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Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job
- palewire 10y agoI work at the LA Times and conducted the data analysis of wages included in this story. We published all the code behind it on GitHub. AMA. https://github.com/datadesk/california-crop-production-wages-analysis/blob/master/03-analysis.ipynb https://github.com/datadesk/california-crop-production-wages...
- tn13 10y agoGreat work guys at LA Times! That is very transparent.
- palewire 10y agoThanks. The Jupyter Notebook technology is great for us. It's nice that it helps us be transparent, and it's even better that it helps us keep our analysis readable, sharable and organized when it's in development.
- smortaz 10y agopalrewire, it would be great to have the notebook hosted on http://notebooks.azure.com http://notebooks.azure.com so people can run it. thx.
- palewire 10y agoThanks for passing this along. It's very interesting. I just gave it a go with a hefty SQL import to test its power. My database connection string to Amazon RDS, which works locally on my computer, failed. Any idea why?
- deepnotderp 10y agoWow, amazingly transparent data. LA times deserves a bookmark and subscription (if they have one) from one
- stale2002 10y agoWell then obviously wages haven't risen enough. For an extreme example, pay me 200$ an hour and I'll quit my web dev job and do it myself.
- mbroncano 10y agoAlthough it's obviously not going to happen, even if it did you couldn't afford buying that same product as a direct result of the increase in cost.
- WillPostForFood 10y agoThe people picking chardonnay grapes often aren't the target consumers to begin with, but your core point is correct, wage inflation usually leads to price inflation, but it doesn't always follow that therefore the product becomes unaffordable.
- coddingtonbear 10y agoIs that really relevant, though? If the cost of having cheap food is that we create an underclass that are willing to put up with low wages out of economic desperation, is that really an acceptable moral compromise?
- Retric 10y agoOr more likely you just get automation. We don't use a lot of man hours per lb of corn. Which means even without massive subsidies it would still be dirt cheap.
- kmonsen 10y agoThis is not true, it would be true if all wages were rising but we want to increase the wages of the most poorly paid compared to highly paid people.
- st3v3r 10y agoThat's not entirely true.
- pessimizer 10y ago
- supercanuck 10y agoI see a potential solution to Los Angeles's homeless population.
- draw_down 10y agoYou mean, give them homes on farms? Sure, why not.
- kodfodrasz 10y agoWhy give them work with decent wages? Just give people what they need: free stuff! Seriously, you were just joking, were you?
- trentmb 10y agoFree housing is one of the benefits mentioned in the article.
- kodfodrasz 10y agoThis may help people get out of the hopeless situation, although I'm not sure how long an agricultural season is in California, here it is limited to at most 2/3 of the year, so this is a temporary solution at best.
- anoonmoose 10y agoI doubt they were joking. The homeless need homes more than they need jobs.
- kodfodrasz 10y agoIt is hard to determine which is needed more, as a home has costs, loosing a job leads usually loosing a home. I believe both are equally important, and this is kind of a snake biting its own tail problem, as without a home it is very hard to get a job. (Although I can imagine someone living in a car temporarily in mild weather conditions, it would be impossible to survive a winter that way here in Central Europe) Hopefully this opportunity will help those in need.
- kingmanaz 10y agoImmigration laws seem likely to be enforced, illegal alien labor scabs self-deport in advance, and wages rise. Not hard to understand.
- draw_down 10y agoInteresting use of the word "scabs"!
- datatan 10y agoAccurate
- orf 10y agoinaccurate and pretty stupid actually.
- datatan 10y agoOh look, he used the word stupid. Obviously he must be right. I mean, such a well reason argument can't be ignored can it?
- orf 10y agoOh look, he used a sarcastic comment as a comeback. That means all illegal immigrants are scabs! Such a well reasoned argument can't be ignored, can it?
- sctb 10y agoPlease stop this, both of you.
- anoonmoose 10y agoI mean, neither of your comments added anything to the conversation.
- WillPostForFood 10y agoThere has to be more to the story here because the unemployment rate in Stockton is 9.5%. So what's the disconnect between people not working, and employers who are apparently trying to pay more and aren't getting workers?
