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Comment by drclau | Hacker News Reader

Not really related to the subject of the article, but your comment reminds me of employers in Romania complaining they can't find people to hire, while they offer small salaries and people just leave the country for better paying jobs abroad. The solution to their problem is really simple: make better offers.

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The exact same thing is happening in Australia in regards to farmers and fruit picking labour. With international borders shut they are unable to exploit foreign workers and complain that young adults are refusing to relocate for $5 an hour hard labour jobs.

Farming is low margin. Farmers don’t get to set the price of their products, and they aren’t handed billions in capital to burn through or 1000x multiples on their profit in the public markets. When most businesses say they can’t hire someone and the reason is because they don’t pay enough, the underlying cause of their low pay is usually because that’s what the company can afford.

Sure, farmers could pay $10/hr, but unless your Doritos were $10 a bag, they’d lose money.

...yes? The alternative to farmers is not harvesting their crops at all, since with the borders closed foreign labor is not available.

If nobody wants to buy $10 doritos, that means the product can't exist in a market without cheap labor.

Well perhaps that's the problem of the market. That it can't particularly function to enrich some people without gross levels of exploitation.

Being paid $5/hour farming in Australia vs $0.50/hour assembling shoes in Malaysia. Wow, such exploitation.

"Exploitation" is a relative term, some people would rather be exploited in the countryside of a first-world nation rather than the countryside of their homeland.

Yes, they are both exploitation and they are both evil.

Which is more exploitative, working for $5/hour in agriculture in a wealthy country, 50¢/hour in an urban factory in a poor country, or $1/day in a rural peasant village somewhere or having no work at all?

It’s all relative.

That's a bit like asking, "Which is worse? A shot to the head or an overdose of morphine?" Either way the person's going to die.

> Being paid $5/hour farming in Australia vs $0.50/hour assembling shoes in Malaysia. Wow, such exploitation.

The Australian national minimum wage is $19.84/hr.

Getting paid about a quarter of minimum wage is very clearly exploitation. There may be other benefits for actually working in Australia, but that's not really relevant here when you're trying to attract native Australians to work for you.

In particular, when the wage is low enough you have slavery in all but name. People working for your shitty pay staying in your shitty dormitory eating your shitty food because they can't afford not. The end result people leaving when visas run out with more debt, and headlines about people forced to pick fruit in bikinis and allegations of sexual assault, because that happens when some people gain that sort of power.

To me it always seemed a bit similar to justifications used for the "peculiar institution" - the system can't exist without slavery, therefore slavery must exist. The benefits of cheaper labor was well appreciated; Carnegie called immigration "the golden stream which flows into the country every year."[1]

[1]https://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/andrew-carnegie/trium...

True! Except it's not just doritos, it's everything you eat.

And it's not just cheap labor, it's labor exploited under pain of deportation.

Doritos aren't going to get more expensive, because like all the real staple crops, corn is completely mechanized, and you have one guy driving an air-conditioned tractor or combine, following GPS-plotted courses.

Not sure that’s the best example to use, since food costs are a trivial fraction of the retail price of a bag of Doritos, and harvesting labor is a trivial fraction of the price of food.

Edit: that was just based on my general memory of non-perishable food economics. But I googled it and found this (sorry, quora) from someone who would know, a 2 oz bag of potato chips costs 15 cents to produce and bring to (retail) market. Of that, a fraction is potato prices.

https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-a-bag-of-57g-of-Lays-act...

Edit: fix Verizon math.

The reason I buy expensive eggs, milk and cheese is that I know that the supermarkets fuck over the farmers. I never buy the supermarket brand, unless it's the last one on the shelf. The price difference is sometimes 1.5x but unless you're really "broke" broke, you don't notice the difference. It's a few cents a week.

Good idea, but how do you know the extra money is properly passed on?

While, like most things in life, it's not a guarantee, doing basic research about the farms and the cooperatives that produce the goods will provide some insight. Almost anything is better than a CAFO (Concentrated animal feeding operation).

