This would be a good time to implement regulations and taxes on all robots to diminish all margins gained from automation.
That would include a tax on your job would it?
As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots
21–30 of 178 posts
Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots
#22Or they could, you know, offer higher wages.
Picking fruit and vegetables has always been peasant and serf work. The market has never once said, 'you should be paid more,' because there always is an underclass and even if you paid triple what you pay now it'd be the same class of people working the job. The problem is every American thinks he's too good to be at the bottom of the barrel these days.
Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots
#23I've mentioned those machines before. They're still prototypes, nowhere near rugged enough for field use. Agrobot: [1] Too many parts, too many places that can catch dirt, too slow. If they can solve the sensor problem, they need to do a complete mechanical redesign to make it field-ready. Abundant Robotics: [2] Too slow, too fragile. For comparison, here's a Festo vision-guided robot picking up randomly oriented obj…
While I agree with your conclusion in the small, Who else is working on it to take up the slack?
Don't know. Doing good mechanical design requires an organization that's good at making machinery. Not that many people are really good at mechanical design. I occasionally mention that I'm into restoring antique Teletype machines. All the good Teletype machines were designed by two people - Howard Krum and Ed Klienschmidt. Competitors mostly copied them, or produced unreliable machinery.
(I once worked at a hydraulics R&D facility for a big machinery company. They had that capability, and it took several acres of plant, with everything from overhead cranes to machine shops to scanning electron microscopes. It also took hundreds of people who've done it before. You need that kind of industrial backup. A laptop in a Starbucks is not enough. That gets you a design like Jucero, way overdesigned and overpriced.)
Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots
#24Or they could, you know, offer higher wages.
They mention this in the article. The wages that the growers are willing to pay aren't capturing the interest of the locals or even the immigrant workers (since they have comparable jobs back home).
It's worth it to them to invest in tech rather than continue to pay higher wages.
Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots
#25They could also, which is notably mentioned no where in the article, pay more? In a market driven economy...which companies want...employees have market power as well when their is a shortage.
> They could also, which is notably mentioned no where in the article, pay more?
From the article:
> And native-born Americans aren’t interested in the job, even at wages that have soared at higher than average rates.
> Not surprisingly, wages for crop production have climbed 13% from 2010 to 2015 — a higher rate than the state average, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of Labor Department data.
> Growers who can afford it have begun offering savings and health plans more commonly found in white collar jobs.
Margins are thin, though, and the article makes it sound like it is more efficient to grow less labor-intensive crops and import the other crops.
Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots
#26They could also, which is notably mentioned no where in the article, pay more? In a market driven economy...which companies want...employees have market power as well when their is a shortage.
The rising wages is notably mentioned in the article, and it is the implied reason for automation - the industry is not going to replace cheap workers with expensive workers, it's going to restructure everything (including the crop species it grows) to ensure that cheap workers are replaced with machines.
If some industry is employing $10 million of labor and market wages go up 20%, the expected outcome is not spending $12m on labor, you should rather expect something like spending $9m on labor and $2m on machines that weren't worth it back when labor was cheap but are worth it now.
Many industries, including this one, employ humans only because (and only while) they can do it cheaper than the machines. Yet. As the technology matures and becomes cheaper, and people want to earn more, the result is going to be simply less jobs.
Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots
#27I've mentioned those machines before. They're still prototypes, nowhere near rugged enough for field use. Agrobot: [1] Too many parts, too many places that can catch dirt, too slow. If they can solve the sensor problem, they need to do a complete mechanical redesign to make it field-ready. Abundant Robotics: [2] Too slow, too fragile. For comparison, here's a Festo vision-guided robot picking up randomly oriented obj…
While I agree with your conclusion in the small, Who else is working on it to take up the slack?
[deleted]
Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots
#28Or they could, you know, offer higher wages.
Picking fruit and vegetables has always been peasant and serf work. The market has never once said, 'you should be paid more,' because there always is an underclass and even if you paid triple what you pay now it'd be the same class of people working the job. The problem is every American thinks he's too good to be at the bottom of the barrel these days.
If it's a comparison between getting crap pay at McDonalds and getting crap pay in the hot sun all day, then there is no comparison.
Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots
#29Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots
#30They could also, which is notably mentioned no where in the article, pay more? In a market driven economy...which companies want...employees have market power as well when their is a shortage.
They could pay more. But since what we're really talking about here is the market, the real question is who would pick up the added costs. Are consumers willing to pay the "real cost" of food grown by employees who are paid a fair wage?