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> "I can't hold my employees to 40 hours, because it's just not enough to live on." This is the crux of it. Man wants to pay his workers a non livable wage and

> "I can't hold my employees to 40 hours, because it's just not enough to live on." This is the crux of it. Man wants to pay his workers a non livable wage and have them stay on-farm 7 days a week. That’s an unreasonable proposition. This law might be the wrong lever to pull, but the fundamental issue here is farm owners are trying to get people to do something without paying them fairly. The solution, in my mind, is collective bargaining. Farm workers should group together and demand whatever would help them, and lawmakers should support them doing that - rather than a top-down approach that ends in whack-a-mole. There is no one little tweak from somebody who’s never picked a veggie in their life that’s going to fix this - empower and support the people to fix their own problems.

oneTbrain23 3y ago
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johncessna 3y ago
They make 30 dollars an hour. Given you got that far into the article, what are your suggestions for the farmers pain points? How would you price asparagus that needed twice the labor costs to harvest than a box next week that didn't?
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  Yes, it is very convenient that NPR picked a type of produce that demands relatively high hourly wages so that labour would look greedy in this circumstance. But make no mistake, the exact same thing will happen on farms with much lower hourly wages where the same level of skill isn't required. As for your second question, you and I both know the answers are difficult. Do you think it's reasonable for American labourers to make the same as a labourer in Peru? Because that's the issue here: globalized trade causing a race to the bottom in labour compensation. IMO there aren't many great answers, but "pay people a Peruvian wage in the US" certainly isn't a good one.
- closewith 3y ago
  And yet, 40 hours at $30 power hour is not enough to live on.
  - kennywinker 3y ago
    Look at some of the other comments in this thread. Key takeaways: $30/hour isn’t what every worker is making. You have to live on the farm 24/7 to get those 40 hours. Normal worker was getting $1400/week, which is not $30*40hrs. Now closer to $1000/week, apparently. Tho these numbers are all from the owner not the workers.
- kennywinker 3y ago
  First, 30/hour is the ceiling, not the floor. But ok yeah 30/hour for 48 (soon 40) hours of work, but you have to live on the farm 7 days a week. Sooo… that’s 30 * 48 / (24 * 7) = 8.60/hour. If the target is to have each worker do 70 hours/week, but you’re capped at 40 hours before overtime kicks in, that only brings your cost up by: With overtime: 40 normal hours * $30 + 30 overtime hours * $45 = $2550 Without overtime: 70 normal hours * $30 = $2100 Difference is $450/worker, or a ~21% increase in cost. At most, since most workers aren’t getting $30/hour. So yeah, raise the price of asparagus by 21%, to reflect the actual cost of picking, or better yet have the owners take a 21% pay cut.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    > So yeah, raise the price of asparagus by 21%, to reflect the actual cost of picking, or better yet have the owners take a 21% pay cut. Wouldn't be anything like 21%. Tons of costs other than the labor to pick. I'd bet it'd closer to 2% than 20%.
    - kennywinker 3y ago
      Omg yes, i got fixated on the labour portion and forgot that’s just a fraction of the production cost.
      - bamfly 3y ago
        Easy to do, even when people aren't doing it on purpose for propaganda reasons (which, you clearly weren't, from the tone of your post, but... it happens).
    - anon84873628 3y ago
      The article says that labor can be 50% the cost of asparagus
      - bamfly 3y ago
        This farmer claims it's about 50% of his costs. There are more steps before it hits store shelves. And price-charged is necessarily over costs for any non-failing business, so 50% (let's say) of costs won't equal 50% of the wholesale price even before shipping, storage, and all the profit and overhead of those are factored in. Plus, the same farmer said stuff like: "After all, he says, he cannot raise his price on a box of asparagus by 50% just because it was cut on a Sunday." Which makes me inclined to take anything he says about his business or this law with a grain of salt(ed & peppered grilled asparagus... mmm, delicious). Because that's both a blatant math fail, and a business-sense fail.
- diffeomorphism 3y ago
  Easy answer: you don't. Just like when water is scarce and expensive and you want to grow water intensive crops for cheap. Then the result is not that water needs to be cheaper, but that you simply chose the wrong crop.
  - seti0Cha 3y ago
    In this case the expensive resource is labor, so following your analogy, they should grow crops that are less labor intensive. Makes sense but doesn't seem like there's a net gain for the laborers there.
    - diffeomorphism 3y ago
      No, the whole point of the article is that for the workers it is always 7 days no matter whether it is 35, 40 or 48 "hours", since external costs like child care stay fixed. So the expensive resource decidedly is not labor but time.
      - seti0Cha 3y ago
