep down wages in a time of such prosperity and fast-paced industrial development, but Corporate America, with its eye always on the far horizon, planned for depression of wages and living standards. They did have a model for keeping the wages low: when the National Labor Relations Act was passed, farm workers, waitresses, and domestic workers were left out and their wages lagged far behind even the low rate at which the minimum wage for all workers was set. Their wages continued to lag far behind and they lag far behind today.

Without that generations-long lag, farm worker wages would be (it could be reasonably assumed) somewhere around the average wage of all American workers. Of course, if their wages were not kept artificially low, a cheap-food policy would not be possible in the U.S. and, despite what it appears when one enters a supermarket, there is a cheap-food policy, which is possible only when placed squarely on the backs of farm workers. If farm workers were paid a living wage with benefits, a nutritious diet would be out of reach of millions of Americans.

The cheap-food policy also is dependent on the low wages of those who work in the packing and distribution portions of the food industry: packinghouse workers, warehouse workers, truck drivers, manufactured-food plant workers, retail workers, and hundreds of other kinds of workers who bring food from the field to the table. The drive to keep American wages low never ends. It isn’t just the lack of jobs; it is that those low wages have the nation’s workers staring into a deep economic pit.

Volkswagen is now bragging that it will be producing cars in Chattanooga, Tenn., for about half the wages of the American Big Three in Detroit and elsewhere. The starting wage at the new plant is about $14.50 an hour and the plan is that VW workers there will be up to as much as $19.50 an hour within a few years. At the same time, they plan to reduce their per-unit cost by nearly one-third.

Foreign car manufacturers can do this because their plants are strategically located in places where anti-union sentiment is high (in the South). Add that to the decades-long effort by Corporate America to depress wages and the American standard of living and you have a formula for producing cheap cars. So, the U.S. has a cheap-food policy and, if you buy a foreign car, a cheap-car policy. The rest of consumer goods that are bought in the U.S. also are cheap…goods such as clothing and shoes, and even household appliances, but that’s because more and more things are made in other, very low wage countries like China.

Looked at from a global perspective, is it any wonder that there are not the jobs that are needed to make an economy run? And, even if there were jobs enough to go around for the 14-20 million people who need jobs, the low wages that those jobs will pay will not be anywhere near enough for a return to the golden era of manufacturing in the U.S., when one paycheck paid all the household bills and there was no inkling that any of that would ever end. Simply, those jobs won’t return and there will have to be a readjustment in the way the U.S. economy operates.

If the rich and the corporations are to maintain the growing chasm of wealth disparity between themselves and the other 99 percent of the country, the rest of the country will just have to make adjustments. For starters, there will be fewer home owners, fewer young men and women going to college, little or no health care, few vacations, and a sharp reduction in consumption of nutritious food (just when Americans were beginning to learn about what’s good for them). Along the way, the masses also will have to put up with low quality air and water, as well as getting used to the degradation of the rest of the environment.

It’s not a pretty prospect, however you look at it, but there is still a semblance of democracy and people can still participate in the political process. Too many have looked at the choices and said: “It’s not worth it.” They think they’ll stay out of politics, but there are other possibilities. Nothing says that there can’t be more than two political parties. But, even if you don’t start your own political party, there is a budding movement that may provide the change we need: Occupy Wall Street. It isn’t just about Wall Street, of course, but the anguish of the American people over the condition of their political system and its economy that has been caused, in large part, by the financial manipulators of our nation.

The Tea Party “patriots” are the right wing populists and they have taken up the Republican orthodoxy with a vengeance…government is no good, government is the problem, government is too big, government is too wasteful, government can’t do anything right. They have made themselves tools of those who run the government… corporations and the powerful and rich, the people (a very small minority of Americans) who have perverted government and the political system.

Occupy Wall Street, which is daily gaining adherents in cities and small towns across the nation, is looking at the right people as the source of most of the problems: Corporate America, Wall Street, warmongers, the filthy rich, right wing politicians who are bought by the latter day robber barons, and the purveyors of propaganda on AM radio and cable television. Occupy Wall Street is a group as diverse as any in the country and they represent America as it is. These are the people who are not owned by anyone. You should join them.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.