Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 232 posts

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#121

Post by ysavir »

smcdow wrote: post #110
ysavir wrote: post #26

> Before the day was through, Solorio would make the same pitch to dozens of men and women, approaching a taco truck, a restaurant and a homeless encampment. Has he tried Craigslist? Or has his entire hiring strategy involved approaching random people on the street?

I would expect his target audience doesn't spend much time on the internet.

And what target audience is that? The one he's used to that the past few administrations are trying to eliminate?

The impression I get from the article is that he's willing to pay more, but not willing to change how he approaches hiring. Assuming that is the case, it's hard to fault anyone but him.

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#122

Post by [deleted] »

smcdow wrote: post #110
ysavir wrote: post #26

> Before the day was through, Solorio would make the same pitch to dozens of men and women, approaching a taco truck, a restaurant and a homeless encampment. Has he tried Craigslist? Or has his entire hiring strategy involved approaching random people on the street?

I would expect his target audience doesn't spend much time on the internet.

[deleted]

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#123

Post by lohi »

edblarney wrote: post #73
greedo wrote: post #28

When I was younger, I worked at a McDonalds in SoCal. Almost all the employees were white teenagers. The managers were white as well. We didn't make much, just a bit above minimum wage, but we were all mostly high-school students or college students working in the summer to pay tuition. This went on until around 1984 or so, when it became much harder to hire this demographic. It wasn't as cool to work at fast food, a…

"It wasn't as cool to work at fast food, and the area was becoming more affluent." If you walk into a 7-11 in Scandinavia (yes, they have some there) - esp. in a small town - you'll sometimes see a drop-dead '10' Swedish model working behind the counter. Why? Because 'it's normal' for people to do such jobs - as you say - 'when you were young' it was normal. When those jobs are done by non-citizens, especially of a d…

I think in Sweden, were this has been changing in big cities in recent years, it's mostly because you can't support yourself in many areas on a 7-11 salary anymore. If you can't get an apartment you can't stay in the area, so there's no young temporary workforce left and people with options aren't going to commute long for a 7-11 job.

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#124

Post by gmarx »

So if you raise wages there isn't instantly a group of people available who will do the work at those wages? So it takes time for things to adjust because that's how humans and cultures react to incentives? That's an excellent argument for never changing much of anything if you don;t feel like it.

When I was a kid the democrats were on the side of labor, like American citizens who work with their hands. It's a shame that now the leaders of both parties agree that cheap manual labor is a right that rich people and corporations have

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#125

Post by Apocryphon »

dragonwriter wrote: post #41
decebalus1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> illegal alien labor scabs self-deport in advance, and wages rise You know when there was a bug in the codebase so hard to fix and for so many years that developers started building on top of that and considered the bug to be 'not really a bug' but more of a design decision. And then some new hire comes along and fixes it without a deep understanding of the dependencies and breaks existing functionality. And then th…

> Guess what will happen to the price of produce? Very little, because it's a highly competitive global market and much of what is in supermarkets is already imported. There's a few crops where CA is dominant and where prices would be affected significantly, but the main question would be "what happens to the jobs, and the companies, when labor costs make it impossible to sell their product at a profit". Jobs aren't…

If this leads to the decline of agriculture in CA, does that mean the water woes will be diminished? But on the other hand, that just leads to the growing economic collapse of the Central Valley.

Maybe some tech startups should start looking to relocate to Stockton and Sac, cheaper rents and CoL, and within drivable distance to the Palo Alto VC firms...

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#126

Post by Apocryphon »

datatan wrote: post #83
dragonwriter wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do we get the unemployed Midwesterners into Napa Valley? Just a thought: Government loans with low interest, delayed and income-contingent repayment, and forgiveness after a set period of on-time payments for relocation expenses for unemployed adults with job offers outside of their own immediate area. Getting people to where the work is good for the public fisc, good for employers, and good for the people invo…

Why is the first instinct of every Democrat/Liberal to have Government subsidize everything? If the wages and cost of living were there people would come. Solve the problem, don't subsidize it and create more problems. Absolutely insane.

According to the story, it sounds like wages and cost of living are already there.

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#127

Post by kingmanaz »

orf wrote: post #116
kingmanaz wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strikebreaker Educate yourself.

In random American colloquialisms? No thanks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scab

Strange. Willfully contextless reading comprehension. No wonder the word appears "random".

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#128

Post by derrickdirge »

diogenescynic wrote: post #87
greedo wrote: post #28

When I was younger, I worked at a McDonalds in SoCal. Almost all the employees were white teenagers. The managers were white as well. We didn't make much, just a bit above minimum wage, but we were all mostly high-school students or college students working in the summer to pay tuition. This went on until around 1984 or so, when it became much harder to hire this demographic. It wasn't as cool to work at fast food, a…

There are plenty of white teenagers who work at every In-N-Out I've ever been to--because they pay better. Otherwise those kids, in nicer areas like you point to, have better alternatives for minimum wage like retail. The reason the jobs you describe are being replaced by immigrants is because the wages have been stagnant or not kept up with inflation. Unskilled immigrants take labor jobs that Americans aren't really…

To the parent's point, it's probably generally considered slightly 'cooler' to work at In-N-Out than at McDonald's. In-N-Out certainly seems to be trendier amongst young people than most other fast food restaurants.

Anecdotally, it seems that as general affluence within a community rises, so does the value placed on social standing. So your compensation package has to cover increased lifestyle expenses, adjusted for the position's impact on your status in the community.

If wages stagnated, but somehow McDonald's just kept getting trendier, I expect they would retain more of their original demographic than if McDonald's was increasingly seen as a place that only employs losers and morons.

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#129

Post by chrisbennet »

scotty79 wrote: post #16
stale2002 wrote: post #3

Well then obviously wages haven't risen enough. For an extreme example, pay me 200$ an hour and I'll quit my web dev job and do it myself.

Ok, but that would mean that the price of produce would need to grow nearly just as much. And then nobody would buy it. So at some level of price of labor it's better for the producer to close the shop and take the losses instead of rising wages even more and risking more losses due to crashing demand.

"Labor costs comprise only 6 percent of the price consumers pay for fresh produce. Thus, if farm wages were allowed to rise 40 percent, and if all the costs were passed on to consumers, the cost to the average household would be only about $8 a year."

http://cis.org/articles/2007/back907.html

Re: Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don’t want the job

#130

Post by [deleted] »

zeroer wrote: post #113
kodfodrasz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to determine which is needed more, as a home has costs, loosing a job leads usually loosing a home. I believe both are equally important, and this is kind of a snake biting its own tail problem, as without a home it is very hard to get a job. (Although I can imagine someone living in a car temporarily in mild weather conditions, it would be impossible to survive a winter that way here in Central Europe) Ho…

> loosing It's spelled "loosening", btw.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN