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Comment by avs733 | Hacker News Reader

They could also, which is notably mentioned no where in the article, pay more?

In a market driven economy...which companies want...employees have market power as well when their is a shortage.

The rising wages is notably mentioned in the article, and it is the implied reason for automation - the industry is not going to replace cheap workers with expensive workers, it's going to restructure everything (including the crop species it grows) to ensure that cheap workers are replaced with machines.

If some industry is employing $10 million of labor and market wages go up 20%, the expected outcome is not spending $12m on labor, you should rather expect something like spending $9m on labor and $2m on machines that weren't worth it back when labor was cheap but are worth it now.

Many industries, including this one, employ humans only because (and only while) they can do it cheaper than the machines. Yet. As the technology matures and becomes cheaper, and people want to earn more, the result is going to be simply less jobs.

Tell that to the plethora of hotels that are constantly hiring contractors to clean their hotels because their staff either quit due to lack of pay or being overworked due to lack of staff.

The same for trucking companies that are haemorrhaging drivers.

The same for the construction industry.

Market efficiency implies the market is managed well. It's not half the time.

From a hotel accounting standpoint I honestly wonder which is more profitable for what I'd assume can be classified as a low-skill job:

1. Hire more employees and/or pay higher wages or other benefits to retain experienced (and thus presumably more efficient and effective staff)

2. Churn and burn with abandon because there will always be people desperate enough for any job to keep themselves off the street, even if it's just until they can find something marginally better

I'm not making any judgements on the morality of this...just raising the question since I have a guess that #2 is more profitable.

I suspect that number 2 is less profitable: the quality of work drops, your reputation drops, and the effective market rate you can charge drops.

But I think you can get trapped in a number 2 situation regardless -- eg, there's an economic downturn, so people spend less, the business "cost optimizes", which causes people to spend less, etc.

I think the second case is a sort of "survival" mode witnessed in fundamentally unhealthy economies where businesses are being squeezed because people in general are being squeezed.

Frances Gabe, an Oregon woman who took the first steps toward a self cleaning dwelling: http://kuow.org/post/remembering-frances-gabe-oregon-invento...

i think the idea still needs some refinement before it can be rolled out at a Holiday Inn though

I'd say the math is off, but your ideas are sound. If you can reduce a 10M labor market to capital investment with zero yearly wages, it would probably make sense to spend 80M on robots that will cost 20M over ~10 years (or something similar). Point being, if you plan on being in business for a few decades, getting rid of labor costs (especially there might be a race to get rid of labor costs) is likely going to be essential.

> They could also, which is notably mentioned no where in the article, pay more?

From the article:

> And native-born Americans aren’t interested in the job, even at wages that have soared at higher than average rates.

> Not surprisingly, wages for crop production have climbed 13% from 2010 to 2015 — a higher rate than the state average, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of Labor Department data.

> Growers who can afford it have begun offering savings and health plans more commonly found in white collar jobs.

Margins are thin, though, and the article makes it sound like it is more efficient to grow less labor-intensive crops and import the other crops.

> And native-born Americans aren’t interested in the job, even at wages that have soared at higher than average rates.

Conspicuously absent in every single article claiming that Americans "aren't interested" in farm work is exactly what constitutes "higher than average rates". You _will_ find Americans interested in this work at some rate, but it's going to be higher than what you think it "should" be. In a country where a $15 minimum wage is expected for relatively comfy fast food work, back-breaking outdoor labor is going to be significantly more expensive. But you will find takers at some price.

In another comment on this thread, a farmer said he couldn't hire people at $25 / hour. If a machine can do it, then a machine should do it. Especially work that's difficult and can be dangerous - like farm work.

Yes, but farm workers only work part of the year, and only work on each farm for a few weeks.. then move onto another farm.

So having 1 farm paying $25/hr, does not change much for the worker.. after they finish at that farm, they'll need to go to another that's paying near minimum wage (the average for a farm worker).. and the result is that they are still in poverty (the average farm worker lives below the poverty line).

The result is that no one is going to move from even a minimum wage job to farm work unless the pay is even higher and/or other farms get onboard with the higher wages.

Exactly right. This work needs to be entirely automated.

