You don't catch anything from a strawberry.
This job is fundamentally no different from others, and way safer than for instance fast-food-window worker.
This job is fundamentally no different from others, and way safer than for instance fast-food-window worker.
Those conditions are not safe.
There's literally no step in "picking strawberries" that can't be done while maintaining social distancing. It will increase the cost of labor, and force humans to be treated like... humans. But farming isn't inherently unsafe re: coronavirus.
I'm not saying this to justify the current conditions, I'm just pointing out that it's this or an eradication of the industry.
edit: an eradication I'm totally fine with.
Okay, but is there a functioning society? Is there some welfare system where these people could take refuge?
I don't think so. These workers come all the way from some place where their situation wouldn't be any better, otherwise that's where they'd stay. Should the industry go extinct, they'd be strictly worse off.
That's not my argument. Of course, if a slave owner has to give up on their "property", they're not gonna provide housing, food and equipment to their former slaves anymore. The price of labor kicks in.
Perhaps that price is lower than keeping a slave, perhaps it is higher. There's some arguments as to why free workers are actually cheaper. In any case, that price is always in flux.
You're not going to discover that price while maintaining slavery, because the slaves have no opportunity to name their price. That's why the slave owner's argument is invalid.
By contrast, the workers at these farms do have the choice. Nothing forces them, besides their own economic situation. They have no claim to welfare, no other skill that would pay better.
> It doesn't mean we should support inhumane treatment of other people so that a handful of "Farmers" can get rich.
By and large, farmers don't get rich. They're under price pressure from the store chains that buy their produce. Those store chains don't get rich either, they're under price pressure from consumers. Margins are razor-thin.
We can all stop buying strawberries and let those farms go bankrupt, everything will be strictly worse.
Right - starving to death is always an option, nothing is forcing them. Free market at work!
>By and large, farmers don't get rich. They're under price pressure from the store chains that buy their produce. Those store chains don't get rich either, they're under price pressure from consumers. Margins are razor-thin.
It's not 1980, that's a fallacy and has been for a long time. By and large, "farmers" are large corporations printing money.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2017/march/large-family...
>The shift has come at the expense of small farms. Small family and nonfamily farms accounted for 46 percent of production in 1991, but by 2015, that share had fallen under 25 percent.
The free market is not a welfare system, though it can contribute a great deal to welfare, by keeping consumer prices down. It can support a welfare system by being sufficiently productive to raise taxes to pay for stuff.
Meanwhile, those countries that do not employ a free market are poor across the board. Wealth is only achieved through corruption. That poverty is then blamed on "foreign intervention". Well, fair enough, but if your system can't handle that foreign intervention, it's still inferior.
> It's not 1980, that's a fallacy and has been for a long time. By and large, "farmers" are large corporations printing money.
Just because they're larger today doesn't mean they are printing money. It's a highly competitive business. Of course a large farm can be a bit more profitable due to economics of scale, but there's always pressure from the bottom, because the threshold to market entry isn't that high.
Just try to accept that nothing is wrong with business profits per se. Let's say farming businesses have a 12% profit margin[1]. That's the price you pay for them to take the risk of running the business, and to do so efficiently. The profit margin reflects the real price of that service, just like the price of labor. Absent of any monopolies, it's a fair price. You couldn't get it any cheaper by, say, making the government do it. To the contrary.
[1] https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2018/08/operating-profit-m...
If this approach is unsustainable (and it would be), then there are a lot of other things that need to change. What doesn't need to happen is us shrugging our shoulders, saying "meh, farmworkers need to suffer, it's too expensive otherwise"
However, the wholesale price may be far lower than that, because of oligopsony.
Countries tend to protect their agricultural industry from foreign competition fairly effectively, particularly for staples.
It is very uncommon in our experience to find undocumented workers in these regulated environments, though you will still find plenty at the even city sponsored "day laborer" centers, or working for the crews that end up selling their fruit on street corners in cities. From what we have hears, 20-30 years ago there was a much larger truly undocumented immigrant issue.
[1] https://sg.news.yahoo.com/blogs/singaporescene/hidden-slums-...
What relevance does that have to whether or not these workers should get reasonable protection from coronavirus risks, and treatment if they get sick?
Maybe we should pay more for strawberries and treat workers better?
Hopefully masks are there when travelling? And an isolated cohort in a bunkhouse has some benefits. Of course it only takes one.
Workers also typically live on caravans near/on the fields in very cramped quarters to save commute time/cost.
That could easily be changed to a more distributed method with per-worker wheelbarrows or backpacks, but presumably that would decrease throughput and increase costs.
I'd rather have less strawberries, that are more expensive, than have strawberries picked by someone who died as a result of contracting COVID-19 in a field whilst they were picking strawberries to earn money to feed themselves/their family.
It turns out policing entire supply chains by consumers isn't viable. Either enforce regulations, or do nothing. The middle ground of trying to shame companies into doing 'good' things just leaves uneven playing fields for companies without a public face to shame.
e.g. If a vaccine is realistically a year off (which is realistic, though we clutch onto every bit of preliminary news when in reality most are failures), in the relatively near term we will start to all have to take more risks, and the majority of us will go through COVID-19.
Would be interesting to see Italian, Spanish, French data on infections by profession.
I'd guess its going to be biased to travelers(travel related professions), travel sector(airports, hotels, stations etc), health workers, seniors/patients already in hospital for something else, and families of all of the above.
Do you have some subject matter expertise or was this just intuition?
(If that comment was some sort of outlier, must not be reading much on HN.)