Involuntary Volunteer Work

I am lucky living in Morris Plains. Every Saturday I can go to the farm market in town, and I can also go to the farmstand hidden behind the Lafayette Learning Center at the end of Hazel Street in Morristown.

Both have advantages. In July, when tomatoes, peppers or corn aren't ready yet, the Ort Farm of Long Hill has an agreement with a South Jersey farm to sell its produce - making them available in Morris Plains. The farm also sells a variety of fruit.

However, the Urban Farm, which is part of Grow It Green Morristown, sells what it grows right there as part of an initiative to teach urban dwellers about agriculture. The vegetable beds are neatly laid out, labeled in English and Spanish because that's what's spoken in the community. There are many types of herbs, root vegetables, flowers to cut, lettuce pulled from the ground for you and cucumbers cut off the vine. There's a chicken coop in the rear because chickens create fine compost. Like any farm, crops are rotated. When snow pea season is over, the vines will come down and melon vine will be planted.

It is a wonderful place to go. The prices are reasonable, the food is certainly fresh and I have a good time talking to the people there about plants I know (I grow peppers in pots) and the many more I don't know.

Volunteers of different ages work there. For instance, the day it opened for the season, an older woman arrived when I did and immediately got on her knees in the heat and started putting straw in and around the herb beds. 

But this past Saturday, the volunteer assigned to walk with me was a tall, shy young woman. She said it was her first day.

I like to cut my own stuff, particularly flowers, but the head of the volunteers said the young woman must come with me. We compromised. I picked and she cut. But I also explained what the flowers were and why I was cutting this one here and another there. 

I asked her if she was volunteering to learn about food and agriculture and farming. Her answer surprised me.

"I live a block away. I couldn't get a job in Morristown," she said. "They don't hire college students. We don't stay too long."

So this was a kind of involuntary volunteer work. It struck a chord. When I was between jobs I started doing volunteer work, too, so I would put my time to good use and not constantly brood about finances, bills and property taxes.

For this young woman, volunteering up the street from home gave her something to do with her time until she returned to college.

It used to be businesses hired college students, despite knowing it would only be for a few months. That seems to have changed.

I don't know what jobs my volunteer sought but I do know that when people my age lost their jobs during the recession, they took anything they could find, including jobs usually held by college students. Employers now can literally afford to be picky. College students and other "transients" need not apply. 

It's the same in the white-collar world. When I look at job listings I see ads posted for a very long time. This is because the employer can afford to wait for someone who is willing to come down (often by a lot) on salary. 

There's a lot of people out there looking.

The talking heads on CNBC and the rest of the business networks tell us companies won't hire because they are waiting to see what the Federal Reserve does, see what Obamacare does, yadda, yadda. That's just this decade's excuse. These companies are more concerned about the bottom line than the unemployment line, as they always have been.

I don't think the young woman at the farmstand knows or cares about what the titans of industry are telling CNBC. She can't find a paying job. That's her bottom line. Will she find a job when she has graduated from college? I hope so. At least she is helping visitors to a community farmstand pick the best coneflowers and cucumbers. 

I hope she gets to take some vegetables home in lieu of a paycheck to help her family.