        Ok, I see your point. If the farmer were to grow a crop that didn't require such rapid harvesting, the workers would end up doing the same labor over a longer period of time which could allow them to have lower child care costs. On the other hand, it would then take them longer in terms of calendar days to get the same income, and all their other expenses are likely to stay the same. If they normally moved on to other jobs after the harvest, this would mean reduced overall income. Also, the difficulty of the job is factored into the pay they receive (the article specifically says their hourly wage is higher than normal farm labor), so they would likely be paid less for this less demanding crop. It still doesn't seem like much of a solution.
- II2II 3y ago
  The numbers in the article don't work out. First of all, they were claiming that farm workers used to earn up to $1,400/week and now they are earning up to $1,000/week. They were also claiming that they could work up to 70 hours per week in the past, and now they are limiting it to 48 hours per week. Oh yes, there was also the claim they could earn up to $30/hour. - $1,400/week at 70 hours results in an hourly rate of $20/hour. Likewise, $1,400/week at $30/hour reflects 46.7 hours of work. Perhaps they mean take-home pay, but I've never heard of businesses discussing pay in that context. Perhaps the skilled workers ($30/hour) are working fewer hours than the lesser skilled workers who are being paid $20/hour. In that case, they are not working enough hours to earn overtime. - Even if they had to start paying overtime, time-and-a-half only accounts for a 21.4% increase labor costs assuming everyone was working 70 hour work weeks, not 50% more as the article claims. Given the claim that labor costs contribute to half of the cost of production, we would expect the cost of the product to rise by about 11%. Take my numbers with a grain of salt, because the numbers they are based upon (those cited in the article) are of unclear provenance. At best, the article's numbers are cherry picked and misleading. At worse, they are pulled out of a hat.
BaseballPhysics 3y ago
Exactly right. The "workaround" would never have worked with a strong labour union.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  But in that case you'd be paying 1.5x more for asparagus.
  - diffeomorphism 3y ago
    Where are you getting 1.5x from? The article is about 48 vs 40 hours. And that is just for the labor cost part of the price, while logistics, quality control, marketing,... stay fixed. So 1.2x would already be a very generous upper estimate.
  - kennywinker 3y ago
    I really think that 1.5x is a small price to pay to know that nobody suffered to produce this. I also think that if you believe the price of asparagus is 100% farm labour, you’re mistaken.
- slillibri 3y ago
  Like the United Farm Workers, founded by this guy named Cesar Chavez in 1962?
tastyfreeze 3y ago
A judgment of fair payment is up to the employee and the employer not the nation as a whole. Previously, farm workers believed it was fair to work 70 hours with no overtime compensation. Now the employer is prohibited from doing that pushing the required compensation above what he believed to be fair. Price fixing labor does not work. Harvesting is a job that should be paid by produce harvested or job completion instead of hourly. But, that is illegal as well. If we keep making low rung jobs illegal there is no ladder for people to climb.
- cxr 3y ago
  > Harvesting is a job that should be paid by produce harvested or job completion instead of hourly. But, that is illegal as well. Is it? Even if that's true for hired workers, presumably Schreiber, the guy who owns Schreiber Farms, does get paid based on production. > If we keep making low rung jobs illegal there is no ladder for people to climb. What ladder are you referring to in your counterfactual?
- rhyme-boss 3y ago
  Do the employees agree it's fair or are they desperate, in a survival mentality, and they take whatever they can get? It's far-fetched to think a farm worker is going to ascend to a higher income. There is no ladder when you're making less than subsistence.
  - tastyfreeze 3y ago
    Does it matter which it is? They agreed to do the job for the compensation that was offered because it was better than something else. This nation was built by immigrants that came here with nothing and worked their asses off to improve their family circumstance. How many generations ago did your family move here? How did the first US generation of your family work and live? Where is your family now? That path has to remain open. Labor laws handed down from on high have been progressively making it more difficult to start from nothing and become something. Like many in the country, my great grandparents moved to the US with essentially nothing, not speaking much, if any, English. They worked as farmers with lots of children to get the work done. Nobody in my family are currently farmers. Many in my current family generation work high paying jobs, many don't. I am not saying that farming is a bad job. It is necessary. Just illustrating that the possibility, not guarantee, of upward mobility is what makes this country great.
vasco 3y ago
If you make labor much more expensive you're going to get more robots in the fields, not rich farmhands.
- kennywinker 3y ago
