They need to raise their wages, pay what it really costs for labor.
And as a bonus, the increased costs will provide an incentive for future automation.
Even if you multiply the cost by 5 to cover markup as it goes through the chain (of distribution), you have... $2.50 going to $2.75, or ten percent more at retail. Not shocking.
I think everyone would prefer that.. but this is a problem the farmers created themselves. They've been using migrants for so long, that they've created a substantial difference in pay between themselves and the rest of the labor market. And with a sudden change in the supply of migrants, they're now trying to figure out what that difference is--what the true cost of labor is for their industry.
If they never relied on migrants, they would already know the answer to this question.
How do you explain why its so much cheaper to buy quality food in European countries?
When I am in France or Austria, quality butter, eggs, fresh egg pasta, salami, and milk are all very inexpensive. Quality cultured butter in the US is especially expensive. (Mache in the US is also extremely expensive compared to France but that's a demand thing afaik. I don't remember the price diff of spinach.) Even Switzerland had better prices than the US when I was there for quality animal products.
(It has probably been a few years, but the point stands: the cost of labor is a small portion of the cost of food.)
Some of smaller organic farms don't hire external workers for labor. They are more expensive, but not that much more expensive.
That being said, due to the currency leveraging, many central American economies, cultures, and peoples have suffered from the illegal immigration as well.
In addition, higher prices might make us less wasteful. What is it, 30% of food ends up in the rubbish bin?
Slow rises are fine, the economy will adjust, fast rises, say from eliminating a large portion of the workforce at once, will cause much more disturbances in the economy.
It's also hard to recruit workers to a gig that's temporary and seasonal. That can maybe be made up for in wages though.
I'm also curious about where the labor is required. Corn/wheat is mostly a machine based harvest, I assume there are few migrant workers there but I don't know. Is there analysis on where migrants end up on the value chain of farm products?
Also, while there's some talk of undocumented immigrants, I think there's also a legal seasonal-labor system in the US. Trump famously uses it to staff Mar-a-lago. How many migrant farm workers are under that system?
If you consider the existence of human labor undesirable then automation is always good.
If you consider jobs the end-goal of human existence then automation is always bad.
In all likelihood you're somewhere in between those, and whether automation is good or not depends on external factors. GP seems to lean more towards the "human labor is bad" side.
The migrant workers were that automation. Farmers got the same labor for less cost that return many multiples the value to customers.
It's an inconvenient truth of the scaled up agriculture that produces food for us city folk.
Many European countries have formal guest-worker programs. A big consequence of the EU is easier guest-worker access and better working conditions.
The reason the USA immigration hassle never gets solved by congresscritters is this: it's convenient economically to have an underclass of workers with few rights and no recourse for mistreatment. Congresscritters have to say they're TRYING to solve the problem or they appear to be amoral. But they can't actually solve the problem without antagonizing the 1% who pay their re-election campaign bills. So the issue is a perennial theme of chin music. Both major US parties do this.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/despite-economy-americans-dont-...
Most americans are unwilling to work on farms, even at the heights of the recent recession.
No sane person with any other options would take that trade
at the wages offered by farm owners!!! This is very similar to arguments trotted out in support of shitty H1B jobs. You want workers for your jobs? Increase the wages. Increased wages will make you raise the prices for your customers? Do so, or find the efficiencies in your business. Increased wages might drive consumers to produce grown in foreign countries? Have appropriate trade agreements protecting vital industries like agriculture, similar to what we have for defense (and after all, trade agreements are not a suicide pact (TM)).
Possibly, but it may also depend on how much the current political climate could have been foreseen. The reality is that it's been the status quo for decades, and there's been clemency for illegal immigrants that grants citizenship in the past.
Ultimately while it ended up being a bad decision, it might have been one that was considered an extremely safe one until everything changed. Sort of like buying a car with the assumption you'll still have a job next year. If you needed a car then it might have been good decision until all of a sudden it really wasn't.
This is an area for regulation (no one raised an eye when they got cheap labor) and economic incentives (NAFTA f'd over Central American economies, commodities market manipulation causes prices to skyrocket in developing markets - both causing mass migrations).
The US administration seems to believe that our economic growth was cash constrained, hence the massive corporate tax cut. But for many industries growth is labor constrained.
[1] Colloquial phrase for Central American human traffickers.
I'm not going to point fingers at anyone, but corporate cash levels were already hitting records before the tax cuts passed and money was already available at record-low interest rates. Anyone who thought our companies were cash-constrained was intentionally not paying attention.
>Alabama’s Failed Anti-Immigration Law The state's experiment in "self-deportation" reveals what might happen if the US sent 11 million undocumented workers home.
[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8gk7nx/what-alabamas-fail...]
Come on. Vice documentaries are entertainment at best. I've enjoyed a couple of them myself but I would never use them to prop up my political arguments.
