Farmworkers thought a new overtime law would help them. Now, they want it gone
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This is the crux of it. Man wants to pay his workers a non livable wage and have them stay on-farm 7 days a week. That’s an unreasonable proposition. This law might be the wrong lever to pull, but the fundamental issue here is farm owners are trying to get people to do something without paying them fairly.
The solution, in my mind, is collective bargaining. Farm workers should group together and demand whatever would help them, and lawmakers should support them doing that - rather than a top-down approach that ends in whack-a-mole. There is no one little tweak from somebody who’s never picked a veggie in their life that’s going to fix this - empower and support the people to fix their own problems.
Given you got that far into the article, what are your suggestions for the farmers pain points? How would you price asparagus that needed twice the labor costs to harvest than a box next week that didn't?
But make no mistake, the exact same thing will happen on farms with much lower hourly wages where the same level of skill isn't required.
As for your second question, you and I both know the answers are difficult.
Do you think it's reasonable for American labourers to make the same as a labourer in Peru?
Because that's the issue here: globalized trade causing a race to the bottom in labour compensation.
IMO there aren't many great answers, but "pay people a Peruvian wage in the US" certainly isn't a good one.
$30/hour isn’t what every worker is making.
You have to live on the farm 24/7 to get those 40 hours.
Normal worker was getting $1400/week, which is not $30*40hrs. Now closer to $1000/week, apparently. Tho these numbers are all from the owner not the workers.
But ok yeah 30/hour for 48 (soon 40) hours of work, but you have to live on the farm 7 days a week. Sooo… that’s 30 * 48 / (24 * 7) = 8.60/hour.
If the target is to have each worker do 70 hours/week, but you’re capped at 40 hours before overtime kicks in, that only brings your cost up by:
With overtime: 40 normal hours * $30 + 30 overtime hours * $45 = $2550
Without overtime: 70 normal hours * $30 = $2100
Difference is $450/worker, or a ~21% increase in cost. At most, since most workers aren’t getting $30/hour. So yeah, raise the price of asparagus by 21%, to reflect the actual cost of picking, or better yet have the owners take a 21% pay cut.
Wouldn't be anything like 21%. Tons of costs other than the labor to pick. I'd bet it'd closer to 2% than 20%.
Plus, the same farmer said stuff like:
"After all, he says, he cannot raise his price on a box of asparagus by 50% just because it was cut on a Sunday."
Which makes me inclined to take anything he says about his business or this law with a grain of salt(ed & peppered grilled asparagus... mmm, delicious). Because that's both a blatant math fail, and a business-sense fail.
Literally still more than some other jobs, and meanwhile by this math you're getting paid while you're asleep or drinking with your friends.
> Without overtime: 70 normal hours * $30 = $2100
What typically happens: Farmer hires 75% more people so none of them get overtime but now they each make 57% as much money because they've each had their hours cut.
> So yeah, raise the price of asparagus by 21%, to reflect the actual cost of picking, or better yet have the owners take a 21% pay cut.
Food is a global commodity. The margins aren't 21% and if you try to raise the price buyers will just get it from someone in a different country.
> Literally still more than some other jobs, and meanwhile by this math you're getting paid while you're asleep or drinking with your friends.
This is big “a pizza party is good compensation for overtime” energy, my guy. If you’re AT work you’re working.
> Labor accounts for half of the costs
The margins aren't 10.5% either, and they can't go below the market rate of return or the farm shuts down because the land and equipment is worth more than it generates. Which it was already so close to before this happened that many of them already have.
This isn't Apple, it's a farm.
> If you’re AT work you’re working.
Slogans-as-hard-rules that don't take into account context is why labor laws consistently hurt workers.
Can you see why a worker might prefer this arrangement to one in which they're paid e.g. $12/hour for 40 hours, and are consequently upset at having it be prohibited?
The actual quote is:
> Labor accounts for half of the costs, he says
Unless he shows me his books, I’m not gonna believe that on just his word. Neither should you.
> The margins aren't 11.5% either
Again, I’d have to see his books before I concluded that the margins didn’t leave room for a <11.5% raise in labour costs. Remember - it would be less, since as he said only the most skilled cutters are earning +$30/hour.
"He" is the farmer. Who else would even know?
> Again, I’d have to see his books before I concluded that the margins didn’t leave room for a <11.5% raise in labour costs.
Books are just spreadsheets. They contain no authentication. You don't trust his word but you trust him to give you accurate numbers?
We don't need some specific farmer's accounts to know which businesses have low margins. Farming is a notoriously competitive industry with razor-thin margins because the product is a fungible global commodity.