I always buy the supermarket brand, even though I can easily afford more. It's not because I want to save a few pennies on each purchase; it's helping to drive prices down on all overpriced goods, helping out those really in need.

Same reason I avoid organic whenever possible. We don't need boutique food.

I agree much of the “benefits” of organic food are not really true or meaningful, but I do try and buy local when I can.

That doesn't even make sense in neoclassical economics. One person's effects on the market are necessarily tiny, but if buying more of Brand X has any effect it will be to drive up the price of Brand X. You're actually harming "those really in need", and you should feel bad about it.

People have to eat food. Food in aggregate has one of the most inelastic demand curves imaginable. If the price rises because the production costs increase, people will still buy food. They might buy different food, and you'll see a decrease in acreage given over to labor-intensive crops, but that's just the free market at work.

The thing is, if farmers in Australia increase wages and thus their product becomes more expensive, the product on supermarket shelves will not become more expensive. Rather, supermarkets will import food from another country. Food is, with few exceptions, a commodity. The producer does not set the price of the commodity, the market does.

I am telling this as an engineer working in the Canada's oil and gas sector. Since 2014, salaries in our sector have decreased and firms are struggling. "Just raise the price of oil" is not an actionable advice. The price of oil is not ours to set. It's the market's

It just shows most people working in Tech Industry, and specifically software ( or web ) development ( as oppose to Tech / software within Oil Industry or any other industry ) have absolutely zero idea on market or commodity trading.

I consider food security a national security issue. Produce is one of the few areas where I would consider a tarif justified. Every country should be able to feed it's citizens with the food grown there, or they risk hunger when cut off by war or natural disaster.

And countries do that, but for a few strategic ones, not everything. Canada produces lots of wheat and dairy and maple syrup. It even has a strategic maple syrup reserve. But it does not produce a lot of citrus fruits or pistachios or dates. It may be possible for US to produce everything within the country—it is a gigantic country and has just about every climate there is. But it would be an ecological disaster if countries without those attributes do the same. Think of all the heating required to produce warm-climate fruits in Canada.

Oh! One of my favorite ag articles talked about the challenges of growing oranges in russia!

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/04/fruit-trenches-culti...

You're absolutely right that perhaps not everything should be grown everywhere, but I strongly believe that a country should have a local source of all the calories and vitamins / minerals they need. In Canada, for example, maybe they encourage farmers to grow greens, brocolli or potatoes instead of citrus for vitamin c, but they absolutely need a source.

The EU sets fairly high tariffs on food imports, since food security means we must maintain local food production.

Australia does not use this approach, and instead seems to have pushed other countries to eliminate their own tariffs for the TPP.

What tariff does is that it moves the price point at which the retailers switch to imports a bit higher. Tariff does not eliminate the ceiling. There still would be a ceiling on price, determined by international commodity price + X% tariff.

So the tariff needs to be high enough to be absolutely ruinous. See, for example, Canada's tariff on dairy. Since Canada runs a cartel on dairy producers, Canada does set the domestic price of milk at $4/gal. This is incompatible with the US subsidy model, where it prices out to around $1.50 a gallon -- so there's a 270% tariff on dairy imports. The great thing about numbers is there's always a bigger one.

Yes, you can do that. It's not something the farmers strapped for workers can do, but the government certainly can. It would not be particularly popular in most political climates, so passing such laws in democracies are always difficult. But as the Canada example shows, not impossible.

Apples and Oranges. If you include global supply, then you have to increase salaries "globally". We all (I assume) should know that demand/supply set the price.

But imported products don't fly right into the country. There is customs, and denying/tariffing them is a policy that countries are very actively using. So at the end of the day, it's a political decision.

Edit: On the other hand, if you are exporting stuff (oil for Canada), then you can't really do that for the external market. Might explain why the government will let some sectors run with illegals (to remain competitive); the alternative being their ultimate demise.

