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Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

...yes? The alternative to farmers is not harvesting their crops at all, since with the borders closed foreign labor is not available.

If nobody wants to buy $10 doritos, that means the product can't exist in a market without cheap labor.

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Well perhaps that's the problem of the market. That it can't particularly function to enrich some people without gross levels of exploitation.

Being paid $5/hour farming in Australia vs $0.50/hour assembling shoes in Malaysia. Wow, such exploitation.

"Exploitation" is a relative term, some people would rather be exploited in the countryside of a first-world nation rather than the countryside of their homeland.

Yes, they are both exploitation and they are both evil.

Which is more exploitative, working for $5/hour in agriculture in a wealthy country, 50¢/hour in an urban factory in a poor country, or $1/day in a rural peasant village somewhere or having no work at all?

It’s all relative.

That's a bit like asking, "Which is worse? A shot to the head or an overdose of morphine?" Either way the person's going to die.

> Being paid $5/hour farming in Australia vs $0.50/hour assembling shoes in Malaysia. Wow, such exploitation.

The Australian national minimum wage is $19.84/hr.

Getting paid about a quarter of minimum wage is very clearly exploitation. There may be other benefits for actually working in Australia, but that's not really relevant here when you're trying to attract native Australians to work for you.

In particular, when the wage is low enough you have slavery in all but name. People working for your shitty pay staying in your shitty dormitory eating your shitty food because they can't afford not. The end result people leaving when visas run out with more debt, and headlines about people forced to pick fruit in bikinis and allegations of sexual assault, because that happens when some people gain that sort of power.

To me it always seemed a bit similar to justifications used for the "peculiar institution" - the system can't exist without slavery, therefore slavery must exist. The benefits of cheaper labor was well appreciated; Carnegie called immigration "the golden stream which flows into the country every year."[1]

[1]https://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/andrew-carnegie/trium...

Doritos aren't going to get more expensive, because like all the real staple crops, corn is completely mechanized, and you have one guy driving an air-conditioned tractor or combine, following GPS-plotted courses.

True! Except it's not just doritos, it's everything you eat.

And it's not just cheap labor, it's labor exploited under pain of deportation.

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