> Remember - it would be less, since as he said only the most skilled cutters are earning +$30/hour.
The 21% increase comes from paying 50% more for 30 of 70 hours, (0.5 x 30)/70 = 21%, the same percentage regardless of the base hourly wage.
But it's actually worse than that, because for the overtime hours it's a 50% increase. Which is why they immediately get cut.
Wouldn't that also increase rates, since you need to hire more laborers, which means the demand for labor increases?
Another possibility, is lower peoples' rates to $24.80—40 hours at $24.80/hr + 30 hours at overtime = $2108, so the same as they were being paid before.
Or something in between.
Only if farm work is such a large proportion of the market for unskilled labor that it would move the entire market, which it isn't. And even if it was, paying more would raise costs which would cause marginal farms to fail and lower labor demand again.
> Another possibility, is lower peoples' rates to $24.80—40 hours at $24.80/hr + 30 hours at overtime = $2108, so the same as they were being paid before.
Those people don't want to work for $24.80/hour instead of $30 for most of the year just to be able to get overtime during harvest season. You might offer to pay them less during that time for the same kind of work, but this is the sort of thing the government sometimes gets mad at you for, because then you're transparently thwarting their inefficient price controls.
And you have to ask what's the point of the law if the best case scenario is that you can find a way to cause the rule to have no effect.
I was looking for a way to have the rule cause no harm—everybody works the same hours, and gets paid the same.
First, there is a difference between being away from home and being away from home while being on site 24/7. I'm pretty sure the business traveler and the majority of farm workers don't fit into the latter category. Those who do, such as people working in remote parts of the world, are usually paid quite handsomely.
Second is the level of compensation being provided. Even if you could earn $1,400/week every week of the year as a farm hand, which you cannot since it is seasonal work, you would still be earning less than most people who have to travel for business on a frequent basis. In other words, certain people have their pay padded to account for working away from home.
Finally, there are a whole host of other differences. To a certain degree, these laborers are considered replaceable. (They may not have lost their jobs, but they have lost hours.) The hours worked are rarely guaranteed, particularly if their role is tied to production (rather than maintenance). And if they do have a job outside of the farm, they're going to have far less flexibility to pick up extra hours even when the pay is better (not everyone is a migrant worker or a student).
I don't have to even ask them (since I've worked such jobs) to know what they want. They want as many paid overtime hours as they possibly can get during the season. Anyone limiting these hours will be seen as the enemy.
They are not upset at anyone other than the government over this situation, as they should be.
I don't think many on HN realize that this sort of ham-fisted regulation damages the lower classes and the narratives start from here. If you want to know why the EPA is so hated by blue collar rural workers - this is almost a perfect example. A policy put in place that harms them, when they are told it is helping when anyone complains about it.
Just like when water is scarce and expensive and you want to grow water intensive crops for cheap. Then the result is not that water needs to be cheaper, but that you simply chose the wrong crop.
On the other hand, it would then take them longer in terms of calendar days to get the same income, and all their other expenses are likely to stay the same. If they normally moved on to other jobs after the harvest, this would mean reduced overall income. Also, the difficulty of the job is factored into the pay they receive (the article specifically says their hourly wage is higher than normal farm labor), so they would likely be paid less for this less demanding crop. It still doesn't seem like much of a solution.
First of all, they were claiming that farm workers used to earn up to $1,400/week and now they are earning up to $1,000/week. They were also claiming that they could work up to 70 hours per week in the past, and now they are limiting it to 48 hours per week. Oh yes, there was also the claim they could earn up to $30/hour.
- $1,400/week at 70 hours results in an hourly rate of $20/hour. Likewise, $1,400/week at $30/hour reflects 46.7 hours of work. Perhaps they mean take-home pay, but I've never heard of businesses discussing pay in that context. Perhaps the skilled workers ($30/hour) are working fewer hours than the lesser skilled workers who are being paid $20/hour. In that case, they are not working enough hours to earn overtime.
- Even if they had to start paying overtime, time-and-a-half only accounts for a 21.4% increase labor costs assuming everyone was working 70 hour work weeks, not 50% more as the article claims. Given the claim that labor costs contribute to half of the cost of production, we would expect the cost of the product to rise by about 11%.
Take my numbers with a grain of salt, because the numbers they are based upon (those cited in the article) are of unclear provenance. At best, the article's numbers are cherry picked and misleading. At worse, they are pulled out of a hat.
The article is about 48 vs 40 hours. And that is just for the labor cost part of the price, while logistics, quality control, marketing,... stay fixed. So 1.2x would already be a very generous upper estimate.
I also think that if you believe the price of asparagus is 100% farm labour, you’re mistaken.
