It was just a simple decision for them: cheap labor that's available today or expensive labor... They mostly went with cheap, and now they don't have anyone available.
Tough luck I guess, but it always was just a question of time until this happened.
In America, it used to be common for young men in high school and college to do construction work during the summer. Now, it's mostly immigrants.
When I was still a military wife, they changed the fitness test to be less stringent for younger members because they were having so much trouble getting qualified recruits. It really pissed my husband off because they didn't make his test any easier. He was in his thirties and was told "You've been working out for years. You are in the best shape of your life."
Developed countries are turning into nations of couch potatoes who turn their noses up at hard physical labor and probably couldn't do it if they wanted to. Or could but it would be extremely hard on them and there would be additional personal costs akin to training for a marathon.
Because college or college-bound adults are, if they are motivated enough to work in the first place, mostly focussed on work that provides a competitive advantage in college admissions and post-college careers, which trade labor mostly isn't.
But the reasons why are almost irrelevant. The pertinent detail is that employers can't fill these jobs without immigrant labor. Most Americans don't want them at any pay rate.
But if you want to make that salary picking fruit, then we'll have to pay more for it -- or you'll need to have some automation to increase productivity.
I doubt we'll want to pay more, consumers would rather buy imports instead.
- college education ($30K-$75K/year, preceded by purchasing a shack for $800K in a good-school town)
- health care ($25K/year for a high-deductible family plan)
What's the point?
Or do we consider education or healthcare luxury now?
We need to fix those things. They are negatively impacting quite a lot of people. The lack of healthcare is hardly peculiar to farm labor jobs.
Healthcare is expensive, but there are programs for the poor.
When you move out of poor things get hard quick though because you don't get the above and so you have to come up with the prices you quote.
$20/hour for temporary backbreaking work in exchange for not being near friends or family, having to move constantly, having to live in a rural area (not what most people want), having no upward income mobility.
The people that do it, do it because they have no better option. Not because they want to.
Isn't that most people in their current job?
Whereas an engineer might answer that they like the work they do, I doubt someone bending over all day and picking strawberries would.
I've been told for years to "go get a real job." I'm medically handicapped. For that and other reasons I can't readily "just go get a real job."
The fact that you hate the working conditions and pay doesn't mean you inherently hate the work. There are people who garden as a relaxing and enjoyable hobby.
The assumption that all poorly paid people hate their work and all well paid people enjoy their work sounds like classist prejudice to me.
I knew someone (a programmer, in fact) who made good money, got fed up with the job and they we're told by someone close to them "You can't just up and quit. A job at Home Depot wouldn't even cover your car payment."
I've also seen stuff on the internet from people who are miserable, desperately want to change jobs and feel stuck because they make good money and can't readily walk away from their good income. They have family to support or college loans to pay or whatever.
What you find is that even people who are overall happy will bitch about their job or whatever, if only because it's a socially acceptable bonding ritual. Bragging to the miserable people around you about how everything in your life works wonderfully well all the time is a good way to get everyone to hate you.
There are real quality of life issues for low paid work, farm labor work, etc. But there are farm laborers who live in Mexico and work the fields in the US because they like living in Mexico, they have no desire to move to America and it pays ten times better than jobs in their town.
Not all of these people feel exploited or victimized. Exploitation isn't a good thing in any job, but it's not somehow the inherently part of doing physical labor and inherently not part of the picture for jobs with better public perception.
Every job has something you don't want to do. Either it is tedious and boring, or it is hard in same way. Many of those things could be ignored (my windows at home are dirty...) in your personal life but the job forces you to do them.
The above factors means even if you love your job there are things to complain about.
Some people join the army because they actively desire to get away from their family. Not everyone has some loving, cherished family situation.
Young people seem happy to be separated from their family for a few months to backpack across Europe or go play digital nomad.
During WW2, we promoted Victory Gardens and lots of people got on board.
I have tried to suggest that we should be checking our county extension office for info and trying to foster Victory Gardens in the face of the pandemic. We shouldn't wait until people are actually going hungry. But I'm a big fat nobody and I don't have much pull, so it's not exactly catching on like wildfire.
Most people work because they must. Even rich people have to do at least some work to effectively manage their wealth or it will run out. They just typically have more pleasant working conditions, but it's sort of a myth that rich people don't have to work.
