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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

> "I can't hold my employees to 40 hours, because it's just not enough to live on."

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.

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A judgment of fair payment is up to the employee and the employer not the nation as a whole.

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.

> Harvesting is a job that should be paid by produce harvested or job completion instead of hourly. But, that is illegal as well.

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?

> Previously, farm workers believed it was fair to work 70 hours with no overtime compensation.

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.

How many of these employees are in the country legally? How many of them actually have much choice at all in their employment?

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.

> The "great" thing about the system is that the poorer the employees are, the lower a wage they will accept.

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.

> But the only solution to this is opportunity.

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…

Because we keep foreclosing opportunities instead of creating new ones. Pass laws that make it harder for small businesses to compete with big ones, increase housing scarcity so people's wages go to landlords, professional organizations like the AMA pushing to restrict the supply of doctors which both makes it harder for people to become a doctor and raises healthcare costs.

"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 market rate for unskilled is low because the unskilled give their labor away for cheap. Nothing intrinsic, they're just poor. Unskilled rich people don't work for cheap.

There is no reason to pay someone above market rates just because they have money. When a business needs someone to work an ordinary job, they're not going to pay a billionaire a ton of money even if it's the only way to get them to take that job, they're just going to hire someone else.

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.

> previously the farm workers believed it was better to work 70 hours with no overtime compensation, rather than starve or become homeless.

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.

> Everyone seems to agree that it is best for the workers to be working 70 hour weeks

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.

I suppose, but you could make that argument about any non-zero number of hours. There are people who drop out of the workforce altogether after making a few million dollars. So that argument doesn't give any indication of what is fair and why.

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).

> but to happen on a large scale we need more opportunities for people to create millions of dollars in value.

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

Yeah.

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...

> 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.

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.

What happened to being "this rich a nation"? There isn't a reason to have one group called "labour" and one called "capital". The world could be all of one or all of the other. In the bad old days it was 100% labour. In the ideal future it is 100% capital. Capital is just more effective than labour, that is the reason why the capitalists end up having much more wealth. It isn't an exclusive club - everyone should be signing up.

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.

> Capital is just more effective than labour

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.

In the real world, these people work 70 hour work weeks and that is worth less than $30/hr. If the situation is going to change, it makes sense to change it in a direction that deals with the root cause.

> 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?

> The only difference between 2023 AD and 2023 BC humans is the vast accumulations of capital we have in the modern world.

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.

Say all the capital disappears one day. It's magic. Poof, gone. What can you do that a human couldn't do in 2000BC? The answer you've given is sit around and discuss philosophy. Few people do that willingly.

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.

Yes we can sit around discussing philosophy, while we take breaks re-building the semiconductor factory.

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”.

> It’d be weird to consider my hard drive full of scientific papers that I collected for fun, capital

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.

Our food system is not built on the backs of local farmworkers alone - it's built on the backs of poor people around the globe. Mostly in the same countries that immigrant workers left themselves. That's who they are competing with.

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.

Do the employees agree it's fair or are they desperate, in a survival mentality, and they take whatever they can get?

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.

Does it matter which it is? They agreed to do the job for the compensation that was offered because it was better than something else. This nation was built by immigrants that came here with nothing and worked their asses off to improve their family circumstance. How many generations ago did your family move here? How did the first US generation of your family work and live? Where is your family now? That path has to remain open. Labor laws handed down from on high have been progressively making it more difficult to start from nothing and become something.

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.

You’re describing a pyramid scheme.

No I am describing the growth of wealth and improvement of society over time. The pie isn't a fixed size. It grows with how much we produce. The more we produce the more there is to go around. Consuming more than we produce shrinks the pie.

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.

I’m not asking for total equality. But the premise that people need to live in poverty and work their life away in increments of 70 hour weeks at a time all so my asparagus is $4/lb not $5/lb, is disgusting.

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 seem angry. It also sounds like you have never worked seasonal work. I believe you have made a critical error assuming this is the only work they have. They are being paid well for the job compared to other listings. When that job is done they move on to another.