Previously, farm workers believed it was fair to work 70 hours with no overtime compensation. Now the employer is prohibited from doing that pushing the required compensation above what he believed to be fair. Price fixing labor does not work.
Harvesting is a job that should be paid by produce harvested or job completion instead of hourly. But, that is illegal as well. If we keep making low rung jobs illegal there is no ladder for people to climb.
Is it? Even if that's true for hired workers, presumably Schreiber, the guy who owns Schreiber Farms, does get paid based on production.
> If we keep making low rung jobs illegal there is no ladder for people to climb.
What ladder are you referring to in your counterfactual?
Correction: previously the farm workers believed it was better to work 70 hours with no overtime compensation, rather than starve or become homeless.
> If we keep making low rung jobs illegal there is no ladder for people to climb.
There was no ladder to climb when piecework was legal, there’s no ladder to climb now. Just because a vanishingly small number of people in America manage to get out of poverty, that doesn’t justify a society structured so there will ALWAYS be large population of people in deep poverty. Nobody should be forced to work 70 hours to feed their family, while we are this rich a nation.
> A judgment of fair payment is up to the employee and the employer not the nation as a whole.
Here I agree. Employees should band together, and use their collective power to extract as much wealth as possible from their employer - since that’s exactly what the employer is doing to them. The job of the government is to support the workers, they are the plurality of the people, after all.
The "great" thing about the system is that the poorer the employees are, the lower a wage they will accept. So "fair" payment is only fair if they aren't poor and have options.
If you don't believe that, do you believe that price gouging does not exist by definition? It's exactly the same thing for transactional purchases, not labor relations.
People who accept low wages are poor by definition. But the only solution to this is opportunity. You can't get there by prohibiting that person's current best option. You don't make more money by working 40 hours at $30/hour than 70 hours at $30/hour.
> If you don't believe that, do you believe that price gouging does not exist by definition?
"Price gouging" is when sellers raise prices during a temporary period of high demand. It's not even obvious that this is bad -- it disincentivizes hoarding and makes sure goods are still on the shelves during an emergency for people who really need them.
Paying the market rate for labor is what any business in a competitive market has to do or a competitor will do it, undercut them on price and put them out of business. The market rate for unskilled labor is low. The known solutions are things like learning a trade so you can do skilled labor, or automating production or reducing housing scarcity so that prices come down and the wages unskilled workers can earn go further.
Many of the laws passed in this regard are highly counterproductive, because they don't do those things, they result in having your hours cut with no change to your hourly wage for the people directly affected, and higher prices for people in general.
Is it? Because tech has created a lot of opportunities over the past 50 years, but we still have farmers working 70 hours during the harvest for a handful of $1400 paycheques. And the middle class continues to shrink…
"Labor laws" like this are the worse-than-nothing they toss you to pretend they're doing something about any of this when they're really in bed with everyone screwing you.
The reason doctors get paid more than farm workers isn't because they're already rich. A doctor right out of medical school often has more debt than anyone.
Comparison is the thief of joy. This isn't a specific argument that something is wrong (why not complain about 40 hours? Or any hours? if someone is out on a farm, what else is there to do but sleep and work?). Everyone seems to agree that it is best for the workers to be working 70 hour weeks and for a harvest season that does seem somewhat reasonable. It is just haggling over price.
It would be a much better world where people could all laze around and just need to work a couple of hours a week to get by. But the path to that world involves creating better opportunities. Not finding the best option people have then blocking them from it.
That’s not true at all. The workers were excited about getting overtime pay. The best thing for them would be higher pay, and time-and-a-half overtime pay. If they were able to earn enough with 40 or 50 or 60 hours some would chose to stop working then.
It'd be nice if that million-dollar thing could happen to all of us, but to happen on a large scale we need more opportunities for people to create millions of dollars in value. Trying to squeeze value out of ... I dunno, asparagus farmers ... won't do that. There isn't that much value in seeding asparagus. Much as I notionally appreciate the efforts that these people go to (I suppose on reflection, I'd rather see them replaced with machines - that would result in the farmer paying them approx. $0 but maybe it'd get more people employed as mechanics. Who knows).
Wouldn’t you say that there has been a huge spike in opportunities over the past 50 years? I’m thinking of the explosion of computing and its impact on society.
Yet we’ve mostly seen the middle class shrink.
