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Comment by tastyfreeze | Hacker News Reader

A judgment of fair payment is up to the employee and the employer not the nation as a whole.

Previously, farm workers believed it was fair to work 70 hours with no overtime compensation. Now the employer is prohibited from doing that pushing the required compensation above what he believed to be fair. Price fixing labor does not work.

Harvesting is a job that should be paid by produce harvested or job completion instead of hourly. But, that is illegal as well. If we keep making low rung jobs illegal there is no ladder for people to climb.

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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 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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…

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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).

> 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

Yeah.

The article points out one instance in a long, systemic conga line of instances where the regulators find the best option that people have and ban it. Yes, we have seen the middle class shrink. If you want the middle class to grow, people need to have freedom to take the best option available. If workers are paid more than the value they produce and there are policies that push people to work 40 hours a week when there are opportunities to work 70 then quality of life isn't going to go up.

A lot of the growth has gone to places that let people work [0] at wages you would probably call unfair. Those people are much better off than they were 50 years ago. They worked in hellish conditions and it turns out the theory is correct - after working very hard and saving their standards of living started to improve. That isn't possible without combinations of hard work and low consumption.

> I’m pretty sure the issue is a shift in the balance of power, moving it from labour to capital.

Then you're choosing a damn stupid strategy by advocating that people get paid more. You should be advocating that they have better opportunities to own and create capital. If labour is at a disadvantage, why encourage people to be labourers? The goal should be to make everyone a capitalist.

It is like those people who are proud of the wins of the union movement. Y'know, congratulations. They locked themselves into being the losing side of a losing game. If they'd been going for more legal support for co-ops and better access to capital there'd be less workers and more people'd be better off.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_China#Macroeconomic...

> policies that push people to work 40 hours a week when there are opportunities to work 70 then quality of life isn't going to go up.

Seems like we have very different definitions of quality of life, if you think working 70 hours/week is a path to it.

> You should be advocating that they have better opportunities to own and create capital. If labour is at a disadvantage, why encourage people to be labourers?

Because labour exists, and a world without it doesn’t. So someone will always be a labouror. All you’re advocating for is more little warlords, instead of a couple kings. Doesn’t sound better to me.

What happened to being "this rich a nation"? There isn't a reason to have one group called "labour" and one called "capital". The world could be all of one or all of the other. In the bad old days it was 100% labour. In the ideal future it is 100% capital. Capital is just more effective than labour, that is the reason why the capitalists end up having much more wealth. It isn't an exclusive club - everyone should be signing up.

That is the type of thinking that leads to stupid legislation like what the article is talking about. Rigid thinking in politics who can't imagine that a vegetable seeder could make a living any way except by going out, seeding vegetables and eventually ruining their bodies. The whole trick to improving their quality of life is finding better work for them to do or convincing them to take ownership of capital. They can't possibly secure a great lifestyle if they keep working as seeders. All the most straightforward scenarios that lead to a step change in their living standard are achieved by them not being seeders - automating the seeding process with them as owners of capital, or upskilling them so that they can find more productive work. Trying to convince the one person in the world who will give them the most money that they need to be payed more is a failed strategy that people have been trying for centuries now with effectively no success.

> Capital is just more effective than labour

At what? Capital doesn’t plant seeds, harvest crops, stock shelves, or cook meals.

In a world with perfect 100% automation, yeah - sure, everybody can be a capitalist. In the real world labour is absolutely necessary, and being a capitalist is just exploiting those people that do the actual real work.

Your suggestion that everybody should try to be a capitalist is saying everyone should fight like crabs in a bucket to be the top crab crushing all the other crabs. Good plan.

In the real world, these people work 70 hour work weeks and that is worth less than $30/hr. If the situation is going to change, it makes sense to change it in a direction that deals with the root cause.

> At what? Capital doesn’t plant seeds, harvest crops, stock shelves, or cook meals.

I'd happily put money on you being completely wrong in the sense that you mean, there are a lot of opportunities for automation now that the vision problem has been solved. And all of those things you list are very capital-intensive activities - farming is highly mechanised and relies on an industrial chemical pipeline. Shopping centres require a lot of capital to set up. Cooking is very capital intensive to if you look around a commercial kitchen.

> ...being a capitalist is just exploiting those people that do the actual real work...

How many people could survive on earth if all the capital disappeared? The trucking fleets alone disappearing would force mass starvation after about a week. There just isn't a way to move the food from farms to cities. Let alone all the other parts of the production chain.

