Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job | Hacker News Reader

Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

latimes.com

131 pointshrshtr217 comments

I work at the LA Times and conducted the data analysis of wages included in this story. We published all the code behind it on GitHub. AMA. https://github.com/datadesk/california-crop-production-wages...

Wow, amazingly transparent data. LA times deserves a bookmark and subscription (if they have one) from one

Great work guys at LA Times! That is very transparent.

Thanks. The Jupyter Notebook technology is great for us. It's nice that it helps us be transparent, and it's even better that it helps us keep our analysis readable, sharable and organized when it's in development.

palrewire, it would be great to have the notebook hosted on http://notebooks.azure.com so people can run it. thx.

Thanks for passing this along. It's very interesting. I just gave it a go with a hefty SQL import to test its power. My database connection string to Amazon RDS, which works locally on my computer, failed. Any idea why?

When I was younger, I worked at a McDonalds in SoCal. Almost all the employees were white teenagers. The managers were white as well. We didn't make much, just a bit above minimum wage, but we were all mostly high-school students or college students working in the summer to pay tuition.

This went on until around 1984 or so, when it became much harder to hire this demographic. It wasn't as cool to work at fast food, and the area was becoming more affluent.

Fast forward five years, and 99% of the staff was now Hispanic, including several illegal immigrants. The restaurant had to do what it could to make money and stay in biz.

I don't know how high wages would have to be to attract the previous demographic to that type of work. The area is far more affluent than when I was growing up, and house prices start at over $700K and go higher easily.

I do think something is missing though when kids don't learn what it's like to hold a retail type job dealing with the public. You learn hard work, humility, and often an appreciation for higher education.

There are plenty of white teenagers who work at every In-N-Out I've ever been to--because they pay better. Otherwise those kids, in nicer areas like you point to, have better alternatives for minimum wage like retail. The reason the jobs you describe are being replaced by immigrants is because the wages have been stagnant or not kept up with inflation. Unskilled immigrants take labor jobs that Americans aren't really willing to do, like being a janitor or emptying septic tanks or pouring concrete in Bakersfield.

To the parent's point, it's probably generally considered slightly 'cooler' to work at In-N-Out than at McDonald's. In-N-Out certainly seems to be trendier amongst young people than most other fast food restaurants.

Anecdotally, it seems that as general affluence within a community rises, so does the value placed on social standing. So your compensation package has to cover increased lifestyle expenses, adjusted for the position's impact on your status in the community.

If wages stagnated, but somehow McDonald's just kept getting trendier, I expect they would retain more of their original demographic than if McDonald's was increasingly seen as a place that only employs losers and morons.

Where I live in SF, there is a coffee shop owner who hires your regular high school/college student, next door there is a grocery store which mostly hires spanish speakers. One seems to make the choice to hire young kids, the other hires cheap labor.

Agreed. When In-N-Out opened up near our franchise, the managers were in a panic because they were paying 75% higher hourly rates not to mention what they paid their managers.

Plus, fast-food jobs developed a stigma as loser/dead-end jobs. Teenagers needed spending money, but not at the cost of being "uncool."

In n Out pays $11-$12/he with good benefits - much more than McD. McDonalds are also franchises so the individual owners are much more concerned with weekly cash flow than corporate In N Out who can decide to invest in higher wages for lower turnover and better staff which are longer term investments.

Minimum wage in that era had much stronger purchasing power. 1980 saw its decline.

https://oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth484/minwage.html

Wages saw a decline since the 1980s. Minimum wage just as well as almost any other. Hell, by a reasonable PCE measure, even the president is making substantially less.

The government has of course solved this problem.

One, the actual amounts didn't go down, they simply didn't keep pace with inflation. And as actual measures (ie. "Big Mac index" type indices) kept going down, they were systematically removed from tracking by the FED. So the government can claim that they didn't in fact go down by a factor of 3.

In reality nobody has lost any wages you see, and the fact that a fast food worker's (esp. immigrant ones) "apartment" (room is a more apt description generally) today is tiny, looks barren and has absolutely nothing in it worth anything, or the issue that their cars are invariably beaters. Well that was the case for lowest-level jobs in the 1980s as well, wasn't it ?

Wait ... no it wasn't. First of all, they owned houses and cars.

But you see, according to the fed's measures of inflation everything is about the same. And of course it is. You see, people today only use about a third of the housing as people of the 1980s. That must be because people now ... euhm ... are about 1/3rd the size of back then ? They also only use 1/3rd transport (fuel, public transport, ...) ... now there's some small justification for that, as a gallon of gasoline goes a lot further now, but still.

This change occurred in my town as well at about the same time. How do you know you are getting cause and effect right? I always assumed that after the amnesty in the first Bush administration it was just easier/cheaper/better attitude to get mexicans and the restaurants stopped hiring the high school kids. I don't think those jobs were ever considered cool for the high school kids but money is useful

> I always assumed that after the amnesty in the first Bush administration

A minor nitpick, but you are probably referring to the amnesty component of the 1986 immigration reform law, which was during the Reagan Administration, not the first Bush Administration.

Thanks

Well, having worked there, and knowing how racist the owners/upper mgmt were, they would have preferred to hire only whites. Any productivity gains by hiring immigrants who "might" have worked harder were lost at least initially with communication issues until we had enough Spanish speakers to make things operate smoothly. And while we did have a few slacker white kids who just wanted an easy paycheck, I can't say that was true of the majority of white teens we employed.

Nothing helped me appreciate education and hard work like working as a produce clerk at a second rate grocery store, seeing day in, day out, the same customers buying the same horrible processed foods, and the same burnout co-workers showing up stoned out of their minds to deal with the shit jobs they work to afford their weed to help them deal with their shit jobs.

Taught me more about life than any class or book ever could.

Here I am working for one poorly run tech company after another, jumping to the next as they die, hoping my salary won't go down as cost of living goes up, dealing with the same kludgy tools and frameworks and short sighted management.

That degree and hard work got me more money. The rest is all the same

Any insight into what does In n' Out does differently? They seem to continue to attract that demographic.

One key factor is that they require English fluency, since every employee is in a position to be customer-facing.

The progression with most other fast food chains in CA was that once you start hiring employees who don't speak English, then you have to have all shift managers be Spanish-speaking, leaving no upward path for line employees who aren't bilingual. Before long, most of the kitchen crew is non-English-speaking.

They don't have franchises like the other chains. That is also why their rollout seems slow. This means the boss is the company, not a franchisee who will have their own way of doing things. They then make a reasonable effort of benefits for their employees: http://www.in-n-out.com/employment/restaurant.aspx

There rollouts are also slower for a couple reasons:

- every In-N-Out must be within 500 miles of a beef distribution center [1]

- In-N-Out tries to buy it's land [2]

My impression is that they grow the business from cash flow, not debt, and they move slowly so they can keep up quality. They are a privately held company, so hard to verify some information.

[1] http://www.ocregister.com/articles/accelerates-291670-expans...

[2] http://www.innoutrealestate.com/

  They don't have franchises like the other chains.

I don't think that's a factor. Both corporate-owned stores and franchisees use the same employee demographics, generally. Sometimes you'll find a franchisee who is an immigrant from outside the Americas and find a lot of family members and their friends making up the crew. (For example, there's a local Taco Bell that has more South-Asian employees than not.)

The franchising is a factor because franchisees have latitude in setting their own policies for employees. eg one franchisee could offer education credits while another doesn't. Or one could pay more than another, beyond just local circumstances.

Do affluent teenagers care about benefits although when their parents very likely have benefits for them already?

My fellow teens only cared about how much money they made, if the uniforms made them look like idiots to the opposite sex, and what their schedule was.