Okay, what's your proposition for the displaced workers?

Displaced workers? We're talking about how difficult it is to find people to do this work.

Anyway, having people do work that could be automated feels like another version of the broken window fallacy.

> We're talking about how difficult it is to find people to do this work.

* in California. So farmers don't matter, just like other workers who lose their jobs to automation. Got it, thanks for the help.

> So farmers don't matter, just like other workers who lose their jobs to automation.

Nobody said that and I can't believe you would think anybody actually sees the world like that. I would hope that we can find more meaningful ways for people to spend their days than doing things that can be better accomplished via machinery. Otherwise we really are just paying one group to break windows so another group can be paid to fix them and that's not good for anybody.

Automating people's jobs away without meaningful replacements is how regions get decimated, and you end up with very large swaths of very angry people without much to lose.

True and nobody is really arguing that point.

Producers should be looking for ways to produce more efficiently. Governments should be working on the social problems. We all have a part to play in making our economy work well.

> True and nobody is really arguing that point.

Or providing solutions, just automating their jobs away.

Ignore the social repercussions or try and shift responsibility for who should help them all you want, I suggest it is a very unwise thing to do.

This basically requires the worker to be either homeless or that they can leave a house somewhere else empty while they are working on a farm.

How does welfare in the US cover housing costs ?

That's a funny joke you just told.

They dont get welfare.

Farms are heavily dependent on immigrants, mostly illegal immigrants from mexico (90% are foreign born) for crop workers. They work on our farms for very little pay (but probably more than they would have in mexico), work here for 10 years or so saving as much as possible, then go back to mexico. They may travel from CA > WA through the season; or on the east: FL > OH > ME (this prolongs their work season). They're on average very poor, with little education (6th grade is the average).

With the more recent restrictions on the flow of illegal migrants, many are finding it's impossible to come back to the us (or they choose not to come back). Disrupting the flow of illegal migrants that the farms depend on.

That is the source of the labor shortage that the farms are now complaining about.

Essentially for years they have taken advantage of illegal immigrants to depress wages in their industry. And now they have been cut off, and theyre finding it difficult to adjust their wages to appropriate levels so they can compete in the domestic labor market.

Farmers deserve no sympathy for the labor shortage.. it's an exploitative arrangement. They should automate as much as possible, and for everything else they should pay market rates (whatever those may be... even if it's $100/hr or more (remember its short term hard labor, 2nd most dangerous work in the US)).

This shortage is actually a great thing, if it lasts. Whatever workers are left, might finally get paid a livable reasonable wage.

Edit: if your curious about their conditions, here's the National Agriculture Workers Survey that covers all of this: https://www.doleta.gov/agworker/pdf/NAWS_Research_Report_12_...

It's currently "offline for maintenance", so here's google's cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HiRr7h...

I realize that most farm workers up to now have been immigrants.

I was trying to find out how things would work if a legal worker alternated between working on farms and living on welfare somewhere out of any work season.

The UK is starting a similar shakeup, most seasonal agricultural work is done by workers from poorer countries in the EU who go back home once the work is done.

I feel that it will be hard to find the market rate for this kind of work in the short term.

There's no welfare program like that. You cant work a seasonal job and live off welfare the rest of the year.. you're going to be homeless.

Farm labor in other states earn $15-20 an hour [1], and will enjoy much higher purchasing power, and (almost certainly) a political climate they'll find less actively hostile than the one they'll find in California. Why would farm laborers want to come here?

1. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes452099.htm

I'm certain people will do the work for $1 million per hour. Thus it seems a valid conclusion that $25/hr in California for this work is not the market rate.

The market rate has to include the cost of doing the job with machines. If a person will do it for $1 million per hour but I can get a machine to do it for $1 / hour, then the market rate is $1 / hour.

> But you will find takers at some price.

At some point, the goods won't move unless they are inelastic goods (which individual foods aren't). There is no single food product which people can not live without.

13% over 5 years isn't exactly what I'd call soaring. That barely beats out inflation over that same time frame.[1] Doing the quick math it looks like that beats inflation by <3% for hard labor in a job with no career potential. What are the wages as well? If they are in the $10-$20/hr range then those increases are fractions of a dollar per hour more for seasonal work. That is unlikely to convince anyone to go pick up that job if they weren't doing it already

[1]http://www.inflation.eu/inflation-rates/united-states/histor...