  Labour shouldn’t demand more money, because otherwise owners will automate them out of a job! Makes sense, but meanwhile, owners are frantically automating us out of our job regardless of how much we ask for.
phil21 3y ago
If the world was ran by folks who think like you back when I was in my early adulthood, I'd still be doing jobs like picking crops and working in factories. There has to be a balance here. You need to allow people who have hustle, drive, and work ethic to rise above the chafe in non-traditional manners other than the prescribed middle class social mobility route. Not everyone is average, and treating society as such is a recipe for tears. I have zero idea how I'd "come up" today since all the ladders of "work harder than those next to you and you can slowly improve your lot in life" have largely been pulled up in the name of fairness and equity.
- dathos 3y ago
  I don’t understand how this relates to not paying people a living wage for full time work?
  - phil21 3y ago
    $30/hr isn't a living wage? Jobs like this are precisely the high-paying hard-labor stuff that is going by the wayside in the name of equity. The exact type of job I used to pull myself out of my situation and bootstrap my tech career. Try walking onto a roofing crew these days and see how that goes. Jobs like this simply are almost nonexistent now for most demographics.
    - cxr 3y ago
      > $30/hr isn't a living wage? Income is relative. Mentioning it without mentioning its measure against what it's used for makes it nearly meaningless. If you're going to do that, you might as well not even mention units like dollars and hours.
    - kennywinker 3y ago
      $30/hour for the most skilled workers, for a few weeks during harvest, where you have to live on the farm 24/7, and then travel somewhere else because this job is done. That’s not roofing. Not even in the same ballpark as roofing.
  - 3y ago
seti0Cha 3y ago
If labor is one of the primary expenses, and the profit margin is low, then increasing the cost of labor will drive the profit margin into the negatives. In other words, the man can't run a business that pays the level you think it should - it would go bankrupt. So what do you propose as a solution?
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Either charge more, or just don't? If people aren't willing to pay enough for something, to the point that it can't be done profitably without exploiting your workers, that's the market saying it doesn't deserve to get done. For example, Applebees is on the ropes. People are unwilling to pay enough money for Applebees' food for the company to remain solvent. Does that mean Applebees has an ethical basis to use slave labor to keep their doors open? No! They should just go out of business.
  - seti0Cha 3y ago
    They can't charge more because they are competing with others not affected by the overtime regulation. And at the current prices they aren't able to pay enough...at least not enough according to bystanders such as yourself, who seem to think it's better for them to lose their jobs than keep working at the rate they've been getting.
    - kennywinker 3y ago
      If applebees goes out of business, a vacancy opens. For a new business - ideally one that can pay its workers. Short term, sure it’s “bad” for businesses to close. Long term, as long as it’s not happening en-mass, it’s a good thing
darth_avocado 3y ago
This commentary seems very out of touch with what the reality of farms. > "I can't hold my employees to 40 hours, because it's just not enough to live on." It doesn’t mean farms pay less money, quite the opposite actually. Skilled farm labor is very valuable and gets paid more than your regular blue collar worker driving an Uber or working a fast food kitchen. The problem with farms is that work doesn’t fit your 9-5 M-F 40 hour work week. Most of the year, you need very little work, and on specific stretches, you need round the clock work. What the comment means is that 40 hours won’t work for the workers because they don’t get 40 hours all the time. Specific seasons are the time for the workers to work longer hours and make more money for the rest of the year. And if the law forces people to work only 40 hours during the season where they make bulk of their money by working longer hours, workers won’t have sufficient for the rest of the year.
- cxr 3y ago
  This always happens in these discussions: > if the law forces people to work only 40 hours The law isn't forcing them to work only 40 hours. It's forcing Schreiber to pay them more if they do.
  - darth_avocado 3y ago
    > Just pay them more It doesn’t work because of you know, math. Not only are you suggesting that people only work 40 hours, but also get paid more for those 40 hours. So now farmers not only hire 2 people instead of 1 because you still have more than 40 hours of work, but now also compensate 2 workers for the lost wages they otherwise would have made working longer hours for a short duration of time. It’s like instead of working 8 hours M-F, I work 10 hours M-Th and take the Friday off because of how my industry works, the law now forces employers to pay me overtime for 2 hours every day. So employers have to restrict me to 8 hours per day to avoid overtime and hire someone else along with me to get the same amount of work done. But then also pay both of us the lost wages for Friday.
    - deleted 3y ago