The only difference between 2023 AD and 2023 BC humans is the vast accumulations of capital we have in the modern world. It is making a big difference.

> and being a capitalist is just exploiting those people that do the actual real work.

Connect the dots. What happens to the people doing the work if they are also capitalists?

> The only difference between 2023 AD and 2023 BC humans is the vast accumulations of capital we have in the modern world.

Lol whut? Unless you expand the definition of capital to include everything except labour, that’s wrong. Ideas and information are not capital, except maybe for brief periods of time while they are protected by legal systems to make them to act as capital. The periodic table of elements is not capital. It’s information. Democracy is not capital, it’s an idea.

Say all the capital disappears one day. It's magic. Poof, gone. What can you do that a human couldn't do in 2000BC? The answer you've given is sit around and discuss philosophy. Few people do that willingly.

All the knowledge is certainly important, but the practical reason for that is it is all knowledge of what type of capital we need, how to produce it and how to organise ourselves to produce it. Give people democracy, and note that they vote in capitalism.

Also, I note with a certain pedantry that you can't transfer complex knowledge without capital. A trivial amount of capital, but we still rely on recording the information on somewhere. In this information age the amount of capital used to record data has actually become quite substantial so the point is less pedantic than it once was.

Yes we can sit around discussing philosophy, while we take breaks re-building the semiconductor factory.

Ideas include stuff like “how semiconductors are made” which isn’t capital, unless you count the most recent still-patent-encumbered developments.

> Give people democracy, and note that they vote in capitalism.

And if they don’t, the CIA will make sure a happy little accident happens to the socialist they do vote in.

And yes, books or hard drives are sometimes considered capital. But unless you’re using the most broad definitions of capital, it’d be weird to consider books in a library, or other public institution, capital. It’d be weird to consider my hard drive full of scientific papers that I collected for fun, capital. Capital is stuff that’s used to earn money, not just “stuff”.

> It’d be weird to consider my hard drive full of scientific papers that I collected for fun, capital

Semiconductor plants are some of the most capital-intensive investments available though. To make chips cheap is, ironically, ruinously expensive. And the infrastructure of the internet isn't cheap either. Without those, it is actually pretty hard to see how that knowledge could be stored and replicated safely across time. Oral transmission is highly unreliable, really only hard disks and cables have sufficiently low marginal cost and high bitrate.

So I note that your hard drive of scientific papers was likely impossible in the 1950s and required some extremely substantial capital investments to make possible. Up until recently it was probably unrealistic for you to have that much knowledge on hand.

Even in the magic example, there is an open question of how to rebuild the semiconductor factory. Nobody actually knows, all the info had to be recorded. It isn't possible to take on most modern engineering projects without a lot of technological aids like pens, paper, hard disk and microprocessors.

It is easy to overlook just how fragile humans are, from an economic perspective a human without capital is more or less useless.

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.

> A judgment of fair payment is up to the employee and the employer not the nation as a whole.

Only true when it's two people of similar wealth and circumstances bargaining over how much one will pay for the other's labor.

If you just cringed over how much less leverage the employer would have in that scenario—yeah, exactly.

If a farmer doesn't harvest they don't get paid, ignoring crop insurance. The farmer literally has no choice but to hire employees to help harvest. The employees in this scenario have all the leverage. But, they can only negotiate their wage up to a point where the farmer's livelihood is sacrificed. Its not like farmers are making orders of magnitude more than the people they employ to help harvest. This isn't the proletariat vs the bourgeoisie. This is people, all technically proletariat, making an arrangement that they all benefit from (free market dynamics).

You are ignoring a lot about the situation of the workers, to reach these conclusions, and implying that they have so much leverage they're able to capture all the value of their labor:

> The employees in this scenario have all the leverage. But, they can only negotiate their wage up to a point where the farmer's livelihood is sacrificed

—save a tiny sliver that the farm owner is lucky to manage to get.

And this:

> Its not like farmers are making orders of magnitude more than the people they employ to help harvest

Consider the immense capital value required to have a farm of large enough scale to even halfway succeed in 2023. Some extremely poor decisions have been made if they're really not making a lot more than a migrant worker on their farm.

This is... fantasy-land topsy-turvy-world stuff.

You might have a point if the laborers were bargaining as a bloc, had captured ~all the available labor into that bloc, and had a substantial cash reserve for strike-pay. Short of that, this is all totally backwards.

Large capital requirement doesn't mean large profitability for the farmer.

