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Comment by csdrane | Hacker News Reader

Or they could, you know, offer higher wages.

Picking fruit and vegetables has always been peasant and serf work. The market has never once said, 'you should be paid more,' because there always is an underclass and even if you paid triple what you pay now it'd be the same class of people working the job. The problem is every American thinks he's too good to be at the bottom of the barrel these days.

If it's a comparison between getting crap pay at McDonalds and getting crap pay in the hot sun all day, then there is no comparison.

I've never worked at a McDonalds, but I've done my time out in the hot sun and honestly when I look at these poor bastards standing in front of a pot of boiling grease all day I wonder if I wouldn't go back to the farm.

Unless the work was picking onions or strawberries or some other crop which involves spending all day in a terrible bent-over posture. If the pay was the same, though, I'd rather spend the day harvesting apples than spend it making burgers for assholes.

I'd rather pick fruit for minimum wage than operate an industrial dishwasher for minimum wage. It won't be 90-something degrees and 90-something percent humidity every day on the farm. It's a toss-up which is worse, the dish-room or the grill.

The worst case is about the same. The average day is better picking fruit.

Farm work tends to be structured as piece work in California. Workers are paid by the flat or bushel or even individual item.

Also, one nice aspect of getting humans out of the fields is that large numbers of human workers (at least) won't be exposed to pesticides.

Ive done both and i much prefer McDonalds, theres just more in common between McDonalds workers than the people working on farms who can be sketchy or not even speak English and the kind of work at McDonaldd doesnt mean you are constantly utilized whereas in farming u are pretty much physically exhausted by halfway

The underclass is economically coerced. People with options aren't rejecting it because of status, but because it is extremely unpleasant work.

Statements like this, that allege some group is being victimized, makes scapegoats out of those with more resources.

Yes we're all "economically coerced", by the need to produce economic resources in order to consume economic resources.

It's like Bastiat said 160 years ago:

"Man recoils from trouble - from suffering; and yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others."

That is just another factor of the desirability of the job that impacts how much one needs to pay to find enough employees. Other factors also involve where the jobs are located (if you are in the middle of nowhere, even with much cheaper costs of living, you may need to pay significantly more to convince someone with the desired skills to move to the middle of nowhere) and the long term potential (really good work that only lasts for a short time may not be worth moving for unless it pays significantly more).

It's not that simple with farming, unfortunately. Worker pay is necessarily based on individual productivity, which can only increase so much [0]. Margins are razor thin for producers to begin with. The vast majority of profits are captured by the manufacturing and distribution. This is why the IRS taxes farm workers and farm employers differently from any other kind of commercial activity.

http://nfwm.org/education-center/farm-worker-issues/low-wage... [0]

Sounds like prices need to rise then in order to compensate labor enough to do the job in the first place.

Or robots, I guess.

At least in theory, once the loss due to lack of sufficient number of workers exceeds the cost of raising the wages they should go up and at the cost of margins or increased prices. This should offer nobody a competitive advantage because every farm is likely facing the same issue.

Sadly employers behave like raising wages was not even an option. I guess that's human nature - money going from you pocket is a more tangible expense/loss than money not going into your pocket due to lost profits/opportunity.

Why should farm work be immune to cost disease when nothing else is?

Alternatively, why should you believe cost disease applies to other work when it doesn't apply to farm work?

>Why should farm work be immune to cost disease when nothing else is?

This is the heart of the matter. Humans have to eat. It's fundamentally different than any other market.

We don't actually have to eat large amounts of cheap produce though.

(farm labor is overwhelmingly concentrated in harvesting produce)

Political lobbying and in the USA's case the way the agricultural sates have representation far in excess of their population when compared to the metro areas

They mention this in the article. The wages that the growers are willing to pay aren't capturing the interest of the locals or even the immigrant workers (since they have comparable jobs back home).

It's worth it to them to invest in tech rather than continue to pay higher wages.

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