Elsewhere in the States, Panera, Starbucks, Chick fil-A, Tropical Smoothie, and likely some others tend to have staff that fits the same visual archetype.

Some of it is likely due to "organic" stratification and segregation of society, which is a less-nice way of saying people keep to their own circles. Some of it may be deliberate discrimination due to factors such as attractiveness and access to resources, often obscured by information asymmetry in the hiring process. Some of it may be that these businesses tend to be located in more prosperous areas that are both distant and difficult to access to by people who lack reliable transportation.

Several of these factors, while alone may not be significant, can occur together to striking effect.

I would love to know what exactly it is Chic-fil-a does. Right now I less than a block from one, but it's all chipper teenagers and, yes, mostly white. This is despite the fact that the neighborhood I live in is majority black, and lower income. I have neighbors who work at McDonalds, but not Chic-fil-a. I can't imagine Chic-fil-a outright discriminates, but every one I visit has polite, probably affluent, teens.

In my experience, there are many black employees at fast food places in Oakland and southeastern S.F. (Bayview).

What does Starbucks pay? Or are their employees just naturally unhappy, if not grumpy?

Also, to piggyback: does anyone know if In-N-Out has a Disney-type dress/grooming code? Every time I go (about once a year, so I'm a bit fuzzy) I get the impression that everyone is cleancut.

~1984 was around the time of the explosion of malls, so there were a lot more non-food jobs for teens after that.

I'm not in the states, but if I had a high school age kid I think I'd do anything I could to get them a better summer job than McD's. The money isn't the point - they're going to end up competing with adults for real jobs at some point, and the more high quality items they can get on a resume, the better their chances. Middle class kids legit can't afford to work in fast food because they need to spend their school years doing something more valuable than that.

I would probably advise my kids to shadow a tradesman, volunteer at a hospital or for a political campaign, plant trees, lead at a summer camp, or any other thing that will lead to better opportunities than fast food. Even working in a high end restaurant would be better.

>Middle class kids legit can't afford to work in fast food because they need to spend their school years doing something more valuable than that.

I agree fully. Especially once you get to college, you need to start looking for internships and having more things on your resume makes you that more competitive.

it's better to let teenagers invest in future job skills than past job skills. Sure grape picking would build character, resourcefulness, obedience to bosses and teamwork, but it's got no future. Same thing with fast food jobs.

Knowing how to show up on time, follow instructions, and be polite to customers is a future job skill.

Interpersonal skills are future job skills.

Technical skills are only useful if they command a salary lucrative enough to live on but not so lucrative that you find yourself on the automation chopping block.

Non-cognitive skills like those are very important. I've seen a few papers lately that show that it's more valuable to long-term earning to learn non-cognitive skills than cognitive skills in a child's early years.

http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/16164/1/16164.pdf

Working in fast food means responsibility and planning: time clock, rules, clean uniform, proper shoes, standards for behavior, etc. Some millenials aren't held to such basic standards elsewhere in life yet.

I didn't grow up in the US, but is this because parenting changed around this time ? Where I grew up, we would hear stories about kids in the US leaving their homes at 15 and trying to figure things out. But when I moved here, i have never seen it. All the families I know take good care of their kids throughout college and even after. So there is no need for them to work at low paying fast food jobs. Their parents can cover their expenses. Savvier parents are even investing their kids future by helping them build startups, participating in hackathons etc. Far cry from a job at McDonad's.

Given your description of folks here in the US (which is positive and flattering) I think you're overlooking most of the population of the country, for which your description of college or building startups is not true.

I was referring specifically to what OP was hinting at - changing demographic at fast food stores in wealthy areas.

Well, really the seem to be talking about an area that became more wealthy, right?

  we would hear stories about kids in the US leaving their homes at 15 and trying to figure things out

I think that's a pre-WW2 concept at best. With the advent of child labor laws, a child has restraints on numbers of hours and time of day, especially during the school year.

When I was 16, we needed school-issued Work Permits to work at all and were limited to 4 hour shifts on "school nights" with a 10PM limit.

In Australia McDonalds are still generally staffed by young teens, not immigrants, and often white. This is because there are lower minimum wages for minors (staggered by age).

I think this is a matter of costs (wages) and not much else.

My impression is that a similar issue occurred in the military a few years later.

What jobs did the teens from affluent families get instead of fast food service?

> What jobs did the teens from affluent families get instead of fast food service?

Probably either none or things (paid or not) connected with their career plans and aspirations, often through personal networks jump started from their parents networks. Same as teens and young adults from affluent families now.

Not the OP, but likely many of them didn't get jobs at all because they didn't need to.

Gotta get those extracurriculars and community service that colleges look for on top of getting good grades.

"It wasn't as cool to work at fast food, and the area was becoming more affluent."

If you walk into a 7-11 in Scandinavia (yes, they have some there) - esp. in a small town - you'll sometimes see a drop-dead '10' Swedish model working behind the counter.

Why? Because 'it's normal' for people to do such jobs - as you say - 'when you were young' it was normal.

When those jobs are done by non-citizens, especially of a different ethnicity, then there is a 'stigma' associated with that work, and the social value drops quite a lot.

The notion that 'the area became more affluent' and kids wouldn't do those jobs is a total misrepresentation of reality.

A) If the social context didn't change, then kids would do those jobs.

B) 'They had to hire illegal migrants' is again another lie. As the area becomes more wealthy - guess what - wages are supposed to rise. Yes, that means the price of burgers should rise a little bit as well. But it's again, a total misrepresentation, borderline lie to imply that the 'only way to have service workers is to hire illegal workers'. This is beyond false.

The anecdote you described provides the fundamental basis for the rise of inequality in America.

The notion that 'illegal workers' must be used to support economic activity is obviously unfeasible in the long-term, that somehow growth depends on a class of workers who'll work below the real prevailing wage - and who cannot organize, collect social security, healthcare etc.

No - it's completely upside down.

There are so many places in the world where 'regular kids' continue to work at McDonald's. Wages and benefits are higher, and there is no real social stigma. (Of course, working at McD's is never going to be considered a choice job, but you did it :) )

"I do think something is missing though when kids don't learn what it's like to hold a retail type job dealing with the public."

Yes - I fully agree. Been there.

But a bifurcated society creates stigma and deep 'social class signalling' in these jobs and it destroys the social compact.

Imagine this for a moment: that Obama or Trump gives all illegal migrants instant citizenship with full rights, healthcare, the right to organize labour, social security.

Then guess what happens by the 'illegals are necessary economic logic': McDonald's has to 'fire the new citizens' and 'hire actual, new illegals'!

It's a destructive, unsustainable Ponzi scheme.

Local wages should rise until the jobs are filled.

Some farming jobs just won't work out - those crops can be grown elsewhere.

Yes - we need to treat people with humanity and dignity and there'll always be some people who 'fall through the cracks' - but the systematic importation of illegal workers on a large scale is inhuman.

I am appalled by the casual sexism and racism of the parent comment. "esp. in a small town - you'll sometimes see a drop-dead '10' Swedish model working behind the counter" --> Is it okay to refer to a person by a sexist score? Does the HN community condones this and at the same time rally against sexual harassment at statups? How is this comment not dead yet?

There is no mention of gender or race in the parent comment. Here is only your opinion implying only females can be models and that being an illegal immigrant is somehow tied to a race.

I think in Sweden, were this has been changing in big cities in recent years, it's mostly because you can't support yourself in many areas on a 7-11 salary anymore. If you can't get an apartment you can't stay in the area, so there's no young temporary workforce left and people with options aren't going to commute long for a 7-11 job.

