​The ache in my bones, in my muscles, is minimum wage slavery. I bend over to tie a wire and irrigation pipe together with “piglet rings”. I have already, after only five days on the job thought of an easier way to achieve the same goal through less work and better time management. But will management ever listen to someone new? Not in this industry.

​The horticulture industry has to be one of the most undeserving of good workers that I have ever worked in. If they ever cry out about going through a crises of having no workers, it’s simply their own fault – pay your employees more. Maybe then potential workers will look at bottom-feeder jobs out in the hot sun and bending over all day as a viable option. When a teenager straight out of school can earn above $18 an hour for just standing behind a counter, why would they ever choose the horticulture industry as a viable work option? One ungrateful son on my first day complained that the work wasn’t worth it, and he was absolutely right. The ungrateful child should have at least done a hard day’s work just to experience and remember it forever, but ultimately, his complaining and refusal to work was spot-on. This modern day slavery is just not worth the time and effort when better paying and easier work is available in the world.

It’s quite ironic that an industry that thrives on capitalism will eventually destroy itself through the share lack of filtering that capitalist money back down the vine and to the roots. Of course this ‘trickle down’ effect has been proven as a failure over and over, but it is a fact that capitalism is what allows the pay of workers to be increased – if you sit there and say your multi-million dollar business can’t afford to pay above the minimum wage, then you have an extremely bad business model that values CEOs more than the people who do all the work on the ground.

Minimum wage = minimal effort. If employers don’t get that, they don’t get that it is now the 21st Century, not the 1950s.
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