”For a typical household, a 40 percent increase in farm labor costs translates into a 3.6 percent increase in retail prices. If farm wages rose 40 percent, and this wage increase were passed on to consumers, average spending on fresh fruits and vegetables would rise about $15 a year, the cost of two movie tickets. However, for a typical seasonal farm worker, a 40 percent wage increase could raise earnings from $10,000 for 1,000 hours of work to $14,000 — lifting the wage above the federal poverty line.”
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/08/17/could-farms...
Hey I am not going to feel bad, that McDonald does not have a Dollar Menu any more. May be the market forces are the right medicine for the "obesity" problems America is facing.
Heres a link: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/05/27/136718112...
In Kathy Lohr's report, she spoke to R.T. Stanley Jr., a farmer who says he can't hire locals to do the job:
Stanley says experienced workers can earn as much as $200 a day. He says he's tried to hire locals to do the job — working in the fields eight hours or more clipping, bending and lifting in the oppressive Georgia heat.
"They just don't want to do this hard work. And they'll tell you right quick," he says. "I have 'em to come out and work for two hours and they said, 'I'm not doing this. It's too hard.' "
For Stanley, finding workers is already tough enough and he says the new restrictions are likely to make it worse.
"I got my livelihood on the line," he says. "If I don't harvest these onions, I'll lose my farm."
So first of all let's be honest about that $200 a day figure, they're being paid by how much they harvest. $200 a day is basically never going to happen, it's a dream figure, no onion farmer in america is paying $200/day to pick onions.
In fact at Stanley's Farm you're going to be making a whole lot less than that, from 2013:
The plaintiffs say Stanley Farms paid them less than minimum wage over the last three years and illegally cut their wages. The plaintiffs said they also worked alongside pickers who had work permits and who were paid more money than what American workers received
“We see this repeatedly,” said plaintiff’s attorney Dawson Morton. “Farms complain that no local workers are available. But when they do hire local workers, they don’t pay them fairly and don’t offer them the same pay as their foreign workers. It’s illegal and discourages American workers from continuing in agriculture.”
The suit claims the workers were paid 40 cents for each 5-gallon bucket of onions picked, while foreign workers received more than $9 a hour. Workers also had to purchase work tools from the company, the suit says.
http://www.ajc.com/business/vidalia-onion-workers-sue-georgi...
$0.40 for a 5-gallon bucket, so to get to that $200 figure you only need to pick... 2,500 lbs of onions! Every day! Easy!
And then later in 2014:
A judge on Monday approved the agreement. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution states that Stanley Farms agreed to pay $92,500, with $82,500 going to back wages and damages and $10,000 going to attorney’s fees and costs. The company also agreed to follow specific hiring and employment practices that were outlined in the agreement.
“We’re pleased with the resolution reached, and we’re pleased that the farm is agreeing to pay U.S. and foreign workers the same amount, which we don’t believe they were doing,” said Dawson Morton, a lawyer for the workers. “That should reduce the exclusion of U.S. workers from Vidalia onion work and we hope assure equal treatment and equal pay.”
The American workers and their former co-workers filed a lawsuit last year that claimed that American farmworkers were paid less than the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour while foreign guest workers were paid between $9.11 and $9.38 an hour.
https://www.andnowuknow.com/shop-talk/stanley-farms-pay-over...
That same articles states that they now follow certain guidelines like making sure there are enough seats for workers on transportation, that the transportation is properly inspected and insured, that workers can't go into fields until at least 24 hours after application of certain chemicals and that they'll provide tools.
So what kind of farm was Stanley actually running when that article was written? Well it's obvious he was paying less than minimum wage to americans and more to illegal immigrants so that he could have an all immigrant workforce so that he could skimp on labor protections. And after doing this for years and years he settles for less than $100,000. This is the problem with american farming. If Mr. Staley had ever actually tried paying americans $200/day and had provided a safe work environment I'm sure workers would have been lined up. It's a pervasive lie that americans won't do farm work for good wages.
(I come from a family of farmers... going up my family tree there are been nothing but farmers)
Since the job doesn't require any specialization (which could take years to master and thus might cause a shortage), it should be easy to fill such positions from the large unemployment pool if employers started paying more to compensate for the missing Mexicans.
But it's only a shortage of people willing to do the work at shitty prices.
I'm not so sure there is any great shortage of willing workers at the moment but it may be a problem in the future once free-movement comes to an end?
As has been mentioned about the US above, there is this myth, propagated by the media, that natives aren't interested, are too lazy and so on...
Truth is that farmers have gotten away with exploiting cheap labour and they don't want it to end. You try getting a job today, as a UK native, picking vegetables and you'll likely face a brick wall.
We didn't have any problems before when people could do casual seasonal work for a fair days pay. When the source of cheap labour dries up we'll likely go back to not having problems. Just a few fat farmers will be slightly miffed about it.
So it seems very much to be an issue pre-Brexit.
Somehow the hn title manages to put the blame with the Mexicans.