If a business can’t pay a living wage, automate the role.
I'm sure those farms unwilling to pay a fair wage will start investing in those expensive machines' R&D. Then do it for all other crops.
Half the blame has to go to consumers and a lack of desire for fair-wage strawberries that cost 2x as much.
You can't claim the market will resolve things when there is no meaningful opportunity for customers to "vote with their wallets". It requires not only equal access to the two products, but also full information about what the differences are.
I think it's more than slightly higher. Cherries and peaches are both stone fruit. They're grown in similar regions, and the trees are so closely related you see hybrids commonly marketed. Cherries are regularly 2x-3x the price by weight because the smaller fruit means they're more labor intensive. Raspberries are also noticeably more expensive than strawberries, and I assume it's because they're harder to pick.
These are labor-intensive produce, so labor drives the price. Staples like wheat aren't, so an extra $5 per hour for someone driving a tractor really would be "slightly higher prices."
That said, even 2x the price for strawberries (at least around here) would only be another $3-5, depending on what size container you bought. That would still fall in the range of "slightly higher" in my book, at least in an absolute sense.
Raise the prices if you have to and tell the consumers to shove it. Chipotle just did this, farms can do it.
If you can't survive without slave labor don't survive at all.
What you're saying only works if you're Driscoll's and tell farmers to pay workers more or enough consumers demand it, but I just don't see much demand for this. The most we've seen is Fairtrade chocolate, coffee, etc., but there's only limited demand for it.
Tractors automate things. Email automates things. Computing in general automated things.
Especially without right to repair!
<Gasp! Some might even save some of that extra money for use in the future!>
E.g.
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/203233/1/1667730924....
>Ashenfelter says the evidence from increased food prices suggests that basically all of the "increase of labor costs gets passed right on to the customers."
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/02/16/967333964/what...
Wasnt transfer from profits supposed to be impossible in both cases because of competition?
I'm sure there's a good reason why employers lobby so hard to keep wages down even when it doesn't affect them in the slightest cos they can just pass the costs on...
Yeah, because demand also drops when prices go up. Whether that's "good for everyone else" is debatable. Fast food? Maybe. Groceries? Probably not.
That's probably largely why they try to keep prices the same and suffer the hit to profits.