They are less compelled to work at any particular thing right this minute so they can still eat next week, but when rich people do nothing at all but spend money, it eventually runs out.
(This may not be true for billionaires, but a million isn't worth what it used to be. This is generally true for most people, even people with a fair amount of wealth.)
The $100+k oil companies are required to pay to entice Americans to work in their remote oil fields is much closer to the reality.
Kinda how like Walmart could double the wage of its retail employees by increasing its prices by 6%.
Costco targets people with more disposable income, so not exactly a comparable market.
You presume people have those options. You presume they can readily and conveniently get to them in a way that makes financial and logistical sense.
In my small town, people who hate Walmart and are happy to drive an hour to a bigger city once a month to "visit the city" and do some of their shopping grudgingly shop at Walmart because it's the only source for a lot of things, even if you are happy to pay more money just to spite Walmart.
People from even smaller towns around us take the bus to shop here (or drive here), mostly at the Walmart. My small town is a regional shopping hub and has shopping and eateries more like a city several times larger because of it. We still can't reasonably get away from shopping at Walmart.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a Walmart fan and wouldn't have moved here if there was no Walmart. I'm just saying I've spoken with a local who hates Walmart and grudgingly does some of their shopping there anyway because they can't always find reasonable alternatives, try though they might.
Note that Walmart of then is not the Walmart of today. They used to have quality products at a good price.
My guess is that the migrant worker proportion of retail cost is <10%. Quadrupling their income would increase retail cost by 30%.
edit:
> What would happen to consumer food costs if farm wages rose and the extra costs were passed on to consumers? The average earnings of field workers were $9.78 an hour in 2008, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture survey of farm employers, and a 40 percent increase would raise them to $13.69 an hour. If this wage increase were passed on to consumers, the 10 cent farm labor cost of a $1 pound of apples would rise to 14 cents, and the retail price would only rise to $1.04.
Many farm-products have negligible farm-labour cost in their production: beans, rice, tomatoes, pulses, potatoes, onions, grains...
Their farm costs are in land, storage, drying and expensive equipment. They're not being picked by hand and manually weeded.
And even then, the price difference between the farm-gate and grocery store is massive.
Fruit and fresh vegetables are much more labor intense.
You could quintuple the pay of fruit pickers and your grocery bill would go up maybe 50%? Less?
We have markets - let the prices rise and we will see more farmers in the future.
E; I know it is not your theory Doreen - but it is a popular species of liberal (meaning democrat + republican) political propaganda.
Everything Moravec's Paradox ever said, everything Peter Thiel ever said about automation - it's right in front of us now.
For growth technology firms that is true - I remember his debate with Eric Schmidt - he was really arguing being a technology firm should be a temporary award contingent on how the firm behaves instead of a title. Technologies mature into infrastructure and stop being thought of as technologies.
This is part of his thesis that technology companies should be monopoly companies - and that the regulator should treat companies like Google as monopolies but the companies producing new value should be classified as different and given a honeymoon period.
His pointing at a technology rust belt is evocative evidence for the position.
Ctrl-F "raised pavement markers" http://rodneybrooks.com/agi-has-been-delayed/
I don't know if I'm right about those - but I am saying the technology giants are not putting their money where their mouth is.
Most everyone would prefer to be farmers (= farm owners = capitalist of at least the petit bourgeoisie, if not actually the haut bourgeoisie) instead of wage laborers.
But, no, I don't think that many office workers would prefer to be manual laborers, whether farm laborers or otherwise. Sure, with enough of a wage premium they might be lured away. But there are limits to the ability to pay higher real wages to farm labor, because food cost is a major basic expense to start with so higher nominal wages for farm labor necessarily (because while there is lots of aggregate profit in food, there's not lots of proportion of profit, which is where the room for absorbing wage increases without price impact comes from) means higher price index, which reduces real wages for everyone, including the farm laborers.
That includes me.
One thing missing from a lot of conversations is the detail that modern medicine is good at keeping you alive after a serious medical crisis. It's not so talented at restoring you to full function. The result is a lot of disabled people and that fact rarely enters the conversation about labor trends.
I suspect another element is that we have more pollution and what not impairing the functioning of pretty much everyone, but saying that risks being accused of being a conspiracy theory nutter. But it's been on my mind a lot here lately because pollution is down across the globe, traffic is down in my small town and my energy is -- "coincidentally" -- up and I'm getting more done than usual here lately, in spite of my underlying condition being an incurable genetic disorder.