If you ban import X from a country, the country will likely ban import Y from your country in retaliation. Sometimes the net effect would still be in your favour, but often times it would not be. Do you know why American brands dominate the US truck market? It started with a tariff on American chicken by some European countries and it quickly snowballed into much more [0][1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/01/25/511663527/epis...

So.... reduce production, and supply/demand curves should get you back financially on track?

Of course, you might get pilloried for the artificial scarcity, but hey... nobody ever likes the capitalist :)

We reduce production, US, Russia, and Saudi Arabia would be more than happy to fill the gap. Actually Saudi Arabia prefers prices that are lower than the strike point for non-traditional oil, so it can get rid of competition from likes of Canada. How should we convince Russia and Saudi Arabia to take a hit to their exports in order to help us out, when we cannot even convince our biggest ally, the US?

Sure, but they'd lose less money than if they didn't hire anyone and couldn't sell their crops at all.

> Farmers don’t get to set the price of their products

Actually farmers could set any price if they colluded to manipulate the market. People will buy food at any price and everyday.

This is offset by imported food. If 100% of American farmers colluded to fix prices, they'd have their lunch eaten(hah) by food importers. Obviously not everything is importable(eg rice), but there is more to the market than the American farmers.

You're right, there is more to the market but not how you describe it. Tariffs are available to any American cartel willing to buy enough politicians. Take a look at sugar, for example. [0]

[0]https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/candy-coated-cartel-tim...

> complain that young adults are refusing to relocate for $5 an hour hard labour jobs.

USD $5/hour is what I earned as a teenager working the fields by hand (picking corn, beans, and fruit for sale same-day at the farmers small stands throughout the area) in the early 1990s... That's insane. Is that USD $5 or AD?

I think people will one day demand higher pay for desk jobs over outdoor work. Looking back on my early life, the hard outdoor work was incredibly valuable to me. Desk jobs sometimes were soul-sucking, depression inducing. Not always and my dev work now is desk work that doesn't suck.

Now, outdoor work with a high injury rate is a different story.

That's in AUD.

What I've seen first-hand in some farming communities was closer to $10AUD/hr, but that is still far below our actual minimum wage of $19.84AUD/hr.

Here in america farmers hire illegals to harvest crops, claiming that no american would do the work. This has always struck me as a really terrible excuse. I'm sorry, you can't simply break the law because you'd have to pay an american $20 / hr to do the work. Sure, it means that your tomatoes are more expensive, but also, now there's a hell of an incentive to apply automation to the problem yes? If you don't like the law, maybe pressure your representatives to reform immigration instead of just hoping everyone turns a blind eye to your exploitation.

A couple of years ago, a serial offender food producer was raided, multiple times. 600+ undocumented workers were found, and all spoke of management knowing their status.

The workers were detained, deported, and so on.

After several raids, not so much as a misdemeanor was levied against a single person, nor a fine to the company in general.

Kind of makes me think, what's the point when these laws aren't actually enforced?

The point is to punish and cause pain to the immigrants. Regardless of the original justification of a system, the point of a system is what it does or will do. That is what this system does and will do unless changed.

"For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law." Getúlio Vargas had it all worked out.

Of course it isn't that simple. If your farm's tomatoes are more expensive than your neighbors' tomatoes, then nobody will buy them. You'll quickly go bankrupt.

It is also difficult because of the two tiers of labor. A farmer will try increasing wages by $1/hour, and still struggle to find enough workers. Wages would probably have to be doubled before new workers—Americans—would start to enter the industry.

This is the reason tariffs exist. You levy a fee that makes the imported food cost as much as food picked using domestic labor.

Or, you know, you let unprofitable endeavors be substituted by profitable ones, and you just import food from different places where it is profitable. Just make sure not to wage war with them all. That's always an alternative to subsidies and tariffs, but it's not as politically useful.

This is how the US gave up its ability to manufacture so many goods.