I’m skeptical the issue here is opportunities. I’m pretty sure the issue is a shift in the balance of power, moving it from labour to capital. One superyacht could have paid for a lot of middle class lives. Automating a farm is a great opportunity to make a couple engineers+ceos+investors rich, and dump a few hundred people onto the job market, diluting their and every other worker in their position’s power
The article points out one instance in a long, systemic conga line of instances where the regulators find the best option that people have and ban it. Yes, we have seen the middle class shrink. If you want the middle class to grow, people need to have freedom to take the best option available. If workers are paid more than the value they produce and there are policies that push people to work 40 hours a week when there are opportunities to work 70 then quality of life isn't going to go up.
A lot of the growth has gone to places that let people work [0] at wages you would probably call unfair. Those people are much better off than they were 50 years ago. They worked in hellish conditions and it turns out the theory is correct - after working very hard and saving their standards of living started to improve. That isn't possible without combinations of hard work and low consumption.
> I’m pretty sure the issue is a shift in the balance of power, moving it from labour to capital.
Then you're choosing a damn stupid strategy by advocating that people get paid more. You should be advocating that they have better opportunities to own and create capital. If labour is at a disadvantage, why encourage people to be labourers? The goal should be to make everyone a capitalist.
It is like those people who are proud of the wins of the union movement. Y'know, congratulations. They locked themselves into being the losing side of a losing game. If they'd been going for more legal support for co-ops and better access to capital there'd be less workers and more people'd be better off.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_China#Macroeconomic...
Seems like we have very different definitions of quality of life, if you think working 70 hours/week is a path to it.
> You should be advocating that they have better opportunities to own and create capital. If labour is at a disadvantage, why encourage people to be labourers?
Because labour exists, and a world without it doesn’t. So someone will always be a labouror. All you’re advocating for is more little warlords, instead of a couple kings. Doesn’t sound better to me.
That is the type of thinking that leads to stupid legislation like what the article is talking about. Rigid thinking in politics who can't imagine that a vegetable seeder could make a living any way except by going out, seeding vegetables and eventually ruining their bodies. The whole trick to improving their quality of life is finding better work for them to do or convincing them to take ownership of capital. They can't possibly secure a great lifestyle if they keep working as seeders. All the most straightforward scenarios that lead to a step change in their living standard are achieved by them not being seeders - automating the seeding process with them as owners of capital, or upskilling them so that they can find more productive work. Trying to convince the one person in the world who will give them the most money that they need to be payed more is a failed strategy that people have been trying for centuries now with effectively no success.
At what? Capital doesn’t plant seeds, harvest crops, stock shelves, or cook meals.
In a world with perfect 100% automation, yeah - sure, everybody can be a capitalist. In the real world labour is absolutely necessary, and being a capitalist is just exploiting those people that do the actual real work.
Your suggestion that everybody should try to be a capitalist is saying everyone should fight like crabs in a bucket to be the top crab crushing all the other crabs. Good plan.
> At what? Capital doesn’t plant seeds, harvest crops, stock shelves, or cook meals.
I'd happily put money on you being completely wrong in the sense that you mean, there are a lot of opportunities for automation now that the vision problem has been solved. And all of those things you list are very capital-intensive activities - farming is highly mechanised and relies on an industrial chemical pipeline. Shopping centres require a lot of capital to set up. Cooking is very capital intensive to if you look around a commercial kitchen.
> ...being a capitalist is just exploiting those people that do the actual real work...
How many people could survive on earth if all the capital disappeared? The trucking fleets alone disappearing would force mass starvation after about a week. There just isn't a way to move the food from farms to cities. Let alone all the other parts of the production chain.
The only difference between 2023 AD and 2023 BC humans is the vast accumulations of capital we have in the modern world. It is making a big difference.
> and being a capitalist is just exploiting those people that do the actual real work.
Connect the dots. What happens to the people doing the work if they are also capitalists?
Lol whut? Unless you expand the definition of capital to include everything except labour, that’s wrong. Ideas and information are not capital, except maybe for brief periods of time while they are protected by legal systems to make them to act as capital. The periodic table of elements is not capital. It’s information. Democracy is not capital, it’s an idea.
All the knowledge is certainly important, but the practical reason for that is it is all knowledge of what type of capital we need, how to produce it and how to organise ourselves to produce it. Give people democracy, and note that they vote in capitalism.
Also, I note with a certain pedantry that you can't transfer complex knowledge without capital. A trivial amount of capital, but we still rely on recording the information on somewhere. In this information age the amount of capital used to record data has actually become quite substantial so the point is less pedantic than it once was.
Ideas include stuff like “how semiconductors are made” which isn’t capital, unless you count the most recent still-patent-encumbered developments.
> Give people democracy, and note that they vote in capitalism.
And if they don’t, the CIA will make sure a happy little accident happens to the socialist they do vote in.