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anon84873628 3y ago
>"The addition of overtime makes our already high labor costs completely uncompetitive to Mexico and Peru," says Schreiber, citing the top two asparagus exporters to the U.S. In both countries, cutters make less in a day than Schreiber pays in an hour. The end result will simply be that the US farms go out of business. More South American rainforest cut down for agriculture, more climate change, less resilient food systems, and the cycle goes on and on...
mindslight 3y ago
> Man wants to pay his workers a non livable wage You can't just write this off in terms of "livable wage". The hourly rate times 40/48 hours a week is seemingly a livable wage for the season being worked. The problem is that this being seasonal piecemeal work, workers want to bank more money than required to merely "live" while the work is there, and then not have to find a different 40 hour a week job during the off season. I totally agree with your point of collective bargaining vs top down impositions. But taking a quick stab based off the implication of a single passage, the problem with the law seems to be that it capped the number of hours per week, but not the number of days per week. So rather than dithering out the days each worker is expected to come in, the farm operators just assumed 7 day weeks of short days. ("if he was limiting them to 48 hours a week, they wouldn't cut asparagus this year. They didn't want to be on the farm seven days a week as required during the asparagus harvest."). In general I think a better phase-in method would have been institute the 40 hour threshold immediately, but then slowly up the multiplier over a longer time - 1.1x, 1.2x, etc Also the problem here seems relatively straightforward to work around too, assuming the problem of short days can be sorted out - work on a second farm the remaining days.
- kennywinker 3y ago
  … Because being required to live on a farm 24/7 sounds like a situation where hopping over to the asparagus farm that’s located conveniently next door is easy + allowed. Yup.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    > Because being required to live on a farm 24/7 sounds like a situation where hopping over to the asparagus farm that’s located conveniently next door is easy + allowed. Yup. This kind of response is an epitome of online toxicity and polarization. I raised a few points, but you're just making some seemingly unfounded assertion and rejecting analysis? Nothing in the article indicates the workers are living on the farms. In fact there are several mentions to things like childcare, gas, getting a second job, etc.
    - 3y ago
blahyawnblah 3y ago
> farm owners are trying to get people to do something without paying them fairly The farmers can't raise prices or their produce won't sell. How are you supposed to compete with Peru's wages and prices?
- mcphage 3y ago
  I believe Tariffs are the traditional way.
cscurmudgeon 3y ago
You see one law with unintended consequences and propose more laws to fix that? Don't you see a problem with that? This will only lead to more faster automation or this moving to countries with laxer laws (e.g. China and manufacturing) > This is the crux of it. Man wants to pay his workers a non livable wage That is signal calling for automation.
- kennywinker 3y ago
  This is a great blanket defense against any kind of improvement for workers. But it’s not logically sound. First of all, companies are already automating and outsourcing jobs away - they aren’t waiting around for people to ask for a raise before they do it. Second, is asparagus harvesting something that can be reasonably automated away at the moment? I’m not sure it is, are you?
  - cscurmudgeon 3y ago
    > But it’s not logically sound Just saying it doesn't make it so. There is a ton of evidence wage hikes lead to automation (it is not even controversial among economists): https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/16/evidence-minimum-wage-hikes-result-in-workers-being-replaced-by-robots.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/16/evidence-minimum-wage-hikes-... https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23667/w23667.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23667/w236... > Second, is asparagus harvesting something that can be reasonably automated away at the moment? I’m not sure it is, are you? Is all farming just asparagus harvesting? Does it need to happen at this moment or not at all? Good intentions + surface-level thinking don't guarantee good outcomes. https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/systems-thinking-and-the-cobra-effect https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/systems-thinking-and-the-cobra-e...
DropInIn 3y ago
Arguably the real issue is people wanting products for less than they should cost. Full stop. We need to recognize just what things would cost if produced exclusively domestically (not including differences in materials costs from geographic availability erc) and recognize that we live in absurd comfort by getting products at 1/10 of what they cost (not the real number just an easy reference). Eventually either we continue to abuse the world or we end up the abused or, in the absolute best case, the economies of the world reach equilibrium and we pay the Proper price for our products.