This is where an imaginative government or community runs experiments - there are people like Elon Musk's brother - have they not been thinking about this?
If we have a large number of people turning their hand to something new - the solution space will open up and we might see new business models in production and distribution.
The political is part of this - there are now large numbers of angry young people wearing masks in the cities.
The real problem isn't just wages - it is also that our society decided some jobs are for people not bright enough to get into university so stigma hollowed the pride of the working class and that is what really cheapened and demoralized their labour.
Mike Rowe nailed it.
If you are working in construction chances are you are stronger than someone sitting at a desk. Put the person sitting at the desk in the construction job for a month and I bet they build some muscle.
Same as sitting the construction worker at a desk 8 hrs a day will make them physically weaker.
This is the reason for the boom in gym membership in the last ~15 years.
Gym membership may be up because we've lost a lot of other avenues for getting some exercise. Lifestyles have changed in recent decades. Kids are much more likely to play video games instead of playing sports with neighbor kids out in the yard or street.
I'm not against vide games. My kids always played a lot of them. But I also made sure they had opportunities to get some physical exercise, if only so my insomniac oldest child would sleep some and he couldn't sleep if he didn't get some physical activity in on a daily basis.
It's a very good thing for a period, as a part of growing up, but as a career, or for long periods. It's not good.
There will be plenty in the fields who would have had a career as a scientist, technician, engineer, who the world is now deprived of that because they are forced financially to work in a field (in the literal sense).
The world is going to die of starvation if we literally can't find anyone who will do this work at all for any amount of time at any pay rate.
I live in a small town with high unemployment and an excess of homeless people. I have fantasies of putting together an "irregular jobs/work" program to help connect locals with remote work, gig work, seasonal work, etc.
My theory is that if you can find some way to connect people to "irregular jobs" who don't want (or can't reasonably do) "regular jobs," a lot of people would be willing to work who aren't working currently.
When I and my sons were homeless, we tried to figure out how to find something like day labor jobs and we were mystified. I asked around on the internet and got a smidgen of feedback, but we never figured it out.
I feel like something went wrong somewhere along the way and America no longer knows how to help people find work of that sort anymore. But maybe some of our social ills would improve if we found a solution to that piece of it.
Oh, I heard that too, years and years ago and always wondered who it was. Somehow the internet has delivered!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PewDctni5c#t=90
That's some pretty sharp comedy writing and delivery.
Guess what: we have a global crisis at hand now. Which means that the neoliberal modus operandi fails without a struggle. It just collapsed overnight.
And if you think otherwise, just answer me this: if tourism cedes to exist, what do wild west neoliberal goverments do (with their current lack of social safety nets) with their 8-10% of their "workforce" having zero capability to get an income?
But I haven't seen much different in the rest of the UK - honestly, to claim the countryside is a giant retirement home seems absolutely absurd to me.
Shame there aren't many decently paying jobs there, though. Unless you work remotely I'm not sure what there is compared to the south east?
Obviously that doesn't negate the broader point - North of England isn't where most farms are, after all. And places where most farms are, are expensive.
Not strictly true in a competative market that races for the lowest possible cost. It's the toxic company culture mentality that in this case, the shareholders are the customers and they want to have their cheap food.
Hence many farmers been squeezed via large corporations and dairy farmers and many others operate upon margins that are just insane and unsustainable that many end up producing at a loss overall.
> Nobody forced the farmers...
The markets did force them, right? If a farmer started making more money from using cheap labour, then the rest would need to follow suit.
> It was just a simple decision for them...
It doesn't seems like anything about this subject is "simple" as farming is big and wide.
1. some farming is loss making in the EU even with cheap labour 2. without cheap labour this subset would need to be subsides 100% (vs ~80% as it is now) 3. you simply cannot fight against ultra low wages from developing countries; you either adapt or die
Agriculture has an identical problem in terms of the market clearing wage for labor, except they don't have the profit margins of the oil fields that allow them to throw $100+k at farm labor to make the problem go away. In that version of the world, it would be better to be farm labor than a farmer. It should also be noted that in some parts of the US, the migrant labor is not "cheap" either by any normal definition as they are paid well above the median wage in the US since they have all of the leverage.