And yes, books or hard drives are sometimes considered capital. But unless you’re using the most broad definitions of capital, it’d be weird to consider books in a library, or other public institution, capital. It’d be weird to consider my hard drive full of scientific papers that I collected for fun, capital. Capital is stuff that’s used to earn money, not just “stuff”.
Semiconductor plants are some of the most capital-intensive investments available though. To make chips cheap is, ironically, ruinously expensive. And the infrastructure of the internet isn't cheap either. Without those, it is actually pretty hard to see how that knowledge could be stored and replicated safely across time. Oral transmission is highly unreliable, really only hard disks and cables have sufficiently low marginal cost and high bitrate.
So I note that your hard drive of scientific papers was likely impossible in the 1950s and required some extremely substantial capital investments to make possible. Up until recently it was probably unrealistic for you to have that much knowledge on hand.
Even in the magic example, there is an open question of how to rebuild the semiconductor factory. Nobody actually knows, all the info had to be recorded. It isn't possible to take on most modern engineering projects without a lot of technological aids like pens, paper, hard disk and microprocessors.
It is easy to overlook just how fragile humans are, from an economic perspective a human without capital is more or less useless.
If food prices don't account for negative externalities of human well-being and climate degradation, and instead we allow arbitrage of labor laws, well the market is always going to be fucked up and exploitive. Just like everything else.
It's far-fetched to think a farm worker is going to ascend to a higher income. There is no ladder when you're making less than subsistence.
Like many in the country, my great grandparents moved to the US with essentially nothing, not speaking much, if any, English. They worked as farmers with lots of children to get the work done. Nobody in my family are currently farmers. Many in my current family generation work high paying jobs, many don't. I am not saying that farming is a bad job. It is necessary. Just illustrating that the possibility, not guarantee, of upward mobility is what makes this country great.
There will always be people at the top and people at the bottom of any specific hierarchy. It is not possible to shape a society where all are equal in all ways. There is too much variability in human personality and ability for that to ever be possible. The best we can do is make it possible for all to achieve what their ambition and ability allow while preventing anybody from stopping others from doing the same. We have that now.
And the premise that we need them to suffer in poverty because their kids might have a shot at a life just above poverty, doesn’t make it better.
We have enough wealth that nobody has to work 70hrs/week. Yet we insist on imposing that, for fear of making our wealthiest slightly less wealthy.
You are also assuming that they are suffering. What do you base this assumption on? Seasonal workers I have met and talked to are generally happy, easy going people. They are not being exploited that is something you read that isn't there.
Only true when it's two people of similar wealth and circumstances bargaining over how much one will pay for the other's labor.
If you just cringed over how much less leverage the employer would have in that scenario—yeah, exactly.
> The employees in this scenario have all the leverage. But, they can only negotiate their wage up to a point where the farmer's livelihood is sacrificed
—save a tiny sliver that the farm owner is lucky to manage to get.
And this:
> Its not like farmers are making orders of magnitude more than the people they employ to help harvest
Consider the immense capital value required to have a farm of large enough scale to even halfway succeed in 2023. Some extremely poor decisions have been made if they're really not making a lot more than a migrant worker on their farm.
This is... fantasy-land topsy-turvy-world stuff.
You might have a point if the laborers were bargaining as a bloc, had captured ~all the available labor into that bloc, and had a substantial cash reserve for strike-pay. Short of that, this is all totally backwards.
You are making at least as many assumptions as I am. What I don't understand is why you would assume that a person that says they prefer the 70 hour week with no overtime doesn't know what is best for themselves. They kept coming back to harvest for Schreiber for decades. People don't do that if they are treated unfairly.
From the article Mendoza was taking home up to $1,400 a week for the 6-8 week harvest period ($8,400 - $11,200). I would say that is not bad for 2 months work.
From that, anyone running a multimillion a dollar a year farm should be doing very well or they should give up and let the market work properly instead of suckling on the teat of government.
And yes, that means higher food prices. Every single person refusing to pay fair prices is the problem, and that's darn near everyone.
It's fascinating seeing an entire generation forget why labour unions came to exist in the first place...
Not only is it possible, it's common: https://www.croptracker.com/blog/farm-labour-should-i-pay-my...
That's not quite true. We have antitrust laws, minimum wages and other things designed to make a more even field for employment relationships.
> Harvesting is a job that should be paid by produce harvested or job completion instead of hourly.
Or not. Opinions differ on this point.
There has to be a balance here. You need to allow people who have hustle, drive, and work ethic to rise above the chafe in non-traditional manners other than the prescribed middle class social mobility route. Not everyone is average, and treating society as such is a recipe for tears.