oneTbrain23 3y ago

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johncessna 3y ago

They make 30 dollars an hour. Given you got that far into the article, what are your suggestions for the farmers pain points? How would you price asparagus that needed twice the labor costs to harvest than a box next week that didn't?

BaseballPhysics 3y ago
Yes, it is very convenient that NPR picked a type of produce that demands relatively high hourly wages so that labour would look greedy in this circumstance. But make no mistake, the exact same thing will happen on farms with much lower hourly wages where the same level of skill isn't required. As for your second question, you and I both know the answers are difficult. Do you think it's reasonable for American labourers to make the same as a labourer in Peru? Because that's the issue here: globalized trade causing a race to the bottom in labour compensation. IMO there aren't many great answers, but "pay people a Peruvian wage in the US" certainly isn't a good one.
closewith 3y ago
And yet, 40 hours at $30 power hour is not enough to live on.
- kennywinker 3y ago
  Look at some of the other comments in this thread. Key takeaways: $30/hour isn’t what every worker is making. You have to live on the farm 24/7 to get those 40 hours. Normal worker was getting $1400/week, which is not $30*40hrs. Now closer to $1000/week, apparently. Tho these numbers are all from the owner not the workers.
kennywinker 3y ago
First, 30/hour is the ceiling, not the floor. But ok yeah 30/hour for 48 (soon 40) hours of work, but you have to live on the farm 7 days a week. Sooo… that’s 30 * 48 / (24 * 7) = 8.60/hour. If the target is to have each worker do 70 hours/week, but you’re capped at 40 hours before overtime kicks in, that only brings your cost up by: With overtime: 40 normal hours * $30 + 30 overtime hours * $45 = $2550 Without overtime: 70 normal hours * $30 = $2100 Difference is $450/worker, or a ~21% increase in cost. At most, since most workers aren’t getting $30/hour. So yeah, raise the price of asparagus by 21%, to reflect the actual cost of picking, or better yet have the owners take a 21% pay cut.
- bamfly 3y ago
  > So yeah, raise the price of asparagus by 21%, to reflect the actual cost of picking, or better yet have the owners take a 21% pay cut. Wouldn't be anything like 21%. Tons of costs other than the labor to pick. I'd bet it'd closer to 2% than 20%.
  - kennywinker 3y ago
    Omg yes, i got fixated on the labour portion and forgot that’s just a fraction of the production cost.
    - bamfly 3y ago
      Easy to do, even when people aren't doing it on purpose for propaganda reasons (which, you clearly weren't, from the tone of your post, but... it happens).
  - anon84873628 3y ago
    The article says that labor can be 50% the cost of asparagus
    - bamfly 3y ago
      This farmer claims it's about 50% of his costs. There are more steps before it hits store shelves. And price-charged is necessarily over costs for any non-failing business, so 50% (let's say) of costs won't equal 50% of the wholesale price even before shipping, storage, and all the profit and overhead of those are factored in. Plus, the same farmer said stuff like: "After all, he says, he cannot raise his price on a box of asparagus by 50% just because it was cut on a Sunday." Which makes me inclined to take anything he says about his business or this law with a grain of salt(ed & peppered grilled asparagus... mmm, delicious). Because that's both a blatant math fail, and a business-sense fail.
diffeomorphism 3y ago
Easy answer: you don't. Just like when water is scarce and expensive and you want to grow water intensive crops for cheap. Then the result is not that water needs to be cheaper, but that you simply chose the wrong crop.
- seti0Cha 3y ago
  In this case the expensive resource is labor, so following your analogy, they should grow crops that are less labor intensive. Makes sense but doesn't seem like there's a net gain for the laborers there.
  - diffeomorphism 3y ago
    No, the whole point of the article is that for the workers it is always 7 days no matter whether it is 35, 40 or 48 "hours", since external costs like child care stay fixed. So the expensive resource decidedly is not labor but time.
    - seti0Cha 3y ago
      Ok, I see your point. If the farmer were to grow a crop that didn't require such rapid harvesting, the workers would end up doing the same labor over a longer period of time which could allow them to have lower child care costs. On the other hand, it would then take them longer in terms of calendar days to get the same income, and all their other expenses are likely to stay the same. If they normally moved on to other jobs after the harvest, this would mean reduced overall income. Also, the difficulty of the job is factored into the pay they receive (the article specifically says their hourly wage is higher than normal farm labor), so they would likely be paid less for this less demanding crop. It still doesn't seem like much of a solution.
II2II 3y ago
The numbers in the article don't work out. First of all, they were claiming that farm workers used to earn up to $1,400/week and now they are earning up to $1,000/week. They were also claiming that they could work up to 70 hours per week in the past, and now they are limiting it to 48 hours per week. Oh yes, there was also the claim they could earn up to $30/hour. - $1,400/week at 70 hours results in an hourly rate of $20/hour. Likewise, $1,400/week at $30/hour reflects 46.7 hours of work. Perhaps they mean take-home pay, but I've never heard of businesses discussing pay in that context. Perhaps the skilled workers ($30/hour) are working fewer hours than the lesser skilled workers who are being paid $20/hour. In that case, they are not working enough hours to earn overtime. - Even if they had to start paying overtime, time-and-a-half only accounts for a 21.4% increase labor costs assuming everyone was working 70 hour work weeks, not 50% more as the article claims. Given the claim that labor costs contribute to half of the cost of production, we would expect the cost of the product to rise by about 11%. Take my numbers with a grain of salt, because the numbers they are based upon (those cited in the article) are of unclear provenance. At best, the article's numbers are cherry picked and misleading. At worse, they are pulled out of a hat.