- crooked-v 10y ago> Or perhaps farms are just not a place where native-born Americans want to work. The job is seasonal, so laborers have to alternate between long stretches without any income and then months of 60-hour weeks. They work in extreme heat and cold, and spend all day bending over to reach vegetables or climbing up and down ladders to pluck fruit in trees. Agricultural jobs like these are strictly seasonal, require transportation to the job site, are physically exhausting, have very long days, and have no prospects for advancement. Now compare that to refusing the offer and instead looking for a low-ranking job in construction, which requires transportation to the job site, is physically exhausting, and has very long days, but has work available year-round and has very real prospects for on-the-job training and career advancement.
- mirimir 10y agoI suspect that the fitness bar for farm work is pretty high. Typical immigrants are arguably in better shape than typical locals. If for no other reason than the fact that they had successfully immigrated.
- datatan 10y ago> Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don’t want the job No. Californians don't want the jobs. Americans live in more than just CA, I know a lot of people in CA find this hard to believe but there is a whole world outside of Sillycon Valley.
- nattaylor 10y agoThe article indicates a 15-year trend of rising wages, yet we don't see American farmhands flocking to CA, so it seems like a fair headline to me.
- datatan 10y ago> The article indicates a 15-year trend of rising wages, yet we don't see American farmhands flocking to CA, so it seems like a fair headline to me. That's because you're biased. Its a small trend over a long period of time that doesn't outpace the cost of living. There is also a massive shortage of farmers thanks to big agriculture killing them all off. Most farmers want to own the land they work. Good luck with that in CA
- nattaylor 10y agoI'm not a Californian or a farmer. I read there's a 50% increase in wages, during a period when CPI is up more like 30% in California [0], and I'm saying I agree with the article: it seems like a reasonable economic incentive. To respond to your comment: isn't a farm worker different from a farmer? I thought the former was someone who does things that require little to no training, like picking grapes, and that these are the people the article references. 0 - http://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/LGCentral/DivMeasure/AdjustMethod/TSDIFAQ.htm http://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/LGCentral/DivMeasure/AdjustMeth...
- kerbalspacepro 10y agoI think you bring up a good point. The people who need jobs and the people that need to fill jobs live in different places. American mobility is at an all time low for our technological era. How do we get the unemployed Midwesterners into Napa Valley?
- relaytheurgency 10y agoFarming is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US. There are reasons aside from money that people choose to pursue other careers.
- tetraodonpuffer 10y agoI would think it being seasonal would put a big damper on people wanting to do it: if you can only work 6-8 months a year, what are you going to do the rest of the time?
- dragonwriter 10y agoIf you're paid enough in that 6-8 months, whatever you want. Plenty of dangerous, limited season jobs exist—but to attract workers they have to pay really well.
- maxerickson 10y agoI know someone that has an agricultural business and does tax accounting in the off season.
- relaytheurgency 10y agoHow many teachers are there in this country? Safe, seasonal work isn't exactly common but it's certainly not shirked due to not being busy for 3 months. A lot of teachers find that to be a benefit.
- Jtsummers 10y agohttps://www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm#2015 https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm#2015 If anyone else wants data on this assertion (farming as one of the most dangerous jobs in the US). It certainly appears to be up there, in both gross and per capita numbers. Seems to largely (for agricultural workers) be associated with transportation (not equipment, so perhaps the way many workers travel around fields and all in the back of trucks and similar unsafe methods?).
- relaytheurgency 10y ago
- ysavir 10y ago> Before the day was through, Solorio would make the same pitch to dozens of men and women, approaching a taco truck, a restaurant and a homeless encampment. Has he tried Craigslist? Or has his entire hiring strategy involved approaching random people on the street?
- smcdow 10y agoI would expect his target audience doesn't spend much time on the internet.
- ysavir 10y agoAnd what target audience is that? The one he's used to that the past few administrations are trying to eliminate? The impression I get from the article is that he's willing to pay more, but not willing to change how he approaches hiring. Assuming that is the case, it's hard to fault anyone but him.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- greedo 10y agoWhen I was younger, I worked at a McDonalds in SoCal. Almost all the employees were white teenagers. The managers were white as well. We didn't make much, just a bit above minimum wage, but we were all mostly high-school students or college students working in the summer to pay tuition. This went on until around 1984 or so, when it became much harder to hire this demographic. It wasn't as cool to work at fast food, and the area was becoming more affluent. Fast forward five years, and 99% of the staff was now Hispanic, including several illegal immigrants. The restaurant had to do what it could to make money and stay in biz. I don't know how high wages would have to be to attract the previous demographic to that type of work. The area is far more affluent than when I was growing up, and house prices start at over $700K and go higher easily. I do think something is missing though when kids don't learn what it's like to hold a retail type job dealing with the public. You learn hard work, humility, and often an appreciation for higher education.