I have zero idea how I'd "come up" today since all the ladders of "work harder than those next to you and you can slowly improve your lot in life" have largely been pulled up in the name of fairness and equity.
Try walking onto a roofing crew these days and see how that goes. Jobs like this simply are almost nonexistent now for most demographics.
Income is relative. Mentioning it without mentioning its measure against what it's used for makes it nearly meaningless. If you're going to do that, you might as well not even mention units like dollars and hours.
You're not wrong about them disappearing. But you're not mentioning factors like how much more top earners are extracting out of the system today versus before. Wealth concentration and wealth disparity have not remained fixed. They certainly haven't gone down. They've gone up, and not even just a little—they've gone way up.
For example, Applebees is on the ropes. People are unwilling to pay enough money for Applebees' food for the company to remain solvent. Does that mean Applebees has an ethical basis to use slave labor to keep their doors open? No! They should just go out of business.
> "I can't hold my employees to 40 hours, because it's just not enough to live on."
It doesn’t mean farms pay less money, quite the opposite actually. Skilled farm labor is very valuable and gets paid more than your regular blue collar worker driving an Uber or working a fast food kitchen. The problem with farms is that work doesn’t fit your 9-5 M-F 40 hour work week. Most of the year, you need very little work, and on specific stretches, you need round the clock work. What the comment means is that 40 hours won’t work for the workers because they don’t get 40 hours all the time. Specific seasons are the time for the workers to work longer hours and make more money for the rest of the year. And if the law forces people to work only 40 hours during the season where they make bulk of their money by working longer hours, workers won’t have sufficient for the rest of the year.
> if the law forces people to work only 40 hours
The law isn't forcing them to work only 40 hours. It's forcing Schreiber to pay them more if they do.
It doesn’t work because of you know, math. Not only are you suggesting that people only work 40 hours, but also get paid more for those 40 hours. So now farmers not only hire 2 people instead of 1 because you still have more than 40 hours of work, but now also compensate 2 workers for the lost wages they otherwise would have made working longer hours for a short duration of time.
It’s like instead of working 8 hours M-F, I work 10 hours M-Th and take the Friday off because of how my industry works, the law now forces employers to pay me overtime for 2 hours every day. So employers have to restrict me to 8 hours per day to avoid overtime and hire someone else along with me to get the same amount of work done. But then also pay both of us the lost wages for Friday.
> [...] Not only are you suggesting
Please don't do false quotes[1]. I'm the one who said, "Just pay them more"—and I'm not sure that anyone did, it seems like it's something that you just... made up (and decided to attribute to me...?). And I didn't suggest anything other than that your choice to phrase it as "the law forces people to work only 40 hours" was untrue—that you were exaggerating—a sort of motte and bailey.
Your approach of responding to this with another (albeit this time less forgivable) instance of exaggeration is in a word unkind.
I don't know what you hoped this would result in, but I'm not going to respond to you further here.
I'm _not_ the one who said it, rather.
The end result will simply be that the US farms go out of business. More South American rainforest cut down for agriculture, more climate change, less resilient food systems, and the cycle goes on and on...
You can't just write this off in terms of "livable wage". The hourly rate times 40/48 hours a week is seemingly a livable wage for the season being worked. The problem is that this being seasonal piecemeal work, workers want to bank more money than required to merely "live" while the work is there, and then not have to find a different 40 hour a week job during the off season.
I totally agree with your point of collective bargaining vs top down impositions. But taking a quick stab based off the implication of a single passage, the problem with the law seems to be that it capped the number of hours per week, but not the number of days per week. So rather than dithering out the days each worker is expected to come in, the farm operators just assumed 7 day weeks of short days. ("if he was limiting them to 48 hours a week, they wouldn't cut asparagus this year. They didn't want to be on the farm seven days a week as required during the asparagus harvest.").
In general I think a better phase-in method would have been institute the 40 hour threshold immediately, but then slowly up the multiplier over a longer time - 1.1x, 1.2x, etc
Also the problem here seems relatively straightforward to work around too, assuming the problem of short days can be sorted out - work on a second farm the remaining days.
This kind of response is an epitome of online toxicity and polarization. I raised a few points, but you're just making some seemingly unfounded assertion and rejecting analysis?
Nothing in the article indicates the workers are living on the farms. In fact there are several mentions to things like childcare, gas, getting a second job, etc.
You raised rationalizations that minimize the struggles of real humans who need to work 70hrs a week to feed their families. I might be online-toxic, but at least i don’t think a good solution for people in that situation is to simply get a second job.
Uh, no. Here you go again, painting with some broad ad hominem brush that assumes the worst intentions.
