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> Previously, farm workers believed it was fair to work 70 hours with no overtime compensation. Correction: previously the farm workers believed it was better

> Previously, farm workers believed it was fair to work 70 hours with no overtime compensation. Correction: previously the farm workers believed it was better to work 70 hours with no overtime compensation, rather than starve or become homeless. > If we keep making low rung jobs illegal there is no ladder for people to climb. There was no ladder to climb when piecework was legal, there’s no ladder to climb now. Just because a vanishingly small number of people in America manage to get out of poverty, that doesn’t justify a society structured so there will ALWAYS be large population of people in deep poverty. Nobody should be forced to work 70 hours to feed their family, while we are this rich a nation. > A judgment of fair payment is up to the employee and the employer not the nation as a whole. Here I agree. Employees should band together, and use their collective power to extract as much wealth as possible from their employer - since that’s exactly what the employer is doing to them. The job of the government is to support the workers, they are the plurality of the people, after all.

quantified 3y ago
How many of these employees are in the country legally? How many of them actually have much choice at all in their employment? The "great" thing about the system is that the poorer the employees are, the lower a wage they will accept. So "fair" payment is only fair if they aren't poor and have options. If you don't believe that, do you believe that price gouging does not exist by definition? It's exactly the same thing for transactional purchases, not labor relations.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > The "great" thing about the system is that the poorer the employees are, the lower a wage they will accept. People who accept low wages are poor by definition. But the only solution to this is opportunity. You can't get there by prohibiting that person's current best option. You don't make more money by working 40 hours at $30/hour than 70 hours at $30/hour. > If you don't believe that, do you believe that price gouging does not exist by definition? "Price gouging" is when sellers raise prices during a temporary period of high demand. It's not even obvious that this is bad -- it disincentivizes hoarding and makes sure goods are still on the shelves during an emergency for people who really need them. Paying the market rate for labor is what any business in a competitive market has to do or a competitor will do it, undercut them on price and put them out of business. The market rate for unskilled labor is low. The known solutions are things like learning a trade so you can do skilled labor, or automating production or reducing housing scarcity so that prices come down and the wages unskilled workers can earn go further. Many of the laws passed in this regard are highly counterproductive, because they don't do those things, they result in having your hours cut with no change to your hourly wage for the people directly affected, and higher prices for people in general.
  - kennywinker 3y ago
    > But the only solution to this is opportunity. Is it? Because tech has created a lot of opportunities over the past 50 years, but we still have farmers working 70 hours during the harvest for a handful of $1400 paycheques. And the middle class continues to shrink…
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      Because we keep foreclosing opportunities instead of creating new ones. Pass laws that make it harder for small businesses to compete with big ones, increase housing scarcity so people's wages go to landlords, professional organizations like the AMA pushing to restrict the supply of doctors which both makes it harder for people to become a doctor and raises healthcare costs. "Labor laws" like this are the worse-than-nothing they toss you to pretend they're doing something about any of this when they're really in bed with everyone screwing you.
  - quantified 3y ago
    The market rate for unskilled is low because the unskilled give their labor away for cheap. Nothing intrinsic, they're just poor. Unskilled rich people don't work for cheap.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      There is no reason to pay someone above market rates just because they have money. When a business needs someone to work an ordinary job, they're not going to pay a billionaire a ton of money even if it's the only way to get them to take that job, they're just going to hire someone else. The reason doctors get paid more than farm workers isn't because they're already rich. A doctor right out of medical school often has more debt than anyone.
roenxi 3y ago
> previously the farm workers believed it was better to work 70 hours with no overtime compensation, rather than starve or become homeless. Comparison is the thief of joy. This isn't a specific argument that something is wrong (why not complain about 40 hours? Or any hours? if someone is out on a farm, what else is there to do but sleep and work?). Everyone seems to agree that it is best for the workers to be working 70 hour weeks and for a harvest season that does seem somewhat reasonable. It is just haggling over price. It would be a much better world where people could all laze around and just need to work a couple of hours a week to get by. But the path to that world involves creating better opportunities. Not finding the best option people have then blocking them from it.
- kennywinker 3y ago
  > Everyone seems to agree that it is best for the workers to be working 70 hour weeks That’s not true at all. The workers were excited about getting overtime pay. The best thing for them would be higher pay, and time-and-a-half overtime pay. If they were able to earn enough with 40 or 50 or 60 hours some would chose to stop working then.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    I suppose, but you could make that argument about any non-zero number of hours. There are people who drop out of the workforce altogether after making a few million dollars. So that argument doesn't give any indication of what is fair and why. It'd be nice if that million-dollar thing could happen to all of us, but to happen on a large scale we need more opportunities for people to create millions of dollars in value. Trying to squeeze value out of ... I dunno, asparagus farmers ... won't do that. There isn't that much value in seeding asparagus. Much as I notionally appreciate the efforts that these people go to (I suppose on reflection, I'd rather see them replaced with machines - that would result in the farmer paying them approx. $0 but maybe it'd get more people employed as mechanics. Who knows).
    - kennywinker 3y ago
      > but to happen on a large scale we need more opportunities for people to create millions of dollars in value. Wouldn’t you say that there has been a huge spike in opportunities over the past 50 years? I’m thinking of the explosion of computing and its impact on society. Yet we’ve mostly seen the middle class shrink. I’m skeptical the issue here is opportunities. I’m pretty sure the issue is a shift in the balance of power, moving it from labour to capital. One superyacht could have paid for a lot of middle class lives. Automating a farm is a great opportunity to make a couple engineers+ceos+investors rich, and dump a few hundred people onto the job market, diluting their and every other worker in their position’s power
anon84873628 3y ago
Our food system is not built on the backs of local farmworkers alone - it's built on the backs of poor people around the globe. Mostly in the same countries that immigrant workers left themselves. That's who they are competing with. If food prices don't account for negative externalities of human well-being and climate degradation, and instead we allow arbitrage of labor laws, well the market is always going to be fucked up and exploitive. Just like everything else.