- late2part 10y agoMy impression is that a similar issue occurred in the military a few years later.
- rhizome 10y ago~1984 was around the time of the explosion of malls, so there were a lot more non-food jobs for teens after that.
- CalChris 10y agoMinimum wage in that era had much stronger purchasing power. 1980 saw its decline. https://oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth484/minwage.html https://oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth484/minwage.html
- candiodari 10y agoWages saw a decline since the 1980s. Minimum wage just as well as almost any other. Hell, by a reasonable PCE measure, even the president is making substantially less. The government has of course solved this problem. One, the actual amounts didn't go down, they simply didn't keep pace with inflation. And as actual measures (ie. "Big Mac index" type indices) kept going down, they were systematically removed from tracking by the FED. So the government can claim that they didn't in fact go down by a factor of 3. In reality nobody has lost any wages you see, and the fact that a fast food worker's (esp. immigrant ones) "apartment" (room is a more apt description generally) today is tiny, looks barren and has absolutely nothing in it worth anything, or the issue that their cars are invariably beaters. Well that was the case for lowest-level jobs in the 1980s as well, wasn't it ? Wait ... no it wasn't. First of all, they owned houses and cars. But you see, according to the fed's measures of inflation everything is about the same. And of course it is. You see, people today only use about a third of the housing as people of the 1980s. That must be because people now ... euhm ... are about 1/3rd the size of back then ? They also only use 1/3rd transport (fuel, public transport, ...) ... now there's some small justification for that, as a gallon of gasoline goes a lot further now, but still.
- jeremyt 10y agoIf you raised wages and nobody wants the job, you haven't raised wages enough.
- PaulHoule 10y agoThe story is not too different for dairy (and other) farms in Upstate New York. Most agricultural jobs pay a few more dollars an hour than the minimum wage, but they are much harder jobs than minimum wage jobs. It is one thing to wake up early morning to milk the cows if you own the farm, it is another thing to do it for other people's cows. I don't know about Alaska and Hawaii, but illegal aliens are a big part of the agricultural workforce throughout the lower 48.
- ABCLAW 10y agoHas anyone here even worked a minimum wage job?? A few dollars an hour above the baseline isn't enough to compensate for the long term health and career advancement penalties you'll be taking. These are terminal career positions; they don't get better. Hauling apples and hay isn't going to get you a spot at a tractor design firm. Pay people enough to make a decent, comfortable life and you'll have workers. The CoL/wage arbitrage between foreign and american workers is what makes these jobs work.
- AlexandrB 10y ago> Hauling apples and hay isn't going to get you a spot at a tractor design firm. Of course not. This is a change in required qualifications and education, not just a move up the ladder. I don't know about agriculture jobs, but in food service your career prospects were to go from flipping burgers to managing/supervising/leading others who are flipping burgers (at increasing scale - store, regional, national, etc). While it's not as nice as any kind of engineering there is a way forward there. Of course moving up like this gets competitive because of the sheer volume of people "at the bottom" hoping to move up.
- ABCLAW 10y agoSure it is. You move from the person moving the hay to the person designing the hay moving systems. This would be a perfectly cogent career story for any engineer working in agriculture, and I know plenty of people who have worked in higher-margin areas of agriculture who have made the jump. (Beekeepers learning biochemistry and getting jobs working as Honey Q/A scientists, chefs jumping into food research and development positions, farm owners pivoting to seed banking/specific organism sales, etc.) The fact that you can't generate enough economic surplus to fund studies to acquire the additional mechanical engineering study in a manner competitive with other mechanical engineering students is why you view the path as untenable. Hence why these positions are desperation tier end-of-the-line jobs and why the CoL/Wage arbitrage is required to keep them staffed. Similarly, people engaged in agricultural studies generally don't come out of the 'harvest labour' workforce. Working on a farm is a transaction with a specific expected ROI. If the ROI sucks in comparison to other mutually exclusive exchanges, why would you do it?
