Does the OP think that farmers, restaurant owners, etc. employ illegal immigrants out of the kindness of their hearts? Or maybe that they skip over Buster because they just like Jose better?
First of all, labor isn’t efficient. So even if a proportion of the unemployed would pick peaches for $5 an hour, that proportion might not be willing to move to Georgia. In fact, we know they didn’t (if they exist at all). Plus, the ones that tried couldn’t pick fast enough. Don’t you think that farmers should determine who they employ? In other words, do you believe in a free economy or protectionism?
Or I suppose we could do it the Republican way, which is to throw government money at the farmers in the form of subsidies. That would at least keep prices low. But it won’t help with that debt ceiling problem.
Hell, if we use child labor, we can pay those kids five bucks an hour. Or we could use slave labor. Paying decent wages doesn’t appeal to companies any more. That’s what the fuss is about. Illegal aliens will take jobs at lower wages than people who are here legally, and they’ll also put up with worse working conditions. Companies LOVE this.
The companies don’t want to pay enough to attract American workers. There ARE Americans who are willing to do tough stoop labor…but they don’t want to be paid a pittance for it.
This debate emerges whenever the issue of sweatshop conditions –ever described with the term ‘deplorable’- comes up.
Using the example of the crab pickers, according to the article workers were paid $7.25 an hour with bonuses to pickers who are particularly proficient. It’s up to the individual employee to determine whether this is a “living wage” or simply not worth the trouble.
If the business owners closed the door on seasonal-migrant workers (perfectly legal and documented it should be noted) then yes, the business owners would have to increase the wage in order to make the job a viable one for the local work force.
In doing that, I’m thinking they would have to double the wage to bring in a reliable work force. Well this upturn in overhead would result in a significant spike to the price point making an already expensive product out of reach to the typical consumer. This loops back around to the producer who no longer has a marketable commodity. Before you know it, the republic is brought to its knees and crab soup lovers everywhere slog onward reminiscing about the good old days.
So essentially you truly can’t have it both ways. Inexpensive product comes from cheap labor. You want to address hiree documentation status or working conditions, fine, but it comes at a cost.
Farmers are going to produce strawberries when their costs and prices are in line that they make a profit that they can live with. The issues isn’t whether you think you “deserve” strawberries at a certain price, but whether people will buy strawberries in sufficient numbers at a particular price to make it worth the trouble for the farmer.
So the question isn’t whether you personally are willing to pay a certain price for strawberries, but whether strawberries will be a scarce luxury item, or a cheap commodity, or not worth producing at all.
This is part of an understanding of economics too, by the way.
In any case, I’m not sure that these economic principles support any particular political position.
I could say just as well that what this proves is that immigration should be unrestricted (making all immigration non-“illegal”) but that mininum labour and wage standards should be enforced. But the fact is that “economics” doesn’t prove any such thing at all, on either side of the political debate.
The fallacy is pretending that economics can dictate policy.
My claim doesn’t directly involve immigration restrictions, just a sudden decrease in the unskilled labor force for whatever reason. The linked thread in the OP talked about the poorest 20% of people in the US disappearing for some unspecified reason. Immigration was only the most obvious example.
News flash, most of the poorest 20% aren’t doing any work at all. So if they went away, there’d be no loss in productivity. The few that are working are generally doing jobs for which there is already a huge oversupply of labor. Would it be hard to fill those jobs? No, those are the easiest jobs to fill. It is hard to find a chief of staff for a medical center. Takes months, sometimes years, and you’ll probably have to hire a consultant to find someone. It is not hard to find ten, or a hundred, people to stock shelves at Wal-Mart.
Christ, when they wanted to outlaw slavery, what do you think the slaveholders said? We’ll never get the cotton picked! We can’t do it! Nobody will do it! Yeah, asshole, nobody will do it for * free*. That doesn’t mean nobody will do it. People then weren’t entitled to cheap cotton and people now aren’t entitled to cheap peaches.
There’s a misconception that direct labor costs are the primary driver of the price of produce, whereas in reality it makes little difference whether you pay the pickers $8 an hour or $16 an hour. An hour’s picking spreads that $8 or $16 over many, many bushels of fruit. Go to a pick-your-own farm - the prices are hardly different from those of picked fruit. Most of the cost is in the land, the seed, fertilizer and water, the shipping and the marketing. Before anyone gets all up in my business, I spent a summer picking berries and it ain’t that hard, all you had to do was show up, get on the truck and start filling baskets. Even the fattest, smokingest desk jockey could get used to it in a few days. I’d much rather pick berries than work on an assembly line, for the same pay. At least you’re outdoors.
It has nothing (directly) to do with skill, or education, or how easy the job is.
Those are contributing factors to how much compensation the job offers, but they don’t determine the compensation. How much a job pays depends on how hard it is to find someone willing and able to do the work you require at the rate you intend to offer. If you can find lots of people willing and able to do the job at the rate you offer, then next time you hire someone, you’re going to offer a bit less money and a bit less money and a bit less money, until it becomes moderately difficult to find someone willing and able to do the job.
That is the equilibrium wage for that job. When people complain about how they can’t find employees, yet they pay minumum wage and have shitty conditions and expect highly qualified go-getters, they’re going to be dissappointed, because those highly qualified go-getters are already working at other jobs for a lot more money. If you want to pay minumum wage, you’re going to be picking through the resumes of people who for whatever reason couldn’t get a better job.