When I was growing up a significant fraction of farm labor in my area was ex-convicts from all over the country. The labor supply was so short that it was one of the best paying jobs that would readily hire an ex-convict. You still see some of this but it is greatly reduced, mostly just convicts who are from rural regions and are already accustomed to that environment.
Overall - this may be of interest: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
They had the alternative to give up, maybe try to find a job in the city or suicide? I am wondering if you imagine this farmers having a big pile of cache because they cheeped out on workers.
Maybe I am wrong so please let me know what would you do if you own a farm and you can't find a job nearby, some people will abandon their homes and go in a big city to work there but not everyone can do that or enjoy working on some assembly line and live in a concrete block.
This is a serious and concerning situation. However, it also has a certain schadenfreude of wealthy Europeans waking up in horror at having to pay local wages in excess of local social safety nets in order to grow their own food.
Absolutely. It's exploitative to be sure, at least here in the US. Farms don't want to pay more for labor, and in some cases (perhaps the plurality of them), the migrant laborers are paid under the table to avoid the tax burden on both ends. Of course, this means the company doesn't have to worry about payroll taxes, workman's comp, unemployment, etc., and the workers aren't going to register with the IRS to get a tax ID.
Additionally, the laborers are paid so little it's difficult to think of this in any other way than as a form of slavery sanctioned by the state as it turns a blind eye to what amount to egregious violations of labor laws.
Part of the blame I place on us as consumers. If we weren't so price sensitive to things like fresh produce, perhaps we could pay more such that things are done above board and we become less reliant on migrant labor. Either way, something has to change.
That Schadenfreude seems to be prevalent among the far right here, who might just as soon become the object of it when differences start to widen again and thousands of people start seeking a better live by migrating outright.
This is not about farming though: it's the canary in the coalmine for the entire economy.
You cannot just stop the economy and print magic money and expect everything to be ok.
We have to be smart like Koreans and control this virus effectively so we can progressively get some of the gears going again, because pain is coming otherwise.
Cheap good food => more people can afford to buy it => less hunger/suffering in the world.
Here is another example:
Cheap technology => more people have access to computers => more innovations are possible => more cheap technology => better life quality.
You can have cheap good food with mechanical and/or high-scale production. Just means you'll be eating bananas instead of strawberries. And whatever's in-season or canned out-of-season instead of fresh anything year-round. And chickpeas instead of beef. Sugar instead of honey. Lettuce instead of kale.
If anything, this is an opportunity to make cheap food even cheaper instead of using that land resource to make luxury fresh fruits/herbs year-round.
People will complain about it non-stop though.
Especially fruits as they're often very hard to harvest through automation.
In the coming years I'd wager that a lot of farms will increasingly go for automation now. That'll have it's own consequences.
The effect of this virus on our global society is gonna be massive and will likely bring a lot of changes.. not necessary good ones either
So very true and an area in which the robotic revolution has always been mooted to happen soon, for many years...
However the transition will have an impact as once you remove those jobs, you shift the issues. So yes, automation will make things cheaper in one hand, but more expensive in another.
If for whatever reason it seems that this year there's not going to be enough migrant labor to harvest your strawberries, then when the spring comes you can plow that field over and plant potatoes, which will require much, much less labor and feed more people from the same field.
This year is very much not 'business as usual' both in production and also in consumption. Just as most other fields, farming needs to adapt to the changing situation; IMHO it's counterproductive to invest a lot of resources to try and preserve the status quo - we're going to see that some farm products become harder to grow, or harder to transport, or are more difficult for people to afford because of economic problems. It does not mean that we should heroically strive to preserve our ability eat as before, if that means that we're going to be eating less of product like that - less fresh food year round (greenhouses or imported), less meat, less fruit, etc, than that should be accepted, and it's okay; and it's okay if the circumstances force the farmers to switch from high-value labor intensive foods back to cheap, efficient staple crops.
A prime example is the scenes I've seen from Netherlands sizeable flower plantations; as flower purchasing in most of their export markets is way down, a lot of the harvest is just discarded. I'm certain that some of that field/greenhouse capacity will be repurposed for basic food growing instead.
Yes.
I mean, not the decreasingly relevant to reality American mythical archetype (always invoked in political context as if it were the mainstay of American Life) of the independent yeoman farmer class, but the actual corporate agribusiness industry which has long displaced it in owning and operating farmland.
Many people in the west don't realize how good they have it
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
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