quantified 3y ago

How many of these employees are in the country legally? How many of them actually have much choice at all in their employment? The "great" thing about the system is that the poorer the employees are, the lower a wage they will accept. So "fair" payment is only fair if they aren't poor and have options. If you don't believe that, do you believe that price gouging does not exist by definition? It's exactly the same thing for transactional purchases, not labor relations.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> The "great" thing about the system is that the poorer the employees are, the lower a wage they will accept. People who accept low wages are poor by definition. But the only solution to this is opportunity. You can't get there by prohibiting that person's current best option. You don't make more money by working 40 hours at $30/hour than 70 hours at $30/hour. > If you don't believe that, do you believe that price gouging does not exist by definition? "Price gouging" is when sellers raise prices during a temporary period of high demand. It's not even obvious that this is bad -- it disincentivizes hoarding and makes sure goods are still on the shelves during an emergency for people who really need them. Paying the market rate for labor is what any business in a competitive market has to do or a competitor will do it, undercut them on price and put them out of business. The market rate for unskilled labor is low. The known solutions are things like learning a trade so you can do skilled labor, or automating production or reducing housing scarcity so that prices come down and the wages unskilled workers can earn go further. Many of the laws passed in this regard are highly counterproductive, because they don't do those things, they result in having your hours cut with no change to your hourly wage for the people directly affected, and higher prices for people in general.
- kennywinker 3y ago
  > But the only solution to this is opportunity. Is it? Because tech has created a lot of opportunities over the past 50 years, but we still have farmers working 70 hours during the harvest for a handful of $1400 paycheques. And the middle class continues to shrink…
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Because we keep foreclosing opportunities instead of creating new ones. Pass laws that make it harder for small businesses to compete with big ones, increase housing scarcity so people's wages go to landlords, professional organizations like the AMA pushing to restrict the supply of doctors which both makes it harder for people to become a doctor and raises healthcare costs. "Labor laws" like this are the worse-than-nothing they toss you to pretend they're doing something about any of this when they're really in bed with everyone screwing you.
- quantified 3y ago
  The market rate for unskilled is low because the unskilled give their labor away for cheap. Nothing intrinsic, they're just poor. Unskilled rich people don't work for cheap.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    There is no reason to pay someone above market rates just because they have money. When a business needs someone to work an ordinary job, they're not going to pay a billionaire a ton of money even if it's the only way to get them to take that job, they're just going to hire someone else. The reason doctors get paid more than farm workers isn't because they're already rich. A doctor right out of medical school often has more debt than anyone.

roenxi 3y ago

> previously the farm workers believed it was better to work 70 hours with no overtime compensation, rather than starve or become homeless. Comparison is the thief of joy. This isn't a specific argument that something is wrong (why not complain about 40 hours? Or any hours? if someone is out on a farm, what else is there to do but sleep and work?). Everyone seems to agree that it is best for the workers to be working 70 hour weeks and for a harvest season that does seem somewhat reasonable. It is just haggling over price. It would be a much better world where people could all laze around and just need to work a couple of hours a week to get by. But the path to that world involves creating better opportunities. Not finding the best option people have then blocking them from it.

kennywinker 3y ago
> Everyone seems to agree that it is best for the workers to be working 70 hour weeks That’s not true at all. The workers were excited about getting overtime pay. The best thing for them would be higher pay, and time-and-a-half overtime pay. If they were able to earn enough with 40 or 50 or 60 hours some would chose to stop working then.
- roenxi 3y ago
  I suppose, but you could make that argument about any non-zero number of hours. There are people who drop out of the workforce altogether after making a few million dollars. So that argument doesn't give any indication of what is fair and why. It'd be nice if that million-dollar thing could happen to all of us, but to happen on a large scale we need more opportunities for people to create millions of dollars in value. Trying to squeeze value out of ... I dunno, asparagus farmers ... won't do that. There isn't that much value in seeding asparagus. Much as I notionally appreciate the efforts that these people go to (I suppose on reflection, I'd rather see them replaced with machines - that would result in the farmer paying them approx. $0 but maybe it'd get more people employed as mechanics. Who knows).
  - kennywinker 3y ago
    > but to happen on a large scale we need more opportunities for people to create millions of dollars in value. Wouldn’t you say that there has been a huge spike in opportunities over the past 50 years? I’m thinking of the explosion of computing and its impact on society. Yet we’ve mostly seen the middle class shrink. I’m skeptical the issue here is opportunities. I’m pretty sure the issue is a shift in the balance of power, moving it from labour to capital. One superyacht could have paid for a lot of middle class lives. Automating a farm is a great opportunity to make a couple engineers+ceos+investors rich, and dump a few hundred people onto the job market, diluting their and every other worker in their position’s power

anon84873628 3y ago

Our food system is not built on the backs of local farmworkers alone - it's built on the backs of poor people around the globe. Mostly in the same countries that immigrant workers left themselves. That's who they are competing with. If food prices don't account for negative externalities of human well-being and climate degradation, and instead we allow arbitrage of labor laws, well the market is always going to be fucked up and exploitive. Just like everything else.