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Comment by cribbles | Hacker News Reader

Corporate welfare is one thing. I'd also like to direct readers to this thread from yesterday: https://twitter.com/unabanned/status/1159272783676891136

- which persuasively argues (with multiple sources) that the US meat industry depends upon massive labor exploitation of undocumented immigrants in order to 1) suppress wages and 2) maintain an otherwise intolerable working environment.

This shows that the problem is not simply corrupt legislation and lobbying, but a de facto symbiotic relationship between the meat industry, federal immigration authorities and border coyotes to maintain artificially low prices.

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> which persuasively argues (with multiple sources) that the US meat industry depends upon massive labor exploitation of undocumented immigrants in order to 1) suppress wages and 2) maintain an otherwise intolerable working environment.

That's well-known about the meat industry. The problem with suggesting it as a reason to avoid meat in favor of vegetable-based food is the same is well-known to be true of agriculture generally.

Good point, though when speaking of "intolerable working environments," many employees of slaughterhouses suffer from PTSD and drug/alcohol addiction, and also become more likely to be domestic abusers: https://metro.co.uk/2017/12/31/how-killing-animals-everyday-...

What will happen to veggie prices when we go to a $15 min wage? Do other farms not benefit from illegal labor?

It takes considerably less labor to farm vegetables than to farm vegetables and feed those vegetables to animals and also take care of those animals. So vegetable prices may go up, but considerably less so when compared to meat.

Got a source for that? I've never been involved in commercial vegetable farming or large-scale cattle raising, but small-scale ranching is really not that labor intensive in my experience.

Scale seems to be exactly the problem. Industrial scale crop farming is highly automated. There aren't similar automations as you scale up cattle, and slaughterhouse work/butchering includes several skilled labor tasks with no similar skilled labor equivalents in vegetable farming.

Animals don't eat vegetables. They eat hay and grains that can be dry land farmed on undesirable land with minimal labor.

Crop labor has also seen a lot more automation in general than meat labor over the last several decades. Some crop farms are almost entirely automated (and International Harvester and other brands think that Level 3 self-driving tech alone puts them on a path to nearly full automation in the next decade or so), though obviously things vary based on which crop.

On the other hand, slaughterhouses generally haven't seen any automation and other than size/scale mostly still resemble their counterparts from previous centuries.

Wouldn't the relationship between the meat industry and federal immigration authorities be the opposite of symbiotic? Federal immigration aims to curb the illegal immigration off of which (we reasonably alledge) the meat industry is profiting. Surely this is evident by the inclusion of "border coyotes" in the alleged symbiotic relationship?

It's also true for the agricultural industry in the US in general though.

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