The parent comment addresses that:

> As the area becomes more wealthy - guess what - wages are supposed to rise. Yes, that means the price of burgers should rise a little bit as well.

There's just no way salaries can keep up with social changes. Housing prices have doubled in the last 10 years. Salaries are already high and hamburgers expensive in Sweden.

A 19 year old in Sweden would make $14/hour at 7-11. That's around $1900/month after taxes. To double that with progressive taxes you would have to make roughly as much as a fairly well paid software developer here. A rental unit could easily be $1200-1400 and to buy a 330 square feet apartment would cost you around $300k, which is essentially the same as SF. Say you save $500/month then it still takes you more than 7 years just to get the cash contribution. It's not happening.

http://www.valueguard.se/index http://www.economist.com/content/big-mac-index

This persistent myth that first world western countries need mass migration because there are jobs "$NATIONALY won't do" really needs to die. Japan is a high income first world nation, very low immigration, and yet somehow they are able to find people to drive taxis, serve food and sweep streets.

It's nothing more than an emotion based persuasion technique to get the first world working class to accept lower wages. Don't fall for it.

Food can be shipped though, so there's a cap on how high wages can rise unless you start adding import taxes.

The U.S. uses import caps instead of import taxes to protect the local farmers and ranchers. My country and Argentina and Australia would sell them all the meat they could otherwise.

Europe does the same. So yes, farmers and ranchers are protected by import restrictions.

...which is what Japan does.

"Trump’s border crackdown is supposed to help U.S. citizens. For California farmers, it’s creating a desperate shortage of help." (Disclamer: I am an immigrant whose paper work is still ongoing)

From the article, it seemed like at least for some their business model was questionable. If the only way to be profitable is to rely on illegal immigrant or non-competitive wages (one of the farmers mentioned could only stay profitable at $8/hr but it seems anything above $10/hr seems unprofitable. "Wineries paid $700 for a ton of grapes, and Klein could make a solid profit paying $8 an hour, the minimum wage.") than you're better off growing something else anyways. (almond and olive trees in this guys case). Even if there was a way to get visas to get labor, the cost of application and transportation might still prevent some of these low margin farms.

Googling shows that other manual labor type jobs in Napa valley [1] seems to be $17+ and often offers training + transport. Seeing as how grapes seems to be used in wine industry, wouldn't the wine industry pay more for the grapes as supply dwindles and make it profitable again?

If I could go work at a farm during summer to save some money for my college, I would consider it. But looking at cost of living/risk involved/ lack of benefits for season workers/ pay, it doesn't appear to be worth it.

So, yes, preventing people willing to work and make it work from doing so it not a good solution. But the narrative that Americans would never work on a farm given the choice is also not true, imho. I've met plenty of white Americans who would like to do it, but lot of the work seems to be seasonal.

> Seeing as how grapes seems to be used in wine industry, wouldn't the wine industry pay more for the grapes as supply dwindles and make it profitable again?

Grapes, IIRC, have a multi-year cycle time. You don't just drop in a set of vines and have a useful harvest for wine in 6 months. As such, that dents the supply/demand cycle and turns it into a game of "chicken".

If I know that we're all hurting growing grapes, the only question is whether I can hold out longer than the other folks who go bankrupt and finally shrink the supply.

Status, status, status.

Another way to think of it might be: How much would I have to pay you for you to walk around with a small amount of shit on your forehead all day?

We have somehow gotten ourselves in the position where manual labor relegates one to be a social untouchable. This means that anyone with a shred of self-interest gets out ASAP, which means the political power of labor is disproportionately weak in comparison to its size.

It's like how Stranger Things HAD to be set in the 80's---because you can't have sympathetic characters in small towns in the modern era, because anyone with a head on their shoulders gets out as their first order of business.

The "everyone should go to college" attitude is a big contributor. Once our society got this idea that having everyone do the 9-to-5 40-year office career as an ideal, and started measuring the quality (and funding) of high schools based on how many students go on to college, you start getting career advisers telling students about how they should all be going into debt because "you don't want to be like those icky dumb construction workers right?". Then the market gets flooded with bachelor's degrees which are little more than an expensive status symbol to most.

> We have somehow gotten ourselves in the position where manual labor relegates one to be a social untouchable.

Hogwash. If the salary rises high enough, people will do the jobs. Why do people only seem to like capitalism when it suppresses wages?

I guarantee you that if the farmers paid $30/hour, they'd have plenty of people to fill those jobs.

Every time I hear about one of these job "shortages" I always sympathize quite deeply: "Yep, I have a similar problem. There is an acute shortage of supermodels willing to have sex with me."

Amazing how that puts things into perspective really quickly.

I think you are really reaching on the Stranger Things connection. The main protagonists were about 13 years old, even a 13 year old in today's times that is aware they might not be in a location with a lot of social mobility does not have a lot of choice in the matter. Even the show's high-schooler supporting characters in the same demo would most likely wait until college to make a move to a different area.

I think Stranger things had to be set in the 80s cause if you were about to be killed by an inter-dimensional monster you'd be live streaming it on Facebook to the very end which throws a kink in the narrative.

If farm work paid 200,00$/year, farmers would all of a sudden have status. Status follows money, not the other way around.

> If farm work paid 200,00$/year, farmers would all of a sudden have status.

Farm workers would have status. (Of course, farmers would also have to make a lot more than they do now, or require far less hired labor, for farm work to typically pay $200k/yr.)

> We have somehow gotten ourselves in the position where manual labor relegates one to be a social untouchable.

To be fair, this is an incredibly common view historically. It would be extremely unusual for a society not to believe that manual laborers were a lower class than non-manual-laborers.

Walking around handing out business cards in a bad neighborhood is not effective recruiting. Nor is the wine industry that important. It's good to see wages rising, though.

Machine picking is taking over. Every crop which can be machine harvested already is. All the staple crops were mechanized decades ago. Fruits and vegetables are mostly mechanized. Orange picking has been mechanized.[1] (The mechanism is brutal, but over 10 years, production isn't affected.) There's a newer, more gentle mechanism.[2] The orange picking machine is a big version of a grape harvester.[3]

Very few kinds of produce require full robotic picking. Apples to be sold whole do, and robotic apple picking exists, but is still experimental.[4] Robotic strawberry picking machines are available.[5]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyI6-jKIfoo [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av17eM1Ruyo [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXTnd90XFWE [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI

Is this why all the potatoes that I buy now have round, half-moon shaped cuts in them?

That's probably from the washing and root removal.[1] Those machines have drums, rollers, or vibrating screens which remove unwanted bits of root.

Potato harvesters are simple. They drive a horizontal blade through the ground at root level, and bring up everything above the blade onto a conveyor with slots. The dirt falls through the slots back onto the ground, and the potatoes are carried upward. Here's an operation that's digging 450 acres a day. Look how fast the trucks fill up with potatoes. No amount of hand labor could compete with that.[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7gydrEpzAs [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KL7OrHkDaY

This is probably where the cuts come from.[1] That's a machine that separates potatoes from rocks and dirt clods by dry mechanical means. Notice the toothed wheels over which the potatoes pass. There are other machines which do the same job more gently by floating the potatoes in water, while the rocks sink, but this one doesn't need so much water.

If most of your product is headed for the peeler and french fry cutter, there's no advantage to keeping the potato skin intact.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo3rpXoAH7w

Well then obviously wages haven't risen enough.

For an extreme example, pay me 200$ an hour and I'll quit my web dev job and do it myself.

Are you sure?