- theparanoid 10y agoThis seems like a victory for labor. Improving working conditions for unskilled labor is a good thing.
- busterarm 10y agoHave a friend whose family owns a tree nursery in Texas. They tried very hard to hire Americans. Most of the people they talk to just aren't up to the job. Most people they did hire quit the first day because the work was too hard. After the fourth American cut the tip of their pinky off in the first couple of hours on the job and sued, they stopped trying.
- pjkundert 10y agoI've long suspected that it may eventually become problematic, that an entire generation's median capability set is "able to suck slurpee through a straw". I think I'm in the minority, though...
- SloughFeg 10y agoThe staggering low wages on Californian farms is preventing proper incentivisation to automate these processes. It reminds me of how slaves in the antibellum south prevented the area from becoming industrialized.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y agoKind of half-right, half-wrong, on both counts. The cotton gin, for example, was a product of industry that expanded production in the slaveholding South. The problem with your analogy is that cash crops tend to command higher margins than foodstuffs like those grown in California. Margins are very low in agriculture, and it's a lot of hard, backbreaking, thankless work. That's before factoring in losses from climate conditions, insects, malformed food that nobody will buy and has to be thrown away... So it's no surprise that wages are pitiful and labor supply remains low or relegated to immigrants who find toiling in the California sunshine preferable to the dangers and destitution found south of the border.
- st3v3r 10y agoI think the difficulty in automating a lot of these jobs is preventing that.
- samirillian 10y agoThis argument is a bit double-edged. Okay, so it's implicitly immoral to keep immigrants out. But it's moral to hire them for jobs that Americans won't do because they're so unpleasant?
- edblarney 10y agoThere is absolutely nothing unpleasant about working in food services. What makes it 'unpleasant' is the destruction of the social contract that valued 'regular work', and the fulfillment of specific jobs by illegal migrants which creates a negative 'social class signalling' dynamic to the work. It's socially destructive, and irreversible - and I believe it adds considerably to inequality.
- samirillian 10y agoHowever you construe the problem (unpleasant, low social capital, etc.) I've gotta believe that in a functional labor economy, illegal immigration would not be incentivized to this degree. And yeah, some of the jobs are very unpleasant (I've worked a few of them). The article's sly portrayal of toothless guys and drug addicts refusing cushy gigs picking grapes at vineyards is meant to give an impression without coming out and saying something that probably cannot be supported by the data: the jobs are good and the citizens are lazy. Every argument that "we simply can't get American citizens to do it" seems to be an appeal to a broken system staying broken.
- empath75 10y agoI think it's immoral to keep immigrants out. I think we should make it dramatically easier for people to emigrate to the us and work these kinds of jobs. At the same time, I think we should make an effort to ensure people are doing it legally and benefit from the same worker protections that make hiring citizens so expensive. And we should crack down on people who hire undocumented workers or off the books employees. I think if we did that, it would dramatically cut down on immigration without imposing quotas because there won't be huge numbers of jobs for unskilled workers making slave wages. Farmers that want to do that will have to move their operations to Mexico or some other country with lax labor laws.
- whalesalad 10y agoYeah no shit no one wants the job. The industry needs to adapt. You can't keep paying people more to solve the problem, it doesn't work. No one aspires to earn 30k a year anyway. Ultimately the jobs need to be replaced by machines or the cost of labor needs to get passed on to the consumer. It might be the end of two buck chuck.
- edblarney 10y ago"You can't keep paying people more to solve the problem, it doesn't work. No one aspires to earn 30k a year anyway" No! The average income for the USA in 2008 was $28K! That's the average - meaning that for every person earning $75K (not that much) there are a dozen people earning $20K. 90% of people don't work as an 'aspiration'. The don't have 'careers' they have 'jobs'. And 90% of jobs in this world are not very exciting. Stocking shelves, pushing paper etc.. It's crazy to suggest that 'almost all of our jobs are crap and boring and nobody wants to do them but desperate illegal migrants who'll work for crap pay'. If you pay reasonable wages, people will do regular jobs - that's how almost the entire world works. If there as no negative social stigma doing things like 'stocking shelves' - and BTW it's a very new phenom - then things would work just fine.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago> The average income for the USA in 2008 was $28K! > That's the average - meaning that for every person earning $75K (not that much) there are a dozen people earning $20K. For all your emphasis, this is a pretty dramatic misunderstanding of how averages work. You'd need a histogram to make the claim you're making. The population earning $75K can equal the population earning $20K, or have basically any other relation to it, without affecting the average income.