BaseballPhysics 3y ago

Exactly right. The "workaround" would never have worked with a strong labour union.

SoftTalker 3y ago
But in that case you'd be paying 1.5x more for asparagus.
- diffeomorphism 3y ago
  Where are you getting 1.5x from? The article is about 48 vs 40 hours. And that is just for the labor cost part of the price, while logistics, quality control, marketing,... stay fixed. So 1.2x would already be a very generous upper estimate.
- kennywinker 3y ago
  I really think that 1.5x is a small price to pay to know that nobody suffered to produce this. I also think that if you believe the price of asparagus is 100% farm labour, you’re mistaken.
slillibri 3y ago
Like the United Farm Workers, founded by this guy named Cesar Chavez in 1962?

tastyfreeze 3y ago

A judgment of fair payment is up to the employee and the employer not the nation as a whole. Previously, farm workers believed it was fair to work 70 hours with no overtime compensation. Now the employer is prohibited from doing that pushing the required compensation above what he believed to be fair. Price fixing labor does not work. Harvesting is a job that should be paid by produce harvested or job completion instead of hourly. But, that is illegal as well. If we keep making low rung jobs illegal there is no ladder for people to climb.

cxr 3y ago
> Harvesting is a job that should be paid by produce harvested or job completion instead of hourly. But, that is illegal as well. Is it? Even if that's true for hired workers, presumably Schreiber, the guy who owns Schreiber Farms, does get paid based on production. > If we keep making low rung jobs illegal there is no ladder for people to climb. What ladder are you referring to in your counterfactual?
rhyme-boss 3y ago
Do the employees agree it's fair or are they desperate, in a survival mentality, and they take whatever they can get? It's far-fetched to think a farm worker is going to ascend to a higher income. There is no ladder when you're making less than subsistence.
- tastyfreeze 3y ago
  Does it matter which it is? They agreed to do the job for the compensation that was offered because it was better than something else. This nation was built by immigrants that came here with nothing and worked their asses off to improve their family circumstance. How many generations ago did your family move here? How did the first US generation of your family work and live? Where is your family now? That path has to remain open. Labor laws handed down from on high have been progressively making it more difficult to start from nothing and become something. Like many in the country, my great grandparents moved to the US with essentially nothing, not speaking much, if any, English. They worked as farmers with lots of children to get the work done. Nobody in my family are currently farmers. Many in my current family generation work high paying jobs, many don't. I am not saying that farming is a bad job. It is necessary. Just illustrating that the possibility, not guarantee, of upward mobility is what makes this country great.