Yes, there are hard, dirty, demanding jobs that pay crappy wages. And this is because, for various reasons, the employer finds that when they offer to pay people that wage they get lots of people willing and able to work for that wage. And there are easy, fun, mentally rewarding jobs that pay high wages. And this is because when employers try to find people to do that job they find very few people who are willing and able to work for that wage.
There is a point in every job where a worker or an employer looks at the work and asks themselves if the job is worth doing at the price being paid. And if both worker and employer agree it is, then the work continues. If they can’t agree, then the work ends and worker and employer go their separate ways, hoping to find other ways to pass the time.
If a few people think they deserve so much that they price themselves out of the market, tough on them. If so many people think that a job doesn’t pay enough that the employer can’t find anyone to fill the job, then tough on the employer. Not just low paid workers - I’ve seen interviews with CIOs where they moan and groan about not getting good people, where they want a very specific list of popular skills and are unwilling to train anyone to do them.
I’m pissed that I can’t buy good shirts for $10, the way I could when I was in high school. That’s my problem. If a shirt manufacturer prices mediocre shirts at $100, he better not blame cheapskate customers for his problem.
The “high” wage of $7.25 an hour for cleaning crabs is the Federal minimum wage, which is the lowest wage that can legally be paid for non-farm labor. Why in the heck would anyone want to work a physically demanding job in a stinky crab shack when they could make the same dime (or more) working practically anywhere else? If the owner of the crab shack needs workers, then they need to pay a rate which will make it competative with other jobs instead of crying about not being allowed to hire illegal immigrants or that “lazy Americans” won’t work.
Fine. But are you willing to give up crabs, strawberries, or whatever agricultural product completely under these conditions?
The fact is that producers of agricultural products have to be able to adjust their prices in line with their costs. And raising the price might result in lost sales, which means that it might just make more sense to ditch the crab business altogether. Are you prepared as a consumer for crabs to become luxury goods?
Seriously though, I have no problem paying more for something if that means a fair wage for the people that make it. However, I think employers crying about not being able to find workers when they don’t offer reasonable pay hypocritical.
Yes, certain goods are priced out of the market when labor costs rise. For example, I’ve been trying to fill the position of scullery maid/fellatrix for years, while offering room and board and $20 a week. No takers yet. And yet, I struggle on even though blowjobs are priced as a luxury good.
In the future if you want to continue to consume labor intensive goods and services where productivity can’t be increased by automation, you’re going to have to resign yourself to paying higher and higher prices in the coming decades, because global wages aren’t likely to fall any time soon, rather the reverse.
One day because the customer’s showroom needed to get done and nobody checked for union cards. It’s hot, dusty, nasty work and I was glad to go back to my drawing board the next day. I’m pretty sure I was making half what the pros were, but I was less than half as good. Making those seams seamless is an art.
This, exactly. Workers are not interchangeable, and in times of high employment most all competent workers will have a job. There will always be some competent workers who are changing jobs, or who are looking for jobs, or whose employer folded. But for the most part, most competent workers will be able to find jobs.
Then there are the people (I hesitate to call them workers, or potential workers) who just don’t have the hang of finding and keeping a job. These folks show up whenever, in whatever clothes were lying on the floor, and generally they don’t understand that employers want a given amount of work done for a given amount of money. Sometimes they can learn, sometimes not. If a company wants to pay minimum wage, when most competent people are already employed, the company gets to choose anyone from this category of job seekers. And then the company complains that they can’t find good workers. Well, the good workers are over at another company, hustling their bustles.
When there are far more job seekers than job openings, though, then the companies can pick and choose from a variety of great workers who are temporarily unemployed or underemployed. If a company can’t find decent workers during a period of high unemployment, then I would take a guess that the company isn’t willing to pay enough money to attract good workers.
And if enough companies pay very low wages, relative to the work that’s being performed, then they’re not going to be able to find consumers for their goods or services.
The people who ended up doing it in the end were the same ones who were doing it before. Their “pay” was in name only. It was called share-cropping and it was slavery dressed up like something else.
You try to put the share-cropping model back into place, and you’ll find yourself in the same situation that farmers are finding themselves in now. When you do find Americans becoming share-croppers, then I think it’s time to worry about this economy. That’s how we’ll know we have reached rock-bottom.
For example American fruit growers compete with South American fruit growers in the supermarkets. If we got rid of the illegal aliens in the fruit picking work force, the cost of labor would increase significantly and the price of Domestic fruit would increase and a lot of the fruit production would move to South America.
Liberals are kind of torn on this issue. On the one hand they want every working person to earn a wage that allows them to live a modest but dignified life. On the other hand they don’t want to expel illegal aliens who for the most part are hard working industrious folks chasing a splinter of the American Dream. The answer of course is to take in the hard working illegal aliens and expel the less industrious members of our own society. We can start with the old and frail (they can’t put up much of a fight and it would solve our budget problem almost overnight).
So the argument is, pay more for Georgia peach pickers and put up tariffs against Chilean peaches? We can do it and it might even be a good idea but its a bit more complicated than you are letting on.
A lot of these jobs like landscaping and nannies evaporate if the costs increase by very much. We end up with people staying at home instead of hiring a nanny (which is significantly cheaper than sending two kids to day care around here). I might mow my own lawn rather than pay someone to do it for me.