- ZoeZoeBee 10y agoThat's why they use Median Income When talking about average income in the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
- dropit_sphere 10y agoStatus, status, status. Another way to think of it might be: How much would I have to pay you for you to walk around with a small amount of shit on your forehead all day? We have somehow gotten ourselves in the position where manual labor relegates one to be a social untouchable. This means that anyone with a shred of self-interest gets out ASAP, which means the political power of labor is disproportionately weak in comparison to its size. It's like how Stranger Things HAD to be set in the 80's---because you can't have sympathetic characters in small towns in the modern era, because anyone with a head on their shoulders gets out as their first order of business.
- DanAndersen 10y agoThe "everyone should go to college" attitude is a big contributor. Once our society got this idea that having everyone do the 9-to-5 40-year office career as an ideal, and started measuring the quality (and funding) of high schools based on how many students go on to college, you start getting career advisers telling students about how they should all be going into debt because "you don't want to be like those icky dumb construction workers right?". Then the market gets flooded with bachelor's degrees which are little more than an expensive status symbol to most.
- jbigelow76 10y agoI think you are really reaching on the Stranger Things connection. The main protagonists were about 13 years old, even a 13 year old in today's times that is aware they might not be in a location with a lot of social mobility does not have a lot of choice in the matter. Even the show's high-schooler supporting characters in the same demo would most likely wait until college to make a move to a different area. I think Stranger things had to be set in the 80s cause if you were about to be killed by an inter-dimensional monster you'd be live streaming it on Facebook to the very end which throws a kink in the narrative.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago> We have somehow gotten ourselves in the position where manual labor relegates one to be a social untouchable. To be fair, this is an incredibly common view historically. It would be extremely unusual for a society not to believe that manual laborers were a lower class than non-manual-laborers.
- Animats 10y agoWalking around handing out business cards in a bad neighborhood is not effective recruiting. Nor is the wine industry that important. It's good to see wages rising, though. Machine picking is taking over. Every crop which can be machine harvested already is. All the staple crops were mechanized decades ago. Fruits and vegetables are mostly mechanized. Orange picking has been mechanized.[1] (The mechanism is brutal, but over 10 years, production isn't affected.) There's a newer, more gentle mechanism.[2] The orange picking machine is a big version of a grape harvester.[3] Very few kinds of produce require full robotic picking. Apples to be sold whole do, and robotic apple picking exists, but is still experimental.[4] Robotic strawberry picking machines are available.[5] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyI6-jKIfoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyI6-jKIfoo [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av17eM1Ruyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av17eM1Ruyo [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXTnd90XFWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXTnd90XFWE [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI
- jschwartzi 10y agoIs this why all the potatoes that I buy now have round, half-moon shaped cuts in them?
- Animats 10y agoThat's probably from the washing and root removal.[1] Those machines have drums, rollers, or vibrating screens which remove unwanted bits of root. Potato harvesters are simple. They drive a horizontal blade through the ground at root level, and bring up everything above the blade onto a conveyor with slots. The dirt falls through the slots back onto the ground, and the potatoes are carried upward. Here's an operation that's digging 450 acres a day. Look how fast the trucks fill up with potatoes. No amount of hand labor could compete with that.[2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7gydrEpzAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7gydrEpzAs [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KL7OrHkDaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KL7OrHkDaY
- 10y ago
- itchyjunk 10y ago"Trump’s border crackdown is supposed to help U.S. citizens. For California farmers, it’s creating a desperate shortage of help." (Disclamer: I am an immigrant whose paper work is still ongoing) From the article, it seemed like at least for some their business model was questionable. If the only way to be profitable is to rely on illegal immigrant or non-competitive wages (one of the farmers mentioned could only stay profitable at $8/hr but it seems anything above $10/hr seems unprofitable. "Wineries paid $700 for a ton of grapes, and Klein could make a solid profit paying $8 an hour, the minimum wage.") than you're better off growing something else anyways. (almond and olive trees in this guys case). Even if there was a way to get visas to get labor, the cost of application and transportation might still prevent some of these low margin farms. Googling shows that other manual labor type jobs in Napa valley [1] seems to be $17+ and often offers training + transport. Seeing as how grapes seems to be used in wine industry, wouldn't the wine industry pay more for the grapes as supply dwindles and make it profitable again? If I could go work at a farm during summer to save some money for my college, I would consider it. But looking at cost of living/risk involved/ lack of benefits for season workers/ pay, it doesn't appear to be worth it. So, yes, preventing people willing to work and make it work from doing so it not a good solution. But the narrative that Americans would never work on a farm given the choice is also not true, imho. I've met plenty of white Americans who would like to do it, but lot of the work seems to be seasonal.