It's also in general how we end up with monopolies. Well-funded companies operating at a loss until they're the only noteworthy players ain't exactly unheard of.

"gave up" sounds like an unnecessarily ominous take on "delegate". But what's your exact point? Do you believe this is an irremediable situation or that know-how has been lost to time in the age of information?

I'm assuming you're implying a conversation about China and their manufacturing capabilities. But worst case scenario short of nuclear war, assuming US-China burns bridges and somehow for some reason now US is fully unable to import Chinese manufactured goods; how does this eliminate the US and all other countries from investing in an area that has now become more profitable? You could argue that prices would increase, but then again you aren't owed cheap manufacturing, and subsidies and tariffs are paid by either the taxpayer or the consumer (which tends to have a knock-off effect on the rest of economy, anyway). There was never a free lunch.

> reform immigration

That's easier said than done. The problem is that in order to reform immigration you have to do one of two things:

1. Start treating people fairly, with the result being higher food prices, which will make some of your constituents very unhhappy

2. Codify the current class structure into law so that you can continue to exploit cheap labor legally. The optics on that are really bad.

Exploiting people off the books is the path of least resistance for everyone, including the workers (manifestly so, or they wouldn't risk life and limb to be here).

If farmers paid enough to get Americans to do seasonal farm labor their produce would cost twice as much as central/south American produce and they would immediately go out of business as everyone buys cheap imported fruit.

A labor-protectionist strategy has to be paired with a goods-protectionist strategy (tariffs or bans on imports).

Sounds like they don’t have a business, and should shut down.

You can fix this with import duties. If the country you are importing from doesn't have good labor laws, you charge them 100% extra.

People get really pissed off when food gets more expensive. Politicians realize that and will therefore never pass legislation that would cause such drastic price increases on food.

If they enforced the laws already on the books, they'd have to pass new laws to fix things. I see that as a net positive. If you selectively enforce against illegal immigrants, well, that's very much a 'rules for thee, not for me' situation isn't it?

Now everyone is poorer.

This kind of reasoning can be used to justify slavery..

Except giving someone a job isn't slavery... it's actually the complete opposite.

Here in america farmers hire illegals to harvest crops, claiming that no american would do the work

This is a political talking point that has been repeated so often that people believe it is true.

During the recession of 2008, there were stores on local TV news in many places showing unemployed Americans waiting in long lines for the opportunity do do those jobs that the politicians kept saying no American wanted to do for those wages. Meatpacking plants, especially, had more than enough Americans to choose from who were willing to work for low wages.

Because these things happened in "flyover" states, they were only very rarely shown on television on the coasts, and so the meme stuck.

A similar oft-repeated lie is that American farmers are all a bunch of Republican hillbillies who hate brown immigrants.

Around 2010, I attended a conference in Seattle for farmers in the Pacific Northwest. The main topic of discussion was how to increase legal immigration from Mexico so that they could have more farmworkers to pick the cherries and apples and mint and whatnot. These people were talking about goals of making people from Mexico and Latin America U.S. citizens in staggering numbers.

The more you actually go places and do things and meet people and talk to them, the more you realize that the words coming out of the political organizations on the coasts are mostly for their own benefit, and do not reflect reality.

My somewhat educated guess is that these farmers in the PNW don't share the same politics as farmers in the rural south or midwest.

That and Republicans have grown way more hostile to immigration since 2010, so it's an interesting anecdote but not sure how well it translates across the US, where polling shows farmers are overwhelmingly Republican who tend also tend to hate immigration legal or not.

"where polling shows farmers are overwhelmingly Republican who tend also tend to hate immigration legal or not."

source?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/03/why-y...

so no, no source. cool

My somewhat educated guess is that these farmers in the PNW don't share the same politics as farmers in the rural south or midwest

When you say it's an "educated" guess, educated how? It only seems to reflect the usual bigotry that comes out of the coasts.

polling shows farmers are overwhelmingly Republican who tend also tend to hate immigration legal or not

If you're going to make a statement that sweeping, you really should back it up with credible sources.