Here's a real example: you can work as an electrician on a mine site here in Australia on a fly-in, fly-out ("FIFO") basis. Typical rosters are 11/3 (days on/off), 2/1 (weeks on/off), etc. You work through weekends when you are on, and often do ~12-13 hour days. Food is good, beds aren't bad, Internet connectivity is 'passable' and the weather is extremely hot.

Many of these jobs pay (substantially!) more than what an electrical designer or electrical engineer may make - e.g. the ones providing a design, drawings or specifications to the electrical contractors. Many designers & engineers hold their relevant tickets or certs—or could quickly obtain one—in order to be an electrician on these sites.

So why would anyone still want to be a designer or engineer? Quality of life, quality of work (mental engagement), transport/commute, safety, overall career progression, etc.

It therefore does not surprise me that people aren't scrambling to pick fruit for hours per day.

> So why would anyone still want to be a designer or engineer?

Because the other, tough job, doesn't pay enough. People prefer the easy, fun job that pays enough.

edit: This is so obvious that everyone who makes the argument that Americans won't take jobs always elides over the exact number of the pay difference as if it isn't the most important factor. This article is pretty great because it doesn't. It makes clear that they're paying a pittance, which due to legislation has become a significantly larger pittance over the past 30 years, massively improving the lives of some of the most vulnerable people.

How many children got a winter coat because people paid an extra 50 cents for a bottle of wine?

A buddy did a job not unlike that. He worked for Schlumberger oil in AIDS infested Africa. He came back addicted to quinine and debt free.

---

To the downvoters, I meant no disrespect but it was a fact.

It was AIDS infested Africa. Entire villages were wiped out by a disease. That didn't matter because there was oil to be extracted.

We heard less if at all about it here. But we got the oil.

I don't mean to be overly sensitive, but I can't help but think there's a more appropriate way to state your point without calling all of Africa "AIDS infested" - if HIV/AIDS is even relevant to the story.

Quinine isn't addictive. Although I suppose one could become addicted to the gin part of Gin and Tonic.

I really forget what he was addicted to. It's been a long time; 30+ years. While he didn't come back exactly right in the head, he eventually recovered. The point of this was that he went through a bit of hell for an oil company to pay off his grad school debts.

Ok, but that would mean that the price of produce would need to grow nearly just as much. And then nobody would buy it. So at some level of price of labor it's better for the producer to close the shop and take the losses instead of rising wages even more and risking more losses due to crashing demand.

"Labor costs comprise only 6 percent of the price consumers pay for fresh produce. Thus, if farm wages were allowed to rise 40 percent, and if all the costs were passed on to consumers, the cost to the average household would be only about $8 a year."

http://cis.org/articles/2007/back907.html

That's correct. As a society, we ought to either accept this, and the resultant (probably large) increase in wine prices, or create a legal program for transient low-wage workers.

But by trying to have our cake and eat it too, we're placing illegal workers in a rather unpleasant situation (or motivating them to place themselves in such situations, if you prefer). They're ripe for all kinds of abuse, and lack the kinds of stability we all want.

Of course, it's the most basic rule of markets. Currently, they're paying unskilled data entry/retail clerk wages, eventually they'll reach semi-skilled, toil in the fields wages. They started at sit in a chair next to a door reading a book, and once every hour or two when somebody arrives, press a button to open the door wages.

I'm not sure what element of this story is supposed to be negative.

Although it's obviously not going to happen, even if it did you couldn't afford buying that same product as a direct result of the increase in cost.

Is that really relevant, though? If the cost of having cheap food is that we create an underclass that are willing to put up with low wages out of economic desperation, is that really an acceptable moral compromise?

The people picking chardonnay grapes often aren't the target consumers to begin with, but your core point is correct, wage inflation usually leads to price inflation, but it doesn't always follow that therefore the product becomes unaffordable.

Or more likely you just get automation. We don't use a lot of man hours per lb of corn. Which means even without massive subsidies it would still be dirt cheap.

This is not true, it would be true if all wages were rising but we want to increase the wages of the most poorly paid compared to highly paid people.

That's not entirely true.

No matter how much the job pays, it's still very hard work. 60 hours a week of manual labor is no joke. I grew up on a small farm and have a bit of experience with how difficult farm work can be. Honestly, I might even hesitate to do it at $200 an hour (and we all know that's an insanely unrealistic figure).

On top of that, it's a job with zero job security and basically no potential for advancement. It's no surprise that people take other options whenever possible.

That may be true, but markets can take a while to balance, there are frictional costs associated with switching jobs, and you may need internal migration to happen to fill these jobs etc.

That may have worked in the past, but now we have the option of robots that can do the work and maintain margins long before wages raise that* high.

*Yes I know it's a hypothetical number.

If money was the sole determiner of what kind of job you'd choose to work, you'd be in finance, enterprise sales, or medicine, not webdev.

There's no amount you could pay me to be a farmer, just like there's no amount you could pay be to become a doctor, a salesman, a lawyer, etc. I'm in tech because I like what I do.

That's not true at all.

Medicine requires many years of your life in training, and going hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

Also, it is extremely competitive and I'd probably fail out of it. High risk for no guaranteed payout.

Finance also doesn't actually pay that much. I had friends working at banks right out of college making <100K for 80 hour weeks. That's bad compared to Tech. Maybe Traders make more? But I have no idea how I'd even get a job as a trader and what it entails.

Being a lawyer at a not top tier institute also sucks in terms of pay/requires debt and training .

Tech really is quite high paying and good for people at all levels. I know people who did bootcamps and are now making 100K with a couple months of training.

No other industry offers THAT.

> Tech really is quite high paying and good for people at all levels. I know people who did bootcamps and are now making 100K with a couple months of training.

It depends on where you live. I'm in Texas; you will never see that kind of salary where I am. I know a guy who had something like 15 years of experience, and he didn't break 100k until he moved to NYC.

When I graduated college in 2007, some of my friends got jobs at a local video game company. They got paid 38k and worked at least 80 hours a week, if not more. It was your stereotypical exploitative "crunch time all the time" game developer. I personally got a job in telecom, and I was making 42k. From talking to various people, 38-45k was the norm for a fresh college graduate then (it might be a little higher now because inflation, but not much). Back in late 2013/early 2014 I was looking for a job, and I was told by everyone that the going rate for somebody with my experience was 60k. I ended up putting my job search on hold for personal reasons, picked it up again in late 2014, and landed a position that paid 65k.

Those inflated six-figure entry-level salaries are only found in high-cost-of-living places like the Bay Area and NYC.

"Those inflated six-figure entry-level salaries are only found in high-cost-of-living places like the Bay Area and NYC."

The same could be said about the finance salaries. My point is that in these high cost of living areas, when comparing apples to apples in terms of tech vs anything else, tech wins.

Finance is shit, being an entry level lawyer from a tier 2 school is shit, consulting is shit, and the only thing thats not is tech.

In other areas of the country tech pays much less, but so does everything else! So tech still wins.

> Tech really is quite high paying and good for people at all levels. I know people who did bootcamps and are now making 100K with a couple months of training.

Having survived the original dot com bust, I feel compelled to point out that there's no guarantee that the happy circumstances you're describing will continue indefinitely. Too many people attempting to ride the same wave will eventually result in unfortunate economic consequences.

Get stuck on an underpopulated island and gathering food would very much become your day to day job. What your referring to is the diminishing marginal value of money which is a real thing, but we also don't need a lot of farmers so it's not about your job it's about convincing enough people to swap jobs.

If you raised wages and nobody wants the job, you haven't raised wages enough.

Or the economy is overheating and you're just causing inflation.

iff wages wholly determine how much someone wants a job.

^ which is debatable.