- bsder 10y ago> Seeing as how grapes seems to be used in wine industry, wouldn't the wine industry pay more for the grapes as supply dwindles and make it profitable again? Grapes, IIRC, have a multi-year cycle time. You don't just drop in a set of vines and have a useful harvest for wine in 6 months. As such, that dents the supply/demand cycle and turns it into a game of "chicken". If I know that we're all hurting growing grapes, the only question is whether I can hold out longer than the other folks who go bankrupt and finally shrink the supply.
- __jal 10y agoIf it weren't for the human suffering involved in all this, I'd be laughing at the farmers, who are simply getting what they asked for[1]. Well, do I still find it funny, but in a much darker way. I still think the answer to all of this is to call the Republican bluff, and just continually push E-verify any time anti-immigration nonsense comes up. Demand universal E-verify use, hit recalcitrant employers really hard (jail time, or at least business-crippling fines), and send the ICE thugs currently tormenting immigrants who try to speak out after the employers. If nothing else, it would be amusing to listen to Ryan explain why he's suddenly soft on "illegals"[2]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/us/california-farmers-backed-trump-but-now-fear-losing-field-workers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/us/california-farmers-bac... [2] There is no such thing as an illegal human.
- gthtjtkt 10y agoGood! How does that saying go? "If you can't pay your employees a living wage, your business shouldn't exist"? And maybe it's about time consumers learned the true cost of the goods they buy, without the artificial price suppression of abundant, cheap labor.
- temp-dude-87844 10y agoThere is always a desperation factor: how badly the worker needs the income from a particular job's wages to get by, or in come cases, support their entire family. Farm work is seasonal, physically exhausting, hazardous to health, requires long hours, offers no long-term advancement, and the job sites often vary and are far away. One only need look at the EU, an advanced economy that (mostly) offers freedom of movement across its diverse constituent states, to see how legal workers from less prosperous areas travel to more prosperous areas to perform skilled manual labor. In the EU's case, the internal economic disparities are often severe enough that the marginal utility of increased income to be gained elsewhere is very high, therefore internal migration is commonplace for blue-collar work. In the US, this (mal-)adaptation is largely absent and is relegated to a few high-risk, high-income categories of manual labor, e.g. oil field roughnecks, Alaskan fishing; and to the similarly time-intensive long-distance truck driving. The phenomenon of a family's primary income-earner relocating elsewhere, leaving the family behind to perform a standard day's shift of blue-collar work is commonplace elsewhere in the world, but among non-immigrant legal US residents.
- gmarx 10y agoSo if you raise wages there isn't instantly a group of people available who will do the work at those wages? So it takes time for things to adjust because that's how humans and cultures react to incentives? That's an excellent argument for never changing much of anything if you don;t feel like it. When I was a kid the democrats were on the side of labor, like American citizens who work with their hands. It's a shame that now the leaders of both parties agree that cheap manual labor is a right that rich people and corporations have
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y agoThey aren't high enough. Perhaps prices need to be raised. If they can't raise them then I have basically no problem with these farmers investing in machinery and employing fewer people than they do now but making those workers legalized americans and paying them a good wage. I also don't have a problem with this guys vineyard failing. That's capitalism, sometimes (a lot of times) businesses fail.
