I’m not sure how to interpret this, or what the solution is. People will buy more strawberries the lower the price, and less strawberries the higher the price. What things should a consumer consider when shopping for strawberries?
Again, this is certainly true of many businesses. But there are lots of businesses where higher take-home wages mean going out of business, never mind making a profit.
Why is it the responsibility of minimum wage employees to keep these businesses alive?
I don’t think it is. If a business model can only exist through the exploitation of workers, it deserves to die. Maybe we don’t get to eat strawberries anymore.
It does complicate things, though. Undocumented workers, for example, typically take the work because they really need the dough and they can’t get it back home. I don’t want them left out in the cold, so to speak, either.
In my Utopia, society would care for all such blameless people, rather than letting them work themselves into an early grave through desperation.
I only buy expensive strawberries. The local strawberries that are probably picked with more expensive labor are much better than the cheap strawberries from across the country. The cheap strawberries really aren’t worth it. The expensive ones are a treat.
Some people look for “made in America”. I’m sure there is a market for “better paid workers”, the industry just needs a clear way to market and communicate that.
The quality of the fruit
The price of the fruit
The seasonality of the fruit (though it’s reflected in price & distance)
The distance the fruit travelled to get to the consumer
The way the business treats its workers
However, it usually requires investigative journalism to ferret out some of this information. My produce is clearly labelled as to country of origin, but that doesn’t help much with distance travelled: between 0 and several thousand miles.
Generally, I use price + quality as a proxy, and hope the government looks after the working conditions. Which it clearly doesn’t.
Got it. I would pay that premium as well, though I don’t recall seeing it anywhere. I’m sure that’s because I haven’t researched it, which I need to do.
If they pay by the bushel, then adding more workers would likely mean the wages per worker would go down. If the immigrants were just limited to farm work (e.g. open immigration for worker visas), then as the number of farm workers increased, the wages per worker would go down. If a farm has X bushels of produce and pays $Y per bushel, then they will pay a fixed $X*Y to the pickers. But if the number of pickers doubles or triples, the average wage each picker makes will be half or one third as before. The farm doesn’t really care how many people show up. At least with an hourly wage the worker knows that if they work a full day, they’ll get a full day’s wages. If there are lots and lots of workers, the wage would go no lower than the minimum wage of $7.25/hr. But if it’s just pay-per-bushel, then their daily income will vary based on how many people show up. If lots of people show up, then the equivalent wages from bushels could be well below $7.25/hr
Sure. $50 an hour will not quadruple the price. What it will do is put American growers out of business, so that we get somewhat more expensive and slightly less fresh imports.
Exactly.
We also value things like the idea of farm fresh produce, eating local, and keeping American farmers in business.
Exactly.
And here’s the thing.
The migrant farm works- only a minority of which are “illegal aliens”*- are happy picking strawberries for the pay offered (not that they’d say no to more). The debate over the ridiculous idea of paying them $50/hour is just a way to justify bigotry in immigration.
That’s what this thread is about American immigration policies. The bigots who rant about $50 an hour are just saying we dont need immigration.
But note that India and China are also major sources of undocumented (and legal) immigrants. And they do “take jobs from Americans”
Mexicans are the largest group of U.S. immigrants, comprising 24 percent of the total immigrant population in 2021, which is a decline from 30 percent in 2000. India and China (including Hong Kong and Macao but not Taiwan) were the next two largest sending countries, accounting for approximately 6 and 5 percent, respectively, of the overall foreign-born population. Other top countries of origin include the Philippines (4 percent); El Salvador, Vietnam, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic (each 3 percent); and Guatemala and Korea (each 2 percent).
But somehow, the bigots are only concerned with the Hispanic immigrants- and many of them are cheerfully doing jobs Americans dont want- maids, gardeners, Ag workers, etc.
If we are really concerned about Immigrants “taking our jobs” we’d get rid of H1B visas, and block immigration from Asia. But the bigots are not concerned with that in reality.
You can only have so many pickers at a time.
What people do and don’t buy is nowhere near as simple as that. Look at all the people who pay extra, often a great deal extra, for a specific name tag on their sneakers or their jeans. (Some of them, even when it’s made by effectively slave labor which gets a tiny fraction of the final purchaser’s cost for their pay.)
We have a society in which many people care more what they put on their ass than what they put in their mouths. But there are still people will pay extra for strawberries with better flavor, with better nutrition, or even that they don’t have to feel guilty about eating.