The staggering low wages on Californian farms is preventing proper incentivisation to automate these processes. It reminds me of how slaves in the antibellum south prevented the area from becoming industrialized.

Kind of half-right, half-wrong, on both counts. The cotton gin, for example, was a product of industry that expanded production in the slaveholding South.

The problem with your analogy is that cash crops tend to command higher margins than foodstuffs like those grown in California. Margins are very low in agriculture, and it's a lot of hard, backbreaking, thankless work. That's before factoring in losses from climate conditions, insects, malformed food that nobody will buy and has to be thrown away...

So it's no surprise that wages are pitiful and labor supply remains low or relegated to immigrants who find toiling in the California sunshine preferable to the dangers and destitution found south of the border.

I think the difficulty in automating a lot of these jobs is preventing that.

> Before the day was through, Solorio would make the same pitch to dozens of men and women, approaching a taco truck, a restaurant and a homeless encampment.

Has he tried Craigslist? Or has his entire hiring strategy involved approaching random people on the street?

I would expect his target audience doesn't spend much time on the internet.

And what target audience is that? The one he's used to that the past few administrations are trying to eliminate?

The impression I get from the article is that he's willing to pay more, but not willing to change how he approaches hiring. Assuming that is the case, it's hard to fault anyone but him.

So if you raise wages there isn't instantly a group of people available who will do the work at those wages? So it takes time for things to adjust because that's how humans and cultures react to incentives? That's an excellent argument for never changing much of anything if you don;t feel like it.

When I was a kid the democrats were on the side of labor, like American citizens who work with their hands. It's a shame that now the leaders of both parties agree that cheap manual labor is a right that rich people and corporations have

There is always a desperation factor: how badly the worker needs the income from a particular job's wages to get by, or in come cases, support their entire family.

Farm work is seasonal, physically exhausting, hazardous to health, requires long hours, offers no long-term advancement, and the job sites often vary and are far away.

One only need look at the EU, an advanced economy that (mostly) offers freedom of movement across its diverse constituent states, to see how legal workers from less prosperous areas travel to more prosperous areas to perform skilled manual labor. In the EU's case, the internal economic disparities are often severe enough that the marginal utility of increased income to be gained elsewhere is very high, therefore internal migration is commonplace for blue-collar work.

In the US, this (mal-)adaptation is largely absent and is relegated to a few high-risk, high-income categories of manual labor, e.g. oil field roughnecks, Alaskan fishing; and to the similarly time-intensive long-distance truck driving. The phenomenon of a family's primary income-earner relocating elsewhere, leaving the family behind to perform a standard day's shift of blue-collar work is commonplace elsewhere in the world, but among non-immigrant legal US residents.

> Trump’s border crackdown is supposed to help U.S. citizens. For California farmers, it’s creating a desperate shortage of help.

I'm immediately skeptical. What has Trump even done on the border that would have any effect on this at all right now?

Trump has done almost nothing on this front. Even his controversial travel ban (which is completely unrelated to Mexican immigration) has been shot down three times.

> What has Trump even done on the border that would have any effect on this at all right now?

The series of highly-publicized immigration raids and deportation actions targeting, in many cases, categories of persons who.were previously not deportation priorities.

Immigration raids? Those have been going on forever now. Deportation is not new under Trump. I assume they must be happening on mass scale starting months ago to have had any effect on this already. He's barely been in office 50 days.

> Immigration raids?

Yes, as the most concrete direct action; though simply signaling intent previously since his election has probably also.had an effect.

> Deportation is not new under Trump.

No, but targeting immigrants who were not targets in the latter years of Obama's Administration is a change with Trump.

> He's barely been in office 50 days.

He's been President-Elect for a lot longer, and signaling animosity and hostile intent toward Mexicans specifically since literally the speech in which he announced he was seeking the Republican nomination.

Voting isn't the only way people react to signals like that.

The article itself, despite its headline, seems to acknowledge that blaming everything on Trump is not quite correct:

> Already, fewer Mexicans had been willing to risk border crossings as security and deportations escalated under the Obama Administration. At the same time, Mexico’s own economy was mushrooming, offering decent jobs for people who stayed behind.

Many of the specific anecdotes occur before Trump even ran. For instance:

> Indeed, Chalmers R. Carr III, the president of Titan Farms, a South Carolina peach giant, told lawmakers at a 2013 hearing that he advertised 2,000 job openings from 2010 through 2012. Carr said he was paying $9.39, $2 more than the state’s minimum wage at the time.

> He hired 483 U.S. applicants, slightly less than a quarter of what he needed; 109 didn’t show up on the first day. Another 321 of them quit, “the vast majority in the first two days,” Carr testified. Only 31 lasted for the entire peach season.

Another one:

> In the last five years, he has advertised in local newspapers and accepted more than a dozen unemployed applicants from the state’s job agency. Even when the average rate on his fields was $20 an hour, the U.S.-born workers lost interest, fast.

Five year period.

Yeah no shit no one wants the job. The industry needs to adapt. You can't keep paying people more to solve the problem, it doesn't work. No one aspires to earn 30k a year anyway.

Ultimately the jobs need to be replaced by machines or the cost of labor needs to get passed on to the consumer. It might be the end of two buck chuck.

"You can't keep paying people more to solve the problem, it doesn't work. No one aspires to earn 30k a year anyway"

No!

The average income for the USA in 2008 was $28K!

That's the average - meaning that for every person earning $75K (not that much) there are a dozen people earning $20K.

90% of people don't work as an 'aspiration'. The don't have 'careers' they have 'jobs'. And 90% of jobs in this world are not very exciting. Stocking shelves, pushing paper etc..

It's crazy to suggest that 'almost all of our jobs are crap and boring and nobody wants to do them but desperate illegal migrants who'll work for crap pay'.

If you pay reasonable wages, people will do regular jobs - that's how almost the entire world works.

If there as no negative social stigma doing things like 'stocking shelves' - and BTW it's a very new phenom - then things would work just fine.

> The average income for the USA in 2008 was $28K!

> That's the average - meaning that for every person earning $75K (not that much) there are a dozen people earning $20K.

For all your emphasis, this is a pretty dramatic misunderstanding of how averages work. You'd need a histogram to make the claim you're making.

The population earning $75K can equal the population earning $20K, or have basically any other relation to it, without affecting the average income.

That's why they use Median Income When talking about average income in the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

The claim I objected to is much more nonsensical based off of a median figure than it is when based off of a mean. You use median income if you want a sense of how much money a "typical person" earns as opposed to how much the entire population earns collectively. But neither median nor mean will tell you anything at all about the shape of the distribution.

And yes, as dragonwriter points out, your own link clearly shows that the mean US income for 2008 was just over $28K. (It also shows that the mean US income for 2008 was just under $27K; within-article consistency is not a big priority on Wikipedia...)

You're probably right that Ed was referring to the mean. However, Real Median Income was only $29k in 2008 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

While Real Mean Income was $42k https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA672N

Do you happen to know why, according to that wikipedia page, "According to the U.S Census Bureau 'The per capita income for the overall population in 2008 was $26,964'", whereas according to the source of your charts (which suggest that citations should credit the Census Bureau!), it was $38,376? ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA646N ). One of those is being seriously adjusted. I tend to suspect it's the Fed chart, which notes that its population base is those aged 15 years and over.

I'm still struggling to understand why you responded to my original comment in the first place. What point are you trying to make? The median income value tells you absolutely nothing about the relative numbers of people making incomes other than the median value.

Can't speak for wikipedia or those who make the edits, frankly the only reason I responded to you is I know you're confused and so is dragonwriter.

