United Farm Workers Ask Americans to “Take Our Jobs”

If you're looking for work, the United Farm Workers have a suggestion: How about some back-breaking labor in the sun-baked fields of California?

The union's "Take Our Jobs" campaign promises that it will help train American citizens to take on the jobs often done by undocumented immigrants.

The effort is in part to counter the claim that immigrants, such as those targeted in Arizona, are "stealing" jobs from Americans, when in fact most Americans wouldn't or couldn't do the work no matter how much they might be paying.

It also highlights just how a country facing an obesity epidemic achieves such low prices for food -- through low pay and poor working conditions for migrant laborers, who can't always complain or reach out to authorities because of their immigration status.

Signing up on the TakeOurJobs.org website will get you an email from a union representative directing you to the state's employment database with instructions on how to find agricultural jobs.

The effort will be getting a boost from faux-right wing pundit Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report on Thursday night at 11:30 p.m. on Comedy Central.

Jackson West has actually signed up, but found that a lot of the job listings were in Texas or required a car.