vasco 3y ago

If you make labor much more expensive you're going to get more robots in the fields, not rich farmhands.

kennywinker 3y ago
Labour shouldn’t demand more money, because otherwise owners will automate them out of a job! Makes sense, but meanwhile, owners are frantically automating us out of our job regardless of how much we ask for.

phil21 3y ago

If the world was ran by folks who think like you back when I was in my early adulthood, I'd still be doing jobs like picking crops and working in factories. There has to be a balance here. You need to allow people who have hustle, drive, and work ethic to rise above the chafe in non-traditional manners other than the prescribed middle class social mobility route. Not everyone is average, and treating society as such is a recipe for tears. I have zero idea how I'd "come up" today since all the ladders of "work harder than those next to you and you can slowly improve your lot in life" have largely been pulled up in the name of fairness and equity.

dathos 3y ago
I don’t understand how this relates to not paying people a living wage for full time work?
- phil21 3y ago
  $30/hr isn't a living wage? Jobs like this are precisely the high-paying hard-labor stuff that is going by the wayside in the name of equity. The exact type of job I used to pull myself out of my situation and bootstrap my tech career. Try walking onto a roofing crew these days and see how that goes. Jobs like this simply are almost nonexistent now for most demographics.
  - cxr 3y ago
    > $30/hr isn't a living wage? Income is relative. Mentioning it without mentioning its measure against what it's used for makes it nearly meaningless. If you're going to do that, you might as well not even mention units like dollars and hours.
  - kennywinker 3y ago
    $30/hour for the most skilled workers, for a few weeks during harvest, where you have to live on the farm 24/7, and then travel somewhere else because this job is done. That’s not roofing. Not even in the same ballpark as roofing.
- 3y ago

seti0Cha 3y ago

If labor is one of the primary expenses, and the profit margin is low, then increasing the cost of labor will drive the profit margin into the negatives. In other words, the man can't run a business that pays the level you think it should - it would go bankrupt. So what do you propose as a solution?

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Either charge more, or just don't? If people aren't willing to pay enough for something, to the point that it can't be done profitably without exploiting your workers, that's the market saying it doesn't deserve to get done. For example, Applebees is on the ropes. People are unwilling to pay enough money for Applebees' food for the company to remain solvent. Does that mean Applebees has an ethical basis to use slave labor to keep their doors open? No! They should just go out of business.
- seti0Cha 3y ago
  They can't charge more because they are competing with others not affected by the overtime regulation. And at the current prices they aren't able to pay enough...at least not enough according to bystanders such as yourself, who seem to think it's better for them to lose their jobs than keep working at the rate they've been getting.
  - kennywinker 3y ago
    If applebees goes out of business, a vacancy opens. For a new business - ideally one that can pay its workers. Short term, sure it’s “bad” for businesses to close. Long term, as long as it’s not happening en-mass, it’s a good thing

darth_avocado 3y ago

This commentary seems very out of touch with what the reality of farms. > "I can't hold my employees to 40 hours, because it's just not enough to live on." It doesn’t mean farms pay less money, quite the opposite actually. Skilled farm labor is very valuable and gets paid more than your regular blue collar worker driving an Uber or working a fast food kitchen. The problem with farms is that work doesn’t fit your 9-5 M-F 40 hour work week. Most of the year, you need very little work, and on specific stretches, you need round the clock work. What the comment means is that 40 hours won’t work for the workers because they don’t get 40 hours all the time. Specific seasons are the time for the workers to work longer hours and make more money for the rest of the year. And if the law forces people to work only 40 hours during the season where they make bulk of their money by working longer hours, workers won’t have sufficient for the rest of the year.

cxr 3y ago
This always happens in these discussions: > if the law forces people to work only 40 hours The law isn't forcing them to work only 40 hours. It's forcing Schreiber to pay them more if they do.
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  > Just pay them more It doesn’t work because of you know, math. Not only are you suggesting that people only work 40 hours, but also get paid more for those 40 hours. So now farmers not only hire 2 people instead of 1 because you still have more than 40 hours of work, but now also compensate 2 workers for the lost wages they otherwise would have made working longer hours for a short duration of time. It’s like instead of working 8 hours M-F, I work 10 hours M-Th and take the Friday off because of how my industry works, the law now forces employers to pay me overtime for 2 hours every day. So employers have to restrict me to 8 hours per day to avoid overtime and hire someone else along with me to get the same amount of work done. But then also pay both of us the lost wages for Friday.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

anon84873628 3y ago

>"The addition of overtime makes our already high labor costs completely uncompetitive to Mexico and Peru," says Schreiber, citing the top two asparagus exporters to the U.S. In both countries, cutters make less in a day than Schreiber pays in an hour. The end result will simply be that the US farms go out of business. More South American rainforest cut down for agriculture, more climate change, less resilient food systems, and the cycle goes on and on...