Some can’t afford to, of course. In large part that’s because we expect a very great deal of the actually essential work in this society to be done by people who aren’t paid enough to benefit from the results. That’s an overall problem. The only way in which it connects to immigration is that, if legal immigration is severely restricted, then there will be people working illegally – and people who are working illegally don’t dare complain about employers who break minimum wage laws, and/or employers who make a difficult job not only difficult but also actively unpleasant in ways in which it doesn’t need to be.
Actually, they probably do. In addition to limits on how much harvesting equipment etc. they have: the farmer(s) want good people to return, who will harvest fruit at the right degree of ripeness, not damage the plants, and so on. Those people won’t show up if they’re not going to find enough work to make it worth it.
I did a little bit of migrant picking, many years ago, while travelling around the country. The favored farms filled up first, and they most certainly did turn down more applicants once they had enough pickers to do the job.
Very true, but my point still stands. For each of these subsets of strawberries, more will be purchased the lower the price. This is a pretty indisputable economic law (with a few rare outliers, where certain prestige products are actually attractive because they’re expensive).
I agree. It’s very complex. If we could wave a magic wand and make produce harvesting wages high enough to attract Americans, while still making it an economically viable model—well, what about those poor bastards crossing the border because they really, really need the $$$? Their kids get hungry, too.
“But they’re being exploited.” Yes, they are! But the fact that they’ll be out of work probably would make that a small comfort.
I wish everyone—Americans, Mexicans, everyone—could be safe, well-fed, doing non-exploitative work that pays a good wage. I just don’t see any simple solutions, and I bristle when I see “solutions” like, “Just pay more to workers! Then Americans will fill the jobs!”
It’s complicated and heartbreaking.
How about this instead? Don’t pay the workers more. Rather, let the people who disproportionately fill those jobs more effectively advocate for their own rights, and exercise greater agency in job selection too, by giving them a relatively painless and permissive path towards legal status and citizenship (one might even say… an early 20th century path to citizenship).
Then, if they still want to be farm workers, they can. And if, as farm workers with legal status in this country, they still feel exploited, they can more easily advocate for themselves to end the “heartbreak” as you call it.
This “gosh, it’s such a ‘complicated and heartbreaking’ problem, but I just can’t see how we could possibly come up with a 100% perfect solution here in the next five minutes, so I guess we shouldn’t advocate for any kind of change at all and let everything keep on going the way it’s going” line of argument is most tiresome.
I’m not suggesting only higher wages. I’m suggesting changing the nature of the jobs, so that they’re not primarily done under terrible working conditions including doing only that one job all day long, poor housing, insufficient water, shade, windbreaks etc., and lack of societal respect.
And I’m suggesting letting people cross the border legally. Did you miss my saying this:
Part of the fix for this is allowing people to come in legally.
Economists and businesspeople often go on and on about “free trade”. It ain’t free trade if the workforce isn’t also free to move. (Or, of course, to stay put, if they’d rather. Some “fair trade” labels are genuinely supporting farmers on their own farms and/or other producers in workplaces they own or share ownership in. But unfortunately it’s necessary to check into the reputation of who’s providing the label.)
I think we three may be in violent agreement.
Not so - I present you the U Visa. It’s a drop in the bucket, and law enforcement REALLY needs to be better educated about it, but it’s a start and I’ve seen it work to get people green cards who would not have qualified any other way.
What percentage of those who apply for it actually get it? What happens to the ones who went through the application process but were denied? How long does the process take? How confident are crime victims who are here illegally that they’ll be able to get the U Visa before they get deported? How well publicized is it to the people who might need it? How likely is applying for it to cause someone else in the household to get deported?
Yeah, it’s better than nothing. But, as you say, a drop in the bucket.
Off the top of my head, I don’t know, but I do know that year after year there are more people seeking, even qualified for, a U visa than there are (very limited) quotas. If only the people who exploit and victimize such vulnerable populations (and the systems that enable such exploitation and victimization) were so restrained.
And, as you might guess, there are a lot of people who are likely qualified, but can’t find a suitable law enforcement official willing to certify them as a victim of a qualifying crime. It’s not just that law enforcement isn’t “aware” of U visas, it’s that they quite often don’t give a shit about so-called “illegals” and such.
Any attempt to distinguish “deserving” immigrants from the “undeserving” is an exercise in the propagation of racial and ethnic bias and, ultimately, the dehumanization of marginalized groups.