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This is, again, straightforward microeconomics. The reason none of the farm owners is able to afford higher wages is because the price they can sell their crops

This is, again, straightforward microeconomics. The reason none of the farm owners is able to afford higher wages is because the price they can sell their crops at is set by competition with other farms, whose prices reflect the fact that they are not themselves paying higher wages. If cheap labor were unavailable, wages and prices would both rise and the business owners would end up about the same. The situation is somewhat complicated by the seasonal nature of the work, which means yearly cycles of hiring and firing. We normally associate periods of intense hiring with a shortage (ie, a recent shift in the economy means much more demand for some category of worker and not enough people have been trained yet to fill the demand), but in the case of agricultural work, that's part of the economy in steady-state.

goldbrick 11y ago
It's not purely that simple. Ideally, the farm owners are trying to hit the price point at the intersection of the supply and demand curves. If the demand curve was perfectly inelastic your explanation would be sufficient, but most consumers are going to balk when a carton of strawberries reaches a certain level, and therefore the market is putting downward pressure on the price due to demand.
- douche 11y ago
  Maybe if these luxury crops can't be sold economically without resorting to illegal labor, they should be replaced with other products that are more economical. I can go pick my own strawberries in New England when they are in season for $1-2 a pound. That season might only be about three or four weeks in June/July, but there's other stuff the other eleven months of the year. If I want fresh strawberries in December, they ought to be at a premium. We used to use a lot of teen-aged labor for this kind of low-skill seasonal work, and I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with that. There's still parts of Aroostook county in Maine where they have a weird school year, because traditionally they needed every warm body to get the potato harvest picked in early fall.

goldbrick 11y ago

It's not purely that simple. Ideally, the farm owners are trying to hit the price point at the intersection of the supply and demand curves. If the demand curve was perfectly inelastic your explanation would be sufficient, but most consumers are going to balk when a carton of strawberries reaches a certain level, and therefore the market is putting downward pressure on the price due to demand.

douche 11y ago
Maybe if these luxury crops can't be sold economically without resorting to illegal labor, they should be replaced with other products that are more economical. I can go pick my own strawberries in New England when they are in season for $1-2 a pound. That season might only be about three or four weeks in June/July, but there's other stuff the other eleven months of the year. If I want fresh strawberries in December, they ought to be at a premium. We used to use a lot of teen-aged labor for this kind of low-skill seasonal work, and I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with that. There's still parts of Aroostook county in Maine where they have a weird school year, because traditionally they needed every warm body to get the potato harvest picked in early fall.