"When you say it's an "educated" guess, educated how? It only seems to reflect the usual bigotry that comes out of the coasts."

I lived first 28 years of my life in the rural south and now live in the midwest.

My entire family and most of my friends growing up are the people you claim I'm bigoted against...

"If you're going to make a statement that sweeping, you really should back it up with credible sources."

The fact that farmers are generally far more conservative and republican than the median voter or average American isn't exactly some shocking new insight.

You seem to have never spent much time around these folks or have done much research on them if this comes as a surprise to you.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/03/why-y...

Are these just bigoted facts "out of the coasts" too:?

I don't think your points really contradict your first statement. First, people tend to drop their standards on the type of work they're willing to do and pay they'll accept when they're desperate. In 2008 a lot of people needed a job. Any job was better than no job. I'm not surprised that jobs that would normally be unpopular had lines of people applying at that time.

Your second point about farmers trying to increase legal immigration in 2010 clearly indicates most Americans won't regularly do this work for the wages being offered. Why else would farmers be looking to hire immigrant workers just 2 years after locals were lining up to get these jobs?

While it would be nice if there was a way to get enough immigrants working legally to fill those jobs that doesn't seem to have happened. Short of another large economic downturn I don't see Americans working those jobs either. That leaves people who are working in the US illegally to fill the gap.

> A similar oft-repeated lie is that American farmers are all a bunch of Republican hillbillies who hate brown immigrants.

> Around 2010, I attended a conference in Seattle for farmers in the Pacific Northwest. The main topic of discussion was how to increase legal immigration from Mexico so that they could have more farmworkers to pick the cherries and apples and mint and whatnot. These people were talking about goals of making people from Mexico and Latin America U.S. citizens in staggering numbers.

Farmers are, for the most part, single issue voters: Whoever has the best plan to support agriculture and small businesses gets their vote.

>Because these things happened in "flyover" states, they were only very rarely shown on television on the coasts, and so the meme stuck.

How do you determine from TV that the people lining up for meatpacking jobs were not undocumented immigrants?

Like, it is generally accepted there aren't any in "flyover states" or something?

I never really thought of it until this moment, but you know how within 100 miles of any border, your constitutional rights are somewhat compromised so DHS can operate? That ought to mean a pretty substantial incentive for people who are undocumented to migrate inward. So I would bet they do.

About half of US hired farmworkers are illegal immigrants, says the U.S. Department of Agriculture.[1] It was only 12% in 1991, but passed 50% by 2000.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor

Sounds like exactly the same problem British farmers are having post-Brexit with things like fruit-picking, they're scratching their heads wondering why British workers aren't keen on having half their wages taken for "rent" to live six people to a crappy caravan on-site and do backbreaking labour day in day out. Their only choices are to improve their wages, conditions, both, or go bankrupt.

> The solution to their problem is really simple: make better offers.

That's certainly a simple solution.

The problem with simple solutions is that they are near guaranteed to not actually be feasible or realistic.

If it's literally this or the company folds, that seems realistic.

Unrelated to the initial post.

> The problem with simple solutions is that they are near guaranteed to not actually be feasible or realistic.

This. There is no amount of money anyone sane can be given to stay in Romania. Most recently i’ve read they (hospitals) were tying covid patients to their beds.

Couldn't help but comment on this as some of things i discovered are shocking for an eu member country (or any country for that matter), such as EU leading human trafficking, police corruption, collapsing health care, and the list goes on.

But sure, the simple solution is to give people money, not the constant abuse taking place at work and outside that makes people want to flee that place.

That's every poor country in existence. Not everyone has the same mindset as you, however. Provided with basic incentives, many, if not most, would not want to leave family, friends, common culture, etc, just for a wealthy life - they just want basic stability.