You are making at least as many assumptions as I am. What I don't understand is why you would assume that a person that says they prefer the 70 hour week with no overtime doesn't know what is best for themselves. They kept coming back to harvest for Schreiber for decades. People don't do that if they are treated unfairly.

From the article Mendoza was taking home up to $1,400 a week for the 6-8 week harvest period ($8,400 - $11,200). I would say that is not bad for 2 months work.

If you aren't beating a savings account with your business then you shouldn't be in business, that simple.

From that, anyone running a multimillion a dollar a year farm should be doing very well or they should give up and let the market work properly instead of suckling on the teat of government.

And yes, that means higher food prices. Every single person refusing to pay fair prices is the problem, and that's darn near everyone.

Most employees don’t negotiate on equal terms with their employers in any industry anywhere in the world, yet some people are happy with their wages and workload.

> A judgment of fair payment is up to the employee and the employer not the nation as a whole.

It's fascinating seeing an entire generation forget why labour unions came to exist in the first place...

> Harvesting is a job that should be paid by produce harvested or job completion instead of hourly. But, that is illegal as well.

Is it? Even if that's true for hired workers, presumably Schreiber, the guy who owns Schreiber Farms, does get paid based on production.

> If we keep making low rung jobs illegal there is no ladder for people to climb.

What ladder are you referring to in your counterfactual?

Why on earth would it be illegal to pay people by lbs of produce at harvesting. You have to pay them at least minimum wage (including minimum wage at 1.5x after overtime hours kick in), but you can pay them the maximum of minimum wage -or- lbs of produce.

Not only is it possible, it's common: https://www.croptracker.com/blog/farm-labour-should-i-pay-my...

That is true only in a free market, which labor is not. Employers have far more bargaining power than any individual looking to sell their labor. To say workers thought it was fair to work "70 hours with no overtime compensation" is delusional. It was the best deal they could accept given the material reality of their conditions.

Do the employees agree it's fair or are they desperate, in a survival mentality, and they take whatever they can get?

It's far-fetched to think a farm worker is going to ascend to a higher income. There is no ladder when you're making less than subsistence.

Does it matter which it is? They agreed to do the job for the compensation that was offered because it was better than something else. This nation was built by immigrants that came here with nothing and worked their asses off to improve their family circumstance. How many generations ago did your family move here? How did the first US generation of your family work and live? Where is your family now? That path has to remain open. Labor laws handed down from on high have been progressively making it more difficult to start from nothing and become something.

Like many in the country, my great grandparents moved to the US with essentially nothing, not speaking much, if any, English. They worked as farmers with lots of children to get the work done. Nobody in my family are currently farmers. Many in my current family generation work high paying jobs, many don't. I am not saying that farming is a bad job. It is necessary. Just illustrating that the possibility, not guarantee, of upward mobility is what makes this country great.

You’re describing a pyramid scheme.

No I am describing the growth of wealth and improvement of society over time. The pie isn't a fixed size. It grows with how much we produce. The more we produce the more there is to go around. Consuming more than we produce shrinks the pie.

There will always be people at the top and people at the bottom of any specific hierarchy. It is not possible to shape a society where all are equal in all ways. There is too much variability in human personality and ability for that to ever be possible. The best we can do is make it possible for all to achieve what their ambition and ability allow while preventing anybody from stopping others from doing the same. We have that now.

I’m not asking for total equality. But the premise that people need to live in poverty and work their life away in increments of 70 hour weeks at a time all so my asparagus is $4/lb not $5/lb, is disgusting.

And the premise that we need them to suffer in poverty because their kids might have a shot at a life just above poverty, doesn’t make it better.

We have enough wealth that nobody has to work 70hrs/week. Yet we insist on imposing that, for fear of making our wealthiest slightly less wealthy.

You seem angry. It also sounds like you have never worked seasonal work. I believe you have made a critical error assuming this is the only work they have. They are being paid well for the job compared to other listings. When that job is done they move on to another.

You are also assuming that they are suffering. What do you base this assumption on? Seasonal workers I have met and talked to are generally happy, easy going people. They are not being exploited that is something you read that isn't there.

> A judgment of fair payment is up to the employee and the employer not the nation as a whole.

That's not quite true. We have antitrust laws, minimum wages and other things designed to make a more even field for employment relationships.

> Harvesting is a job that should be paid by produce harvested or job completion instead of hourly.

Or not. Opinions differ on this point.

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