plum-soup:

Okay how cheap is it to live in rural southern Oregon realistically like it just doesn’t make sense to offer ppl 16$/hour even if you’re in the middle of nowhere. Like how do you even rent an apartment or something in a place like that? Like it’s one thing if you already live there I guess but like that’s the fundamental barrier I come up against when looking forward farm jobs: even the best paying ones still will never give you the salary of a “skilled worker” as if farming isn’t incredibly skilled work lol. Like it’s a cool seed company but at this point in my life I’m willing to accept that maybe the farm work side of farming is not for me because it’s impossible to make any money doing it. Obviously I’m not talking about being rich but like. If I can’t afford a decent place to live that isn’t like somebody’s guest room I’m paying half my wages to live in then what the fuck is the point of trying to work at places like this like it’s a dead end in terms of having a career which I know is dumb theoretically speaking but like capitalism is real and I want to live a comfortable life and have savings in case I need to use them for something!! And like. Maybe be able to rent my own place of even *gasp* own a house….like the fact that these things are so distant from me shows how fucked up the consent producing machine is, it’s why we have all these young ppl opening their eyes to some form of leftism in droves. Like you can only justify the horrors of capitalism if you keep the masses complacent with a Good Economy with like available jobs that pay well and prices that are at least somewhat on track with wages like there’s a reason the left movements of the post-WWII (well really post-New Deal) era all fell flat on their face and failed to gain popular support. Labor was kept placated by giving in to certain concessions. This was no longer viewed as necessary in the modern neoliberal era, and we are in some senses starting to reach the tipping point where the capitalists are either going to have to pull some new deal-like stunt again or they are going to have to face a rising tide of discontent and labor unrest that will eventually devolve into physical violence between the two. Sorry I’m just now realizing how much of a tangent I went on lol.

Southern Oregon is still kinda overbuilt from the collapse of the timber economy, but that means the infrastructure isn’t necessarily anywhere that makes sense for farming and people have abandoned villages and reconcentrated in the few towns on I-5 that still have an economy, so the few places you might want to be aren’t as empty and cheap as you’d expect