Feel free to take a gander at the Census Bureaus reporting of Personal Income. Table 1 Page 7. https://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-236.pdf

Do they use Median or Mean? $27,834

Edit Dragonwriter, You don't understand the difference between Mean and Median Income, hint its not what you think it is

The first part of Table 1, on page six, reports medians. The per capita section, which is at the top of page 7, reports means (though it retains the median heading, which is admittedly poor data presentation.)

You have to read the footnotes.

The article you link to refers first to per capita income, which is mean (the usual average), and then the median.

>The Census Bureau releases estimates of household money income as medians, percent distributions by income categories, and on a per capita basis. Estimates are available by demographic characteristics of householders and by the composition of households

Yes, later in the article it says that, too. Which still is inconsistent with your claim; both the median and the usual average, the mean (per capita), are reported, it is not the case that just the median is used and reported as the "average".

Strange, perhaps you should tell that to the Census Bureau.

PER CAPITA INCOME[4] Table 1: 2007 Estimate is $27,834, but they use the Median not the Mean as you assert...

https://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-236.pdf

Edit Neither of you understand there is a difference between what the Census Bureau Considers the Mean and Median Income. Failing to understand that Median Income is not simply half on this side and half on the other is your problem, feel free to read

http://mcdc.missouri.edu/allabout/measures_of_income/

Here's the text of that [4] footnote, from the pdf you link:

> The data shown in this section are per capita incomes and their respective confidence intervals. Per capita income is the mean income computed for every man, woman, and child in a particular group. It is derived by dividing the total income of a particular group by the total population in that group (excluding patients or inmates in institutional quarters).

Please try to make arguments that aren't immediately falsified by the quotes you cite in "support".

> Edit Neither of you understand there is a difference between what the Census Bureau Considers the Mean and Median Income. Failing to understand that Median Income is not simply half on this side and half on the other is your problem, feel free to read http://mcdc.missouri.edu/allabout/measures_of_income/

Sure. From that link:

> The median of a distribution is the one that ranks in the middle; since there are 98,003 households in this county we can imply from the median that if you ranked all the households in this county by their income the one in the middle (ranking 49002) would have an income of $34,157.

Perhaps you should read the footnote [4]; while the heading on the column with income figures on the table says median, the figures in the per capita section are means, not medians. Here's the footnote text: "The data shown in this section are per capita incomes and their respective confidence intervals. Per capita income is the mean income computed for every man, woman, and child in a particular group. It is derived by dividing the total income of a particular group by the total population in that group (excluding patients or inmates in institutional quarters)."

> Neither of you understand there is a difference between what the Census Bureau Considers the Mean and Median Income.

No, actuslly, I do recognize that there is a difference between the mean and the median, that the Census publishes both, and that the former is the usual definition of "average" in unqualified English use.

> Failing to understand that Median Income is not simply half on this side and half on the other is your problem

No, even your source says that that is exactly what the median is. The mean, OTOH, is something else entirely.

For California farmers, it’s creating a desperate shortage of help.

I am now offering $15k for a new BMW, up from $10k, but there are still no takers. Clearly, there is a "desperate shortage" of BMWs...

Does the LA Times seriously expect us to believe that immigrant labor is immune to the Law of Supply and Demand--that no wage or no combination of wage and benefits is enticing enough to persuade American citizens to work in agriculture, or that if the price is so high as to be unsustainable for most farms, that automation wouldn't come to be viewed as an increasingly viable, cost-effective alternative if cheap, illegal labor were denied to them?

The LA Times should be ashamed of itself for publishing this propaganda.

Farming is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US. There are reasons aside from money that people choose to pursue other careers.

I would think it being seasonal would put a big damper on people wanting to do it: if you can only work 6-8 months a year, what are you going to do the rest of the time?

If you're paid enough in that 6-8 months, whatever you want. Plenty of dangerous, limited season jobs exist—but to attract workers they have to pay really well.

How many teachers are there in this country? Safe, seasonal work isn't exactly common but it's certainly not shirked due to not being busy for 3 months. A lot of teachers find that to be a benefit.

I know someone that has an agricultural business and does tax accounting in the off season.

https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm#2015

If anyone else wants data on this assertion (farming as one of the most dangerous jobs in the US). It certainly appears to be up there, in both gross and per capita numbers. Seems to largely (for agricultural workers) be associated with transportation (not equipment, so perhaps the way many workers travel around fields and all in the back of trucks and similar unsafe methods?).

The decline in equipment deaths and injuries is mostly due to automation. Not nearly as many people with their hands near a PTO as there used to be.

And the distance from medical care means that severe but survivable injuries become severe and fatal injuries out in farm country. Near my grandparents' farm most of the older folks had moved away precisely because of the lack of access to the (due to age) needed medical facilities. When standard care isn't accessible, emergency and trauma care will almost certainly be worse.

This argument is a bit double-edged. Okay, so it's implicitly immoral to keep immigrants out. But it's moral to hire them for jobs that Americans won't do because they're so unpleasant?

I think it's immoral to keep immigrants out. I think we should make it dramatically easier for people to emigrate to the us and work these kinds of jobs.

At the same time, I think we should make an effort to ensure people are doing it legally and benefit from the same worker protections that make hiring citizens so expensive. And we should crack down on people who hire undocumented workers or off the books employees.

I think if we did that, it would dramatically cut down on immigration without imposing quotas because there won't be huge numbers of jobs for unskilled workers making slave wages.

Farmers that want to do that will have to move their operations to Mexico or some other country with lax labor laws.

There is absolutely nothing unpleasant about working in food services.

What makes it 'unpleasant' is the destruction of the social contract that valued 'regular work', and the fulfillment of specific jobs by illegal migrants which creates a negative 'social class signalling' dynamic to the work.

It's socially destructive, and irreversible - and I believe it adds considerably to inequality.

However you construe the problem (unpleasant, low social capital, etc.) I've gotta believe that in a functional labor economy, illegal immigration would not be incentivized to this degree.

And yeah, some of the jobs are very unpleasant (I've worked a few of them). The article's sly portrayal of toothless guys and drug addicts refusing cushy gigs picking grapes at vineyards is meant to give an impression without coming out and saying something that probably cannot be supported by the data: the jobs are good and the citizens are lazy.

Every argument that "we simply can't get American citizens to do it" seems to be an appeal to a broken system staying broken.

The story is not too different for dairy (and other) farms in Upstate New York.

Most agricultural jobs pay a few more dollars an hour than the minimum wage, but they are much harder jobs than minimum wage jobs. It is one thing to wake up early morning to milk the cows if you own the farm, it is another thing to do it for other people's cows.

I don't know about Alaska and Hawaii, but illegal aliens are a big part of the agricultural workforce throughout the lower 48.

Has anyone here even worked a minimum wage job??

A few dollars an hour above the baseline isn't enough to compensate for the long term health and career advancement penalties you'll be taking. These are terminal career positions; they don't get better. Hauling apples and hay isn't going to get you a spot at a tractor design firm.

Pay people enough to make a decent, comfortable life and you'll have workers. The CoL/wage arbitrage between foreign and american workers is what makes these jobs work.

> Hauling apples and hay isn't going to get you a spot at a tractor design firm.

Of course not. This is a change in required qualifications and education, not just a move up the ladder.

I don't know about agriculture jobs, but in food service your career prospects were to go from flipping burgers to managing/supervising/leading others who are flipping burgers (at increasing scale - store, regional, national, etc). While it's not as nice as any kind of engineering there is a way forward there. Of course moving up like this gets competitive because of the sheer volume of people "at the bottom" hoping to move up.