mindslight 3y ago

> Man wants to pay his workers a non livable wage You can't just write this off in terms of "livable wage". The hourly rate times 40/48 hours a week is seemingly a livable wage for the season being worked. The problem is that this being seasonal piecemeal work, workers want to bank more money than required to merely "live" while the work is there, and then not have to find a different 40 hour a week job during the off season. I totally agree with your point of collective bargaining vs top down impositions. But taking a quick stab based off the implication of a single passage, the problem with the law seems to be that it capped the number of hours per week, but not the number of days per week. So rather than dithering out the days each worker is expected to come in, the farm operators just assumed 7 day weeks of short days. ("if he was limiting them to 48 hours a week, they wouldn't cut asparagus this year. They didn't want to be on the farm seven days a week as required during the asparagus harvest."). In general I think a better phase-in method would have been institute the 40 hour threshold immediately, but then slowly up the multiplier over a longer time - 1.1x, 1.2x, etc Also the problem here seems relatively straightforward to work around too, assuming the problem of short days can be sorted out - work on a second farm the remaining days.

kennywinker 3y ago
… Because being required to live on a farm 24/7 sounds like a situation where hopping over to the asparagus farm that’s located conveniently next door is easy + allowed. Yup.
- mindslight 3y ago
  > Because being required to live on a farm 24/7 sounds like a situation where hopping over to the asparagus farm that’s located conveniently next door is easy + allowed. Yup. This kind of response is an epitome of online toxicity and polarization. I raised a few points, but you're just making some seemingly unfounded assertion and rejecting analysis? Nothing in the article indicates the workers are living on the farms. In fact there are several mentions to things like childcare, gas, getting a second job, etc.
  - 3y ago

blahyawnblah 3y ago

> farm owners are trying to get people to do something without paying them fairly The farmers can't raise prices or their produce won't sell. How are you supposed to compete with Peru's wages and prices?

mcphage 3y ago
I believe Tariffs are the traditional way.

cscurmudgeon 3y ago

You see one law with unintended consequences and propose more laws to fix that? Don't you see a problem with that? This will only lead to more faster automation or this moving to countries with laxer laws (e.g. China and manufacturing) > This is the crux of it. Man wants to pay his workers a non livable wage That is signal calling for automation.

kennywinker 3y ago
This is a great blanket defense against any kind of improvement for workers. But it’s not logically sound. First of all, companies are already automating and outsourcing jobs away - they aren’t waiting around for people to ask for a raise before they do it. Second, is asparagus harvesting something that can be reasonably automated away at the moment? I’m not sure it is, are you?
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  > But it’s not logically sound Just saying it doesn't make it so. There is a ton of evidence wage hikes lead to automation (it is not even controversial among economists): https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/16/evidence-minimum-wage-hikes-result-in-workers-being-replaced-by-robots.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/16/evidence-minimum-wage-hikes-... https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23667/w23667.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23667/w236... > Second, is asparagus harvesting something that can be reasonably automated away at the moment? I’m not sure it is, are you? Is all farming just asparagus harvesting? Does it need to happen at this moment or not at all? Good intentions + surface-level thinking don't guarantee good outcomes. https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/systems-thinking-and-the-cobra-effect https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/systems-thinking-and-the-cobra-e...

DropInIn 3y ago

Arguably the real issue is people wanting products for less than they should cost. Full stop. We need to recognize just what things would cost if produced exclusively domestically (not including differences in materials costs from geographic availability erc) and recognize that we live in absurd comfort by getting products at 1/10 of what they cost (not the real number just an easy reference). Eventually either we continue to abuse the world or we end up the abused or, in the absolute best case, the economies of the world reach equilibrium and we pay the Proper price for our products.