Taking the article at face value, the situation is people wanting to work more than 40 hours a week while a certain type of work is in season - essentially making hay while the sun shines. This certainly could be a convenient narrative covering for a more prevalent worse dynamic, and if you've got reason to believe so please make that argument! It wouldn't be with me, but rather with the original article.
I'm merely pointing out that assuming the described workers' motivations are actually true, a limit of 40 hours/week seems straightforward to work around by splitting time between multiple employers. If the choice is 70 hours/week at one job, or 35 per week at each of two jobs, "second job" isn't this heartless condemnation you seem to think it is. Having to juggle two employers certainly is an imposition compared to before, but it's not clear how much that imposition is itself a problem compared to the dynamic caused by previous lack of standard overtime pay requirements.
The farmers can't raise prices or their produce won't sell. How are you supposed to compete with Peru's wages and prices?
Don't you see a problem with that?
This will only lead to more faster automation or this moving to countries with laxer laws (e.g. China and manufacturing)
> This is the crux of it. Man wants to pay his workers a non livable wage
That is signal calling for automation.
Just saying it doesn't make it so. There is a ton of evidence wage hikes lead to automation (it is not even controversial among economists):
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/16/evidence-minimum-wage-hikes-...
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23667/w236...
> Second, is asparagus harvesting something that can be reasonably automated away at the moment? I’m not sure it is, are you?
Is all farming just asparagus harvesting? Does it need to happen at this moment or not at all?
Good intentions + surface-level thinking don't guarantee good outcomes.
https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/systems-thinking-and-the-cobra-e...
We need to recognize just what things would cost if produced exclusively domestically (not including differences in materials costs from geographic availability erc) and recognize that we live in absurd comfort by getting products at 1/10 of what they cost (not the real number just an easy reference).
Eventually either we continue to abuse the world or we end up the abused or, in the absolute best case, the economies of the world reach equilibrium and we pay the Proper price for our products.
>They had their own economic puzzle to figure out, and fewer hours meant it no longer made sense to pay for child care for all of those days.
okay, so he won't give more than 48 hours, but he's still requiring a 7-day schedule. this isn't about the hours, this is about stupid scheduling.
and what prevents him exactly from changing the hourly, so the total pay is equivalent? if you take the example of 70h at 30/h with no overtime, 70h at 26/h with time and a half would be roughly equivalent.
as with everything management complains about, this is a management problem
My read is that the workers want more, and the workers want 7-day schedules.
They want to work 7 days when there is full work, to store up for winter. But the economics don't make sense when they can't commit fully during that week.
I don't like how it sounds, but if the worker from the article if believed to be representative, then I think that's what's going on.
> and what prevents him exactly from changing the hourly
that's a good idea. a bit weird that it means everyone makes less (and is underpaid by industry standards) if they don't work through the harvest season though... seems like a tough situation all-around
Disclaimer: I'm a socialist and cofounder of a tech worker co-operative, so I favour workers rights. I'm just admitting that this situation is confusing :)
No. This is a classic instance of the X/Y problem. If they began working half the number of hours in a day for half the number of days in a week that they had been before, except bringing home the same amount of money, there would be no issue; no one would show up saying, "We want 7-day schedules".
The workers don't want 7-day schedules. They want to be paid greater than or equal to what they were making when they were working 7 days a week under the old arrangement.
WA state has no daily hour limit for overtime, and the employees were already working long days before the change. if management is really going to insist on staying under, then instead of spreading the hours across seven days, cram the hours into three or four days and rotate the staff.
this is not hard. many businesses are open 7 days and still understand how to give staff days off.
this is an invented problem.
On the other side you've got a whole lot of Eastern Washington old white men, who have done things a particular way for decades and don't want to change anything. From their perspective, things like worker housing should count in the overall pay package to offset overtime. I don't think they are lying when they say they can't be profitable on some of these crops, but the other side of it is that they also aren't thinking real hard about ways to improve efficiency, add economic value, or increase profitability. Many of them aren't bad guys. Even though my politics are very different from theirs, I think too often they get treated like country bumpkins, which leads to resentment. Their core identity is that they like predictability. The problem here is that they need someone to give them an out - show them a business path where they can make money and give workers a better deal at the same time. Unfortunately, you've got two sides that don't quite understand how to get to that place, because in part it is a business problem not a political problem.
“Business” journalism, in fact, most journaism, is from the perspective of capital. We read it, and imagine ourselves in the position of the owners and investors, trying to profit. But it’s far far more likely that if we were part of this story, we would be in the position of the workers, trying to survive on the scraps the owners toss our way.