- harrumph 10y ago>That's capitalism, sometimes (a lot of times) businesses fail. Agreed, and add: it's actually the overwhelming majority.
- nilkn 10y ago> Trump’s border crackdown is supposed to help U.S. citizens. For California farmers, it’s creating a desperate shortage of help. I'm immediately skeptical. What has Trump even done on the border that would have any effect on this at all right now? Trump has done almost nothing on this front. Even his controversial travel ban (which is completely unrelated to Mexican immigration) has been shot down three times.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> What has Trump even done on the border that would have any effect on this at all right now? The series of highly-publicized immigration raids and deportation actions targeting, in many cases, categories of persons who.were previously not deportation priorities.
- nilkn 10y agoImmigration raids? Those have been going on forever now. Deportation is not new under Trump. I assume they must be happening on mass scale starting months ago to have had any effect on this already. He's barely been in office 50 days.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> Immigration raids? Yes, as the most concrete direct action; though simply signaling intent previously since his election has probably also.had an effect. > Deportation is not new under Trump. No, but targeting immigrants who were not targets in the latter years of Obama's Administration is a change with Trump. > He's barely been in office 50 days. He's been President-Elect for a lot longer, and signaling animosity and hostile intent toward Mexicans specifically since literally the speech in which he announced he was seeking the Republican nomination. Voting isn't the only way people react to signals like that.
- nilkn 10y agoThe article itself, despite its headline, seems to acknowledge that blaming everything on Trump is not quite correct: > Already, fewer Mexicans had been willing to risk border crossings as security and deportations escalated under the Obama Administration. At the same time, Mexico’s own economy was mushrooming, offering decent jobs for people who stayed behind. Many of the specific anecdotes occur before Trump even ran. For instance: > Indeed, Chalmers R. Carr III, the president of Titan Farms, a South Carolina peach giant, told lawmakers at a 2013 hearing that he advertised 2,000 job openings from 2010 through 2012. Carr said he was paying $9.39, $2 more than the state’s minimum wage at the time. > He hired 483 U.S. applicants, slightly less than a quarter of what he needed; 109 didn’t show up on the first day. Another 321 of them quit, “the vast majority in the first two days,” Carr testified. Only 31 lasted for the entire peach season. Another one: > In the last five years, he has advertised in local newspapers and accepted more than a dozen unemployed applicants from the state’s job agency. Even when the average rate on his fields was $20 an hour, the U.S.-born workers lost interest, fast. Five year period.
- lacampbell 10y agoThis persistent myth that first world western countries need mass migration because there are jobs "$NATIONALY won't do" really needs to die. Japan is a high income first world nation, very low immigration, and yet somehow they are able to find people to drive taxis, serve food and sweep streets. It's nothing more than an emotion based persuasion technique to get the first world working class to accept lower wages. Don't fall for it.
- Eridrus 10y agoFood can be shipped though, so there's a cap on how high wages can rise unless you start adding import taxes.
- GFischer 10y agoThe U.S. uses import caps instead of import taxes to protect the local farmers and ranchers. My country and Argentina and Australia would sell them all the meat they could otherwise. Europe does the same. So yes, farmers and ranchers are protected by import restrictions.
- crdoconnor 10y ago...which is what Japan does.
- Glyptodon 10y agoWonder if any high schools in nearby affluent areas need a new mandatory paid 1 week internship program for their students...
- TheCoelacanth 10y agoIt's a difficult, dangerous, unpleasant job and the wage rise they are talking about still puts it at half the average wage for workers in the state. Why would they want it?
- throwaway862 10y agoFor California farmers, it’s creating a desperate shortage of help. I am now offering $15k for a new BMW, up from $10k, but there are still no takers. Clearly, there is a "desperate shortage" of BMWs... Does the LA Times seriously expect us to believe that immigrant labor is immune to the Law of Supply and Demand--that no wage or no combination of wage and benefits is enticing enough to persuade American citizens to work in agriculture, or that if the price is so high as to be unsustainable for most farms, that automation wouldn't come to be viewed as an increasingly viable, cost-effective alternative if cheap, illegal labor were denied to them? The LA Times should be ashamed of itself for publishing this propaganda.
- chiefalchemist 10y agoDon't want the job? Or too obese to do the job? It's funny how can't do can be spun as don't want.