Fair enough...I missed that part somehow (I swear I actually read the article :) )

They could pay more. But since what we're really talking about here is the market, the real question is who would pick up the added costs. Are consumers willing to pay the "real cost" of food grown by employees who are paid a fair wage?

It's already been shown in Seattle that raising minimum wage does not raise prices.

Therefore paying these workers more should not raise prices. It might make them rise to middle class though :)

Wonderful news! Just set the minimum wage to $100/hr, and we'll be in fat city!

The Seattle experiment would have to be repeated for higher levels of minimum wage. I would suggest a basic income instead though, then people won't have to pick fruit to survive :)

Paying the top 1/2 of earners a basic income is hyper regressive and inefficient (you have to turn around and tax it back from them).

The current progressive income tax system paired with a higher income tax credit - instead of a counter productive higher minimum wage - is a vastly superior approach that has already been proven to work very well.

BI is a fantasy at best. At worst, it'll wreck any economy that attempts it - which is also why none has or will. There's no scenario under which BI works out financially.

Why would you have to introduce inefficiencies like taxing the payment from the government, or if you did do that, how is it any different from just increasing the income reported for the year that you get from work already? As for it being hyper regressive, one of the benefits of BI is that you have no means testing at all and can save on all of the bureaucratic overhead. You can still keep a progressive income tax on top of the BI payments.

I'd also like to see actual evidence that BI cant work out financially. You get X tax dollars out of your economy, you Pay out X/population to each person. How does that not work out?

inefficient (you have to turn around and tax it back from them).

Subtracting two lines is hyper inefficient?

That only works is BI is implemented as part of the tax system.

My salary is not even paid by the government, yet it already arrives into my account after discounting taxes.

According to what I've read [0], the increase has led to more leisure time (and less money). I would expect the same in agriculture.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-26/seattle-s...

That study had some pretty serious flaws, most notably that it excluded workers employed by businesses with multiple locations.

Ag workers are not a huge cost driver to the retail price of food, so it'll be fine.

Does anyone have numbers on this? What I hear anecdotally is that American farmers are having a hard time because of cheaper produce from South America. Produce consumers are extremely price sensitive. If people can save 5c buying imported produce, they will.

"Wages, salaries, and contract labor expenses represent roughly 17 percent of total variable farm costs and as much as 40 percent of costs in labor-intensive crops such as fruit, vegetables, and nursery products."

Source: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor.aspx

well you see... they pay near minimum wage for hard temporary labor that results in most of their workforce living below the poverty line. They've tried giving them a token wage increase, and it hasnt changed anything.. so clearly increasing wages doesnt work /s

For some reason they say they can't figure out.. people aren't jumping at the chance to live in poverty.

When they say they cant find people, and they're paying $7/hr or have increased it to $10/hr... it's a joke. They don't want to compete in the free market for labor.

Maybe the robots cost the equivalent of paying a human $11/hr

They will only try paying a person $12 an hour if the robots don't work.

Seems like society is doing everything it can to keep this trend going: http://i.imgur.com/Uc6kX8G.jpg

Is this correlated to the gold standard ending in the early seventies?

I would guess it's correlated to the rise of other manufacturing competitors like Japan, Taiwan, and later China. After World War II the US had an easier time as much of Asia and Europe's capacity was destroyed.

Or just import more from Mexico and have Californians concentrate on the higher value jobs.

This would be the best thing. US farm subsidies mean that Mexican farmers can't compete with US farms. If we stopped stupidly subsidizing farming[0], the Mexican economy would be able to make use of more of their citizens. They'd get the tax revenue, and maybe there'd even be more incentive to clean up corruption.

[0] Food security might be worth some subsidization, but not the level that the US currently has.

Farmers in Mexico are most certainly competing effectively with US farms in some categories e.g. citrus, avocados and tomatoes.

And automated farm technology will (continue to) cross borders. These machines won't remain only in the US. They will be used in Mexico too.

Although I am in agreement with you, a rise in the cost of wages for this sector hastens more automation

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