Companies paying more (offering more at least) would begin to slow this domino effect, which raises standards of living and provides more funding for the government to provide services and ultimately pressure for increases in quality of life by the voting public. Everyone wins.

Ultimately not everyone can emigrate - it's an impossibility. The brain drain will continue to be real, so it's incumbent upon these companies hiring to raise their wages and retain talent.

Agreed - my statement is in regards to "simple solutions".

That was my point. The simplest solutions are sometimes the most effective, as well. Incentivizing brain power to remain the country via pay increases seems like the most basic approach one can take, considering the GP was talking about Romanian studios complaining they can't find/hold talent and they are competing with the rest of the EU.

The simplest solutions are the most effective, until you realise it isn't at all simple to match the 200-500% pay increase they're emigrating for.

Step in as a multi-national company, open a software engineering office, pay well over "local market value" and you get good software engineers, at a lower price than moving them elsewhere. They, in turn, get a better quality of life, don't have to emigrate (which for some is a bonus, and for some the opposite (a malus?)) and relatively speaking have more spending power than they would have had, if they moved.

It is really not as easy as go "this is the exchange rate" and simply use that to compare pay in different countries.

Well, the problem is this: it might not make economic sense for those specific companies to hire people at a higher rate.

Companies aren't going to say "I guess we're inefficient and should just die." They're going to fight to survive and thrive, which is what you're seeing.

Then again, some companies ARE just cheap. You never know.

I was at a hotel with crappy service and asked about the problems with house keeping. The manager told me everyone in town (Traverse City MI) was trying to bring in foreigners to do housekeeping because they couldn't get local labor.

They said the standard is 30 minutes per room per day. I figure at a very generous $50 per hour (100k / year) it should run $25 to have my room taken care of. Now that doesnt cover the shared costs - doing laundry, cleaning the pool, front desk, etc... but my room was something like $150 per night. How the fuck can they not find people to clean rooms?

Answer: they're too cheap to pay a decent wage. But why? My suspicion is that all these places are actually leveraged far too much and paying rent/interest/dividends so much they can barely operate.

I suspect low interest rates and other incentives to "stimulate" economies are actually causing these problems.

You make no sense. No one will pay $25 to clean a single room in a hotel. Just because your room is $150 it doesn’t mean that “there’s plenty to pay everyone 100k/year.

I assume the cost of a room cleaning (including costs other than direct labor) is closer to $5. That's about what hotels will often give you in some sort of funny money to skip a cleaning.

The service industry might be labor intensive but is hardly the only cost for the owner(s). What about mortgage payments, marketing, integrating with third parties (expedia), gas & electricity, general maintenance / accounting / security etc. I am sure there are hundreds of other costs that I have no visibility into

That was exactly my point. Probably loan payments are the reason they cant afford to pay people to clean rooms.

If they weren't leveraged that much, some other company would pay more for the property by being leveraged that much.

That is, of course, the solution everywhere that companies complain about not being able to hire skilled employees. Fund it and they will come.

This kinda sounds like saying "why are poor countries poor? Can't they just pay everyone more and then they won't be poor?" I get what you are saying but I don't think this will work if the problem is country-wide. You can't just magically increase everyone's wages in a country.

1. The problem isn't country wide. 2. Don't have to increase everyone's - just those with a "shortage". Companies want a market economy - except when it comes to salaries.

> 1. The problem isn't country wide

Sorry, I though I was on the Romania subthread.

At college I had a professor who I worked for who grew up in Romania. Apparently the song that kids had back in the day was: "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

https://youtu.be/-Jh0EN1De4Q

sorry for pun. But that's not always a solution. Sometimes employer is greedy. Sometimes his business just does not allow to pay enough salary.

Don't forget the whining from bureaucrats when American tech takes over the local market, and ships profits back to it's headquarter where... they employ Romanians expats!

Ha, I know this all too well(2000-2006) and it's strange to see/hear it's still happening now.

You've just described the US H1-B visa program.

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