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.

> A judgment of fair payment is up to the employee and the employer not the nation as a whole.

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.

If a farmer doesn't harvest they don't get paid, ignoring crop insurance. The farmer literally has no choice but to hire employees to help harvest. 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. Its not like farmers are making orders of magnitude more than the people they employ to help harvest. This isn't the proletariat vs the bourgeoisie. This is people, all technically proletariat, making an arrangement that they all benefit from (free market dynamics).

You are ignoring a lot about the situation of the workers, to reach these conclusions, and implying that they have so much leverage they're able to capture all the value of their labor:

> 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.

Large capital requirement doesn't mean large profitability for the farmer.

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.

If you aren't beating a savings account with your business then you shouldn't be in business, that simple.

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.

Most employees don’t negotiate on equal terms with their employers in any industry anywhere in the world, yet some people are happy with their wages and workload.

> A judgment of fair payment is up to the employee and the employer not the nation as a whole.

It's fascinating seeing an entire generation forget why labour unions came to exist in the first place...

That is true only in a free market, which labor is not. Employers have far more bargaining power than any individual looking to sell their labor. To say workers thought it was fair to work "70 hours with no overtime compensation" is delusional. It was the best deal they could accept given the material reality of their conditions.

Why on earth would it be illegal to pay people by lbs of produce at harvesting. You have to pay them at least minimum wage (including minimum wage at 1.5x after overtime hours kick in), but you can pay them the maximum of minimum wage -or- lbs of produce.

Not only is it possible, it's common: https://www.croptracker.com/blog/farm-labour-should-i-pay-my...

> A judgment of fair payment is up to the employee and the employer not the nation as a whole.

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.

This commentary seems very out of touch with what the reality of farms.

> "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.

This always happens in these discussions:

> 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.

> Just pay them more

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.

> > Just pay them more

> [...] 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.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947>

> I'm the one who said, "Just pay them more"

I'm _not_ the one who said it, rather.

They make 30 dollars an hour.

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?

Yes, it is very convenient that NPR picked a type of produce that demands relatively high hourly wages so that labour would look greedy in this circumstance.

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.

And yet, 40 hours at $30 power hour is not enough to live on.

Look at some of the other comments in this thread. Key takeaways:

$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.

First, 30/hour is the ceiling, not the floor.

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.

> 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%.

Omg yes, i got fixated on the labour portion and forgot that’s just a fraction of the production cost.

Easy to do, even when people aren't doing it on purpose for propaganda reasons (which, you clearly weren't, from the tone of your post, but... it happens).

The article says that labor can be 50% the cost of asparagus

This farmer claims it's about 50% of his costs. There are more steps before it hits store shelves. And price-charged is necessarily over costs for any non-failing business, so 50% (let's say) of costs won't equal 50% of the wholesale price even before shipping, storage, and all the profit and overhead of those are factored in.

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.

> Sooo… that’s 30 * 48 / (24 * 7) = 8.60/hour.

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.

As someone else pointed out, it would be far far less than 21%, since labour is not the only cost of production. A 21% increase in labour costs doesn’t mean total costs go up by 21%.

> 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.

> As someone else pointed out, it would be far far less than 21%, since labour is not the only cost of production. A 21% increase in labour costs doesn’t mean total costs go up by 21%.

> 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?

> > Labor accounts for half of the costs

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.

> Labor accounts for half of the costs, he says

"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.

> 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.

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.

> Wouldn't that also increase rates, since you need to hire more laborers, which means the demand for labor increases

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.

> 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.

That's some funny math. When I had to travel for work, I did not get paid for every hour of the day I was away from home at the job site.

But unless you were ignoring reality, i’m pretty sure it counted in your mental math about “is this job worth it”. Right?

There's a few places where these comparisons break down.

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).

Why don't you ask the workers?

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.

Easy answer: you don't.

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.

In this case the expensive resource is labor, so following your analogy, they should grow crops that are less labor intensive. Makes sense but doesn't seem like there's a net gain for the laborers there.