Well don't leave us hanging. What are some ways this is better for the workers, that you think NPR omitted?
Not true. Mother Jones and CNN are far more left.
https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart
>> This is biased writing.
Almost all news reporting is biased, in terms of when they emphasize and what they leave out, who they quote, etc. Truth is an onion, many layers, and if you want pure truth, be prepared to dig very very deep. News writing like this would become a research paper, which most news readers are not prepared to consume.
From the article:
>> "The addition of overtime makes our already high labor costs completely uncompetitive to Mexico and Peru," says Schreiber, citing the top two asparagus exporters to the U.S. In both countries, cutters make less in a day than Schreiber pays in an hour.
Seems like there is a bit more layers to explore.
The workers's whys are important to: Why isn't 48h per week enough?
The legislative why: Why did a revision bill to allow 50h work week fail?
Per the API on bias in journalism:
https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/journalism-essentials...
Thus, IMO, to get away from as much bias as possible, one must search deep into research papers to efficiently absorb as many details as possible.
Washington's overtime law included a three-year phase-in, meant to ease the process. Last year, overtime pay kicked in after 55 hours a week. This year, the threshold is 48 hours, and next year it drops to 40.
Schreiber says already, he cannot afford to pay overtime. Instead, he's brought in additional workers to spread the hours around. It's allowed him to keep nearly all his workers to 48 hours a week, not more.
In my spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum fantasy land, I would attempt to mitigate this by making all such laws use continuous functions instead of thresholds. This would also resolve a lot of the confusion around income tax brackets.
As we can see here, all they do is introduce economic distortions that in turn cause various problems for both the employees and the employers.
Instead of doing productive work, the employees and employers waste far too many resources working around or trying to cope with these unnecessary bureaucratic impediments.
Even if such regulations may have been introduced under the guise of helping workers, they've instead created a situation where workers are worse off in new ways.
He says 1/2 of the cost to produce asparagus is labor. I won't argue with that, it could be although he late complains about the high prices of other things. Later he "cannot raise prices by 50% because the labor costs shot up." If he paid the overtime, his labor costs would have gone up this year by 15%[0]. His total costs by 8%[1]. After the phase in period, his cost of producing asparagus would go up by 10%.
10% is far less than 50%.
Later he claims that "skilled workers make $30/hr". Clearly, the implication is that he pays those workers $30/hr. But he doesn't! For his best paid workers he pays 2/3 of that at $20.XX/hour.[2] That means the overtime rate is what he thinks skilled workers should get paid the entire time!
Edit: I forgot to check, but legal minimum wage is $15.74/hr at his farm. That means he's paying a ~25% premium over what they could make at any other job. That's not much. Especially when he didn't pay overtime over 40 hrs/week.
[0] They worked 70 hrs/week. Everything after 48 is 1.5x time. So that's 22 hours at time and a half, or an extra 11 hours of pay on top of 70 hours already.
[1] Rounding numbers make 15% and 8%
[2] Some made "over $1400/week" @ 70 hours/week and everyone makes "under $1000/week" @ 48 hours/week
https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/systems-thinking-and-the-cobra-e...
I'm sorry but this is more political talking points than reality... depending on jurisdiction, many of these ag positions are exempt from minimum wage, where people are still paid based on production. That is - the wage is kept low by regulation, put in place by the people who benefit from keeping those wages low.
You aren't wrong when you say there are migrant workers, but it's important to put that in context. In commercial ag, there are many types of workers who migrate around the country (and yes, also into Mexico) following the seasons. So for example if you are a skilled asparagus picker (yes this is a thing, and not a surprise it is mentioned in the article), you may start the season in Mexico, work through CA, and then continue northward following the season. So it isn't just a matter of "wages no local person would accept" but also a matter of training and skill. As an employer, you want someone who has the training and skills who you can trust year after year. Predictability. You don't get that hiring the local high school kids for the summer. Yes, I know there are places like Iowa where corn detasseling is a right of passage, but that's just not the case for the bulk of west coast commercial agriculture.
If the migrant workers had a lot of in-demand skills, farms would not be able to double the workforce overnight.
If there weren't migrant workers, employers would need to train workers. And in order to not lose investment on that training, they'd need to pay their workers more than the alternatives. But they don't, because the exploit migrant workers.
How are they exploiting them? Well, if wages go up domestically, the cost of produce will go up domestically. Which means produce from other locations will fetch a higher margin, which will allow those economies to develop.
Child labor laws, too.
(100 x 40 x 20) + (100 x 30 x 30) = 170,000
200 workers working 35 hours a week at 20/hour:
200 x 35 x 20 = 140,000