Sure it is. You move from the person moving the hay to the person designing the hay moving systems. This would be a perfectly cogent career story for any engineer working in agriculture, and I know plenty of people who have worked in higher-margin areas of agriculture who have made the jump. (Beekeepers learning biochemistry and getting jobs working as Honey Q/A scientists, chefs jumping into food research and development positions, farm owners pivoting to seed banking/specific organism sales, etc.)

The fact that you can't generate enough economic surplus to fund studies to acquire the additional mechanical engineering study in a manner competitive with other mechanical engineering students is why you view the path as untenable. Hence why these positions are desperation tier end-of-the-line jobs and why the CoL/Wage arbitrage is required to keep them staffed.

Similarly, people engaged in agricultural studies generally don't come out of the 'harvest labour' workforce.

Working on a farm is a transaction with a specific expected ROI. If the ROI sucks in comparison to other mutually exclusive exchanges, why would you do it?

Funny enough, many Mexicans who come to work in the U.S. plan to earn enough money to start their own farm back home.

There are quite a few young people who would like to own a farm, often not farmer's kids. It would be almost impossible to "make it" as a farmer without getting experience in the biz in one form or another.

Milking is becoming automated.[1] Milking robots are production, not experimental technology, with at least four manufacturers. This video is amusing, showing the cow's view of meeting robotic milking for the first time.

Milk cows want to be milked, to relieve the pressure. So, given the freedom to use the robotic milkers any time they want, they get milked about three times a day. Milk production increases a bit. The cows are tagged and monitored, so any cow with a problem is quickly flagged.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_Q1LoxK5mE

Those are very expensive, and really only suitable for massive dairy operations. My wife worked her way through college at a small (~300 head) dairy, and there's no way they could have afforded one of those setups.

They aren't high enough. Perhaps prices need to be raised. If they can't raise them then I have basically no problem with these farmers investing in machinery and employing fewer people than they do now but making those workers legalized americans and paying them a good wage.

I also don't have a problem with this guys vineyard failing. That's capitalism, sometimes (a lot of times) businesses fail.

>That's capitalism, sometimes (a lot of times) businesses fail.

Agreed, and add: it's actually the overwhelming majority.

Have a friend whose family owns a tree nursery in Texas. They tried very hard to hire Americans. Most of the people they talk to just aren't up to the job. Most people they did hire quit the first day because the work was too hard.

After the fourth American cut the tip of their pinky off in the first couple of hours on the job and sued, they stopped trying.

I've long suspected that it may eventually become problematic, that an entire generation's median capability set is "able to suck slurpee through a straw".

I think I'm in the minority, though...

There has to be more to the story here because the unemployment rate in Stockton is 9.5%. So what's the disconnect between people not working, and employers who are apparently trying to pay more and aren't getting workers?

> Or perhaps farms are just not a place where native-born Americans want to work. The job is seasonal, so laborers have to alternate between long stretches without any income and then months of 60-hour weeks. They work in extreme heat and cold, and spend all day bending over to reach vegetables or climbing up and down ladders to pluck fruit in trees.

Agricultural jobs like these are strictly seasonal, require transportation to the job site, are physically exhausting, have very long days, and have no prospects for advancement.

Now compare that to refusing the offer and instead looking for a low-ranking job in construction, which requires transportation to the job site, is physically exhausting, and has very long days, but has work available year-round and has very real prospects for on-the-job training and career advancement.

I suspect that the fitness bar for farm work is pretty high. Typical immigrants are arguably in better shape than typical locals. If for no other reason than the fact that they had successfully immigrated.

This seems like a victory for labor. Improving working conditions for unskilled labor is a good thing.

If it weren't for the human suffering involved in all this, I'd be laughing at the farmers, who are simply getting what they asked for[1]. Well, do I still find it funny, but in a much darker way.

I still think the answer to all of this is to call the Republican bluff, and just continually push E-verify any time anti-immigration nonsense comes up. Demand universal E-verify use, hit recalcitrant employers really hard (jail time, or at least business-crippling fines), and send the ICE thugs currently tormenting immigrants who try to speak out after the employers.

If nothing else, it would be amusing to listen to Ryan explain why he's suddenly soft on "illegals"[2].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/us/california-farmers-bac...

[2] There is no such thing as an illegal human.

It's a difficult, dangerous, unpleasant job and the wage rise they are talking about still puts it at half the average wage for workers in the state. Why would they want it?

Wonder if any high schools in nearby affluent areas need a new mandatory paid 1 week internship program for their students...

I see a potential solution to Los Angeles's homeless population.

If I was homeless in LA, I still wouldn't work for 16 bucks an hour in the hot sun around dangerous chemicals with no benefits in the middle of nowhere.

" I still wouldn't work for 16 bucks an hour in the hot sun around dangerous chemicals with no benefits in the middle of nowhere."

You wouldn't work for what is about 20% above the national wage, to feed yourself, put a roof over your head?

If most people share your sentiment - then America is finished. You're done. It's over. I hope that's not the case.

America is already finished.

In my country, you can work in a warehouse. You get job security, full health coverage, and 18 per hour. There are worker safety regulations that actually get followed, regular breaks, shade, and ppe provided if you're working with dangerous chemicals. You're not out in the sun all day. The US agricultural industry can't provide any of this. Why would anyone work for them if they weren't a poor immigrant planning to take their wages back to Mexico, where 16 is at least a living wage?

You mean, give them homes on farms? Sure, why not.

Why give them work with decent wages? Just give people what they need: free stuff!

Seriously, you were just joking, were you?

I doubt they were joking. The homeless need homes more than they need jobs.

It is hard to determine which is needed more, as a home has costs, loosing a job leads usually loosing a home. I believe both are equally important, and this is kind of a snake biting its own tail problem, as without a home it is very hard to get a job. (Although I can imagine someone living in a car temporarily in mild weather conditions, it would be impossible to survive a winter that way here in Central Europe)

Hopefully this opportunity will help those in need.

> loosing

It's spelled "loosening", btw.

It's misspelled indeed, but I'm pretty much sure I wanted to write losing.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lose

Looks like autocorrect may have "helped" you. I think you meant "It's spelled losing.." (not "loosening")

Free housing is one of the benefits mentioned in the article.

This may help people get out of the hopeless situation, although I'm not sure how long an agricultural season is in California, here it is limited to at most 2/3 of the year, so this is a temporary solution at best.

Don't want the job? Or too obese to do the job? It's funny how can't do can be spun as don't want.

Good!

How does that saying go? "If you can't pay your employees a living wage, your business shouldn't exist"?

And maybe it's about time consumers learned the true cost of the goods they buy, without the artificial price suppression of abundant, cheap labor.

Immigration laws seem likely to be enforced, illegal alien labor scabs self-deport in advance, and wages rise. Not hard to understand.

> illegal alien labor scabs self-deport in advance, and wages rise

You know when there was a bug in the codebase so hard to fix and for so many years that developers started building on top of that and considered the bug to be 'not really a bug' but more of a design decision.

And then some new hire comes along and fixes it without a deep understanding of the dependencies and breaks existing functionality. And then the dev budget for 'fixing' everything goes sky high?

Guess what will happen to the price of produce?

Then the market will fix this, either by automation (which will create other problems for these mostly unskilled people in need), or by importing some more goods from abroad, and farmers changing to crops more competitive in the changed circumstances. Also it might create a slight inflation, which will likely result in the rise of wages, usually in a larger proportion in the lower end wages than in the high end, resulting in some eradication of the divide in wages.

Law is the foundation a society is built on. If breaking the law becomes the norm, a society will slowly disintegrate. If laws create more problems then they solve, but are enforced, they are eventually changed. This should be the norm, not breaking them.