No, the whole point of the article is that for the workers it is always 7 days no matter whether it is 35, 40 or 48 "hours", since external costs like child care stay fixed. So the expensive resource decidedly is not labor but time.

Ok, I see your point. If the farmer were to grow a crop that didn't require such rapid harvesting, the workers would end up doing the same labor over a longer period of time which could allow them to have lower child care costs.

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.

The numbers in the article don't work out.

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.

If the world was ran by folks who think like you back when I was in my early adulthood, I'd still be doing jobs like picking crops and working in factories.

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.

I don’t understand how this relates to not paying people a living wage for full time work?

$30/hr isn't a living wage? Jobs like this are precisely the high-paying hard-labor stuff that is going by the wayside in the name of equity. The exact type of job I used to pull myself out of my situation and bootstrap my tech career.

Try walking onto a roofing crew these days and see how that goes. Jobs like this simply are almost nonexistent now for most demographics.

> $30/hr isn't a living wage?

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.

$30/hour for the most skilled workers, for a few weeks during harvest, where you have to live on the farm 24/7, and then travel somewhere else because this job is done. That’s not roofing. Not even in the same ballpark as roofing.

It's not full-time work. It's seasonal work.

> 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

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.

> Man wants to pay his workers a non livable wage

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.

… Because being required to live on a farm 24/7 sounds like a situation where hopping over to the asparagus farm that’s located conveniently next door is easy + allowed. Yup.

> Because being required to live on a farm 24/7 sounds like a situation where hopping over to the asparagus farm that’s located conveniently next door is easy + allowed. Yup.

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.

> They didn't want to be on the farm seven days a week as required during the asparagus harvest.

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.

> You raised rationalizations that minimize the struggles of real humans who need to work 70hrs a week to feed their families

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.

If labor is one of the primary expenses, and the profit margin is low, then increasing the cost of labor will drive the profit margin into the negatives. In other words, the man can't run a business that pays the level you think it should - it would go bankrupt. So what do you propose as a solution?

Either charge more, or just don't? If people aren't willing to pay enough for something, to the point that it can't be done profitably without exploiting your workers, that's the market saying it doesn't deserve to get done.

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.

They can't charge more because they are competing with others not affected by the overtime regulation. And at the current prices they aren't able to pay enough...at least not enough according to bystanders such as yourself, who seem to think it's better for them to lose their jobs than keep working at the rate they've been getting.

If applebees goes out of business, a vacancy opens. For a new business - ideally one that can pay its workers. Short term, sure it’s “bad” for businesses to close. Long term, as long as it’s not happening en-mass, it’s a good thing

If you make labor much more expensive you're going to get more robots in the fields, not rich farmhands.

Labour shouldn’t demand more money, because otherwise owners will automate them out of a job! Makes sense, but meanwhile, owners are frantically automating us out of our job regardless of how much we ask for.

Arguably the real issue is people wanting products for less than they should cost. Full stop.

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.

> farm owners are trying to get people to do something without paying them fairly

The farmers can't raise prices or their produce won't sell. How are you supposed to compete with Peru's wages and prices?

I believe Tariffs are the traditional way.

>"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.

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 see one law with unintended consequences and propose more laws to fix that?

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.

This is a great blanket defense against any kind of improvement for workers. But it’s not logically sound. First of all, companies are already automating and outsourcing jobs away - they aren’t waiting around for people to ask for a raise before they do it. Second, is asparagus harvesting something that can be reasonably automated away at the moment? I’m not sure it is, are you?

> But it’s not logically sound

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...

Exactly right. The "workaround" would never have worked with a strong labour union.

But in that case you'd be paying 1.5x more for asparagus.

Where are you getting 1.5x from?

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 really think that 1.5x is a small price to pay to know that nobody suffered to produce this.

I also think that if you believe the price of asparagus is 100% farm labour, you’re mistaken.

Like the United Farm Workers, founded by this guy named Cesar Chavez in 1962?

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