> Guess what will happen to the price of produce?

Very little, because it's a highly competitive global market and much of what is in supermarkets is already imported. There's a few crops where CA is dominant and where prices would be affected significantly, but the main question would be "what happens to the jobs, and the companies, when labor costs make it impossible to sell their product at a profit".

Jobs aren't a fixed quantity for which wages will rise without limit given a labor supply constraint.

If this leads to the decline of agriculture in CA, does that mean the water woes will be diminished? But on the other hand, that just leads to the growing economic collapse of the Central Valley.

Maybe some tech startups should start looking to relocate to Stockton and Sac, cheaper rents and CoL, and within drivable distance to the Palo Alto VC firms...

> If this leads to the decline of agriculture in CA, does that mean the water woes will be diminished?

Depends which crops are most affected and what the land use shifts to (could be rising ag labor prices favor crops where the work is more automated, which may be a decline in total profits but not in land or water use.)

Almost nothing. Head of lettuce, for instance, might go up 5 cents per head at wholesale, thus 15-25 cents per head at retail, max. i.e. less than 10% of current price, will be the amount of the increase

Interesting use of the word "scabs"!

I think the intention was as a synonym for "strikebreaker". Not a particularly nice thing to say, but perhaps better than the meaning you might've first thought of.

> Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don’t want the job

No. Californians don't want the jobs. Americans live in more than just CA, I know a lot of people in CA find this hard to believe but there is a whole world outside of Sillycon Valley.

I lived in northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri for 12 years, until 2009. Not only is this where the Tyson corporation is based, but it's also where one of the highest densities of chicken farms are located.

We lived in a house in an extremely rural area. I made good money doing high tech work at the nearby WalMart Stores, Inc., home office.

Most of our neighbors, for miles in every direction, were pretty poor. Many of them lived in broken down trailers on properties handed down generation after generation. Unemployment was very high.

A kindly, law abiding man who went to our church ran one of the many chicken farms, and had for decades.

The only people he could find to work on his chicken farms were Latinos, many or most of them were probably illegal. They did provide proper documentation, so he wasn't breaking the law by employing them.

I asked him how he ran his farm before the Latinos started arriving 15 or so years earlier. He said that in that time, it wasn't hard to find young people who were happy to do the hard, unpleasant work associated with a chicken farm. He said he hadn't raised his wages past minimum wage since the very beginning.

In fact, he said, the Latinos worked a lot harder than the native locals had.

> Americans live in more than just CA, I know a lot of people in CA find this hard to believe but there is a whole world outside of Sillycon Valley.

While not adding much of anything to this conversation, and being needlessly snarky, I understand the fundamental sentiment here. I live in 'Sillycon Valley'. In many ways, it is quite silly here, and a lot of folks have a rather insular mindset, one that I personally try hard to keep clear of.

I guess Georgians or Alabamans don't want the jobs either? That's weird!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/alabama-law-drives-out-...

Maybe they can get those senior citizens living high on the hog of Meals On Wheels to get out there and pick crops?

You're linking to articles half a decade old. Have any new data, you since the economy picked up?

Yes which does an even better job of proving the point. When the economy was worse and unemployment was higher, why didn't the huge numbers of unemployed who need jobs take those available jobs? Hmm!

The article indicates a 15-year trend of rising wages, yet we don't see American farmhands flocking to CA, so it seems like a fair headline to me.

> The article indicates a 15-year trend of rising wages, yet we don't see American farmhands flocking to CA, so it seems like a fair headline to me.

That's because you're biased. Its a small trend over a long period of time that doesn't outpace the cost of living. There is also a massive shortage of farmers thanks to big agriculture killing them all off.

Most farmers want to own the land they work. Good luck with that in CA

I'm not a Californian or a farmer.

I read there's a 50% increase in wages, during a period when CPI is up more like 30% in California [0], and I'm saying I agree with the article: it seems like a reasonable economic incentive.

To respond to your comment: isn't a farm worker different from a farmer? I thought the former was someone who does things that require little to no training, like picking grapes, and that these are the people the article references.

0 - http://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/LGCentral/DivMeasure/AdjustMeth...

> No. Californians don't want the jobs. Americans live in more than just CA

Yes, but if they wanted the jobs, they'd come to CA for them.

> I know a lot of people in CA find this hard to believe but there is a whole world outside of Sillycon Valley.

Most people in California—who are, after all, themsleves outside of Silicon Valley, which is a small piece of the state—are well aware of that.

What's the equivalent of a $16 Napa salary in Nebraska? I really don't think it's worth moving for.

$16 in Napa is probably $2 in Nebraska. The cost of living there is so much lower than California you can barely compare the two. Homes are 1/10th the price or less.

You can find a nice house in Omaha for $175k that would cost about $2.5 million in Palo Alto for example.

When (if?) Bay Area workers ever figure this out they should telecommute from the midwest.

> Yes, but if they wanted the jobs, they'd come to CA for them.

CA is facing a mass exodus right now. Why on Earth would anyone willingly move there with costs being what they are?

I left 10 years ago and will never go back. I can earn just as much with a cost of living being half of that in any number of states.

> Most people in California—who are, after all, themsleves outside of Silicon Valley, which is a small piece of the state—are well aware of that.

I grew up there and no they aren't aware of it. SV isn't a small part of the state. Its the entire middle of it since hardly anyone who works there can live there. They have to commute for hours from all around.

The other half is in LA county with the same delusions. The populace out side of those areas is tiny in comparison.

> CA is facing a mass exodus right now.

No, it's not. It's facing a slowing rate of inward migration, but it still has net inward migration, not an "exodus" at all, much less a mass one (and a lot of the slowing is part of the national net out-migration of undocumented immigrants—the only a mass exodus involved—offsetting in-migration of others.)

"Figure 1 [0] shows California’s Department of Finance’s (DOF) estimate of domestic migration, migration between California and other states. According to the DOF, California’s domestic migration has been negative in 18 of the past 20 years."

[0] http://www.newgeography.com/content/003584-california-a-worl...

Also, see http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/article3267975...

I think you bring up a good point. The people who need jobs and the people that need to fill jobs live in different places. American mobility is at an all time low for our technological era. How do we get the unemployed Midwesterners into Napa Valley?

> How do we get the unemployed Midwesterners into Napa Valley?

Just a thought:

Government loans with low interest, delayed and income-contingent repayment, and forgiveness after a set period of on-time payments for relocation expenses for unemployed adults with job offers outside of their own immediate area. Getting people to where the work is good for the public fisc, good for employers, and good for the people involved.

But why move people out with large government funding? Why not move some work there?

People are easier to move than agricultural land, and employers with jobs that can be moved easily and realize cost efficiencies by doing that usually get financing to do so (though government programs to incentive moving jobs into depressed areas aren't unheard of.)

That brings up the question, why is work in the metropoli (not a word, apparently, but it should be) of America and not the heartland?

Why is the first instinct of every Democrat/Liberal to have Government subsidize everything? If the wages and cost of living were there people would come. Solve the problem, don't subsidize it and create more problems. Absolutely insane.

According to the story, it sounds like wages and cost of living are already there.

How would they get there if they have no money?

> If the wages and cost of living were there people would come

People who lack assets may not be able to afford to move, even if the wage/CoL balance would favor a different location discounting moving costs. Facilitating that through targeted lending (especially if the recipient would otherwise be drawing public benefits) is win/win/win: good for the government/public, food.for.the employer, good for employee.

Californians are Americans. Central Valley is very different to Silicon Valley. You're the person who connected it to Silicon Valley. There's a whole lot of California outside of and unrelated to Silicon Valley.

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