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

151–160 of 232 posts

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

#151

Post by bsder »

dropit_sphere wrote: post #74

Status, status, status. Another way to think of it might be: How much would I have to pay you for you to walk around with a small amount of shit on your forehead all day? We have somehow gotten ourselves in the position where manual labor relegates one to be a social untouchable. This means that anyone with a shred of self-interest gets out ASAP, which means the political power of labor is disproportionately weak in…

> We have somehow gotten ourselves in the position where manual labor relegates one to be a social untouchable.

Hogwash. If the salary rises high enough, people will do the jobs. Why do people only seem to like capitalism when it suppresses wages?

I guarantee you that if the farmers paid $30/hour, they'd have plenty of people to fill those jobs.

Every time I hear about one of these job "shortages" I always sympathize quite deeply: "Yep, I have a similar problem. There is an acute shortage of supermodels willing to have sex with me."

Amazing how that puts things into perspective really quickly.

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

#152

Post by dragonwriter »

nilkn wrote: post #146
dragonwriter wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What has Trump even done on the border that would have any effect on this at all right now? The series of highly-publicized immigration raids and deportation actions targeting, in many cases, categories of persons who.were previously not deportation priorities.

Immigration raids? Those have been going on forever now. Deportation is not new under Trump. I assume they must be happening on mass scale starting months ago to have had any effect on this already. He's barely been in office 50 days.

> Immigration raids?

Yes, as the most concrete direct action; though simply signaling intent previously since his election has probably also.had an effect.

> Deportation is not new under Trump.

No, but targeting immigrants who were not targets in the latter years of Obama's Administration is a change with Trump.

> He's barely been in office 50 days.

He's been President-Elect for a lot longer, and signaling animosity and hostile intent toward Mexicans specifically since literally the speech in which he announced he was seeking the Republican nomination.

Voting isn't​ the only way people react to signals like that.

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

#153

Post by ysavir »

lohi wrote: post #123
edblarney wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

The parent comment addresses that:

> As the area becomes more wealthy - guess what - wages are supposed to rise. Yes, that means the price of burgers should rise a little bit as well.

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

#154

Post by dragonwriter »

Apocryphon wrote: post #125
dragonwriter wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

> If this leads to the decline of agriculture in CA, does that mean the water woes will be diminished?

Depends which crops are most affected and what the land use shifts to (could be rising ag labor prices favor crops where the work is more automated, which may be a decline in total profits but not in land or water use.)

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

#155

Post by harrumph »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #131

They aren't high enough. Perhaps prices need to be raised. If they can't raise them then I have basically no problem with these farmers investing in machinery and employing fewer people than they do now but making those workers legalized americans and paying them a good wage. I also don't have a problem with this guys vineyard failing. That's capitalism, sometimes (a lot of times) businesses fail.

>That's capitalism, sometimes (a lot of times) businesses fail.

Agreed, and add: it's actually the overwhelming majority.

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

#156

Post by dmode »

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…

I didn't grow up in the US, but is this because parenting changed around this time ? Where I grew up, we would hear stories about kids in the US leaving their homes at 15 and trying to figure things out. But when I moved here, i have never seen it. All the families I know take good care of their kids throughout college and even after. So there is no need for them to work at low paying fast food jobs. Their parents can cover their expenses. Savvier parents are even investing their kids future by helping them build startups, participating in hackathons etc. Far cry from a job at McDonad's.

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

#157

Post by nilkn »

dragonwriter wrote: post #152
nilkn wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immigration raids? Those have been going on forever now. Deportation is not new under Trump. I assume they must be happening on mass scale starting months ago to have had any effect on this already. He's barely been in office 50 days.

> Immigration raids? Yes, as the most concrete direct action; though simply signaling intent previously since his election has probably also.had an effect. > Deportation is not new under Trump. No, but targeting immigrants who were not targets in the latter years of Obama's Administration is a change with Trump. > He's barely been in office 50 days. He's been President-Elect for a lot longer, and signaling animosity…

The article itself, despite its headline, seems to acknowledge that blaming everything on Trump is not quite correct:

> Already, fewer Mexicans had been willing to risk border crossings as security and deportations escalated under the Obama Administration. At the same time, Mexico’s own economy was mushrooming, offering decent jobs for people who stayed behind.

Many of the specific anecdotes occur before Trump even ran. For instance:

> Indeed, Chalmers R. Carr III, the president of Titan Farms, a South Carolina peach giant, told lawmakers at a 2013 hearing that he advertised 2,000 job openings from 2010 through 2012. Carr said he was paying $9.39, $2 more than the state’s minimum wage at the time.

> He hired 483 U.S. applicants, slightly less than a quarter of what he needed; 109 didn’t show up on the first day. Another 321 of them quit, “the vast majority in the first two days,” Carr testified. Only 31 lasted for the entire peach season.

Another one:

> In the last five years, he has advertised in local newspapers and accepted more than a dozen unemployed applicants from the state’s job agency. Even when the average rate on his fields was $20 an hour, the U.S.-born workers lost interest, fast.

Five year period.

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

#158

Post by CalChris »

nradov wrote: post #118
CalChris wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A buddy did a job not unlike that. He worked for Schlumberger oil in AIDS infested Africa. He came back addicted to quinine and debt free. --- To the downvoters, I meant no disrespect but it was a fact. It was AIDS infested Africa. Entire villages were wiped out by a disease. That didn't matter because there was oil to be extracted. We heard less if at all about it here. But we got the oil.

Quinine isn't addictive. Although I suppose one could become addicted to the gin part of Gin and Tonic.

I really forget what he was addicted to. It's been a long time; 30+ years. While he didn't come back exactly right in the head, he eventually recovered. The point of this was that he went through a bit of hell for an oil company to pay off his grad school debts.

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

#159

Post by temp-dude-87844 »

hkmurakami wrote: post #68
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…

Any insight into what does In n' Out does differently? They seem to continue to attract that demographic.

Elsewhere in the States, Panera, Starbucks, Chick fil-A, Tropical Smoothie, and likely some others tend to have staff that fits the same visual archetype.

Some of it is likely due to "organic" stratification and segregation of society, which is a less-nice way of saying people keep to their own circles. Some of it may be deliberate discrimination due to factors such as attractiveness and access to resources, often obscured by information asymmetry in the hiring process. Some of it may be that these businesses tend to be located in more prosperous areas that are both distant and difficult to access to by people who lack reliable transportation.

Several of these factors, while alone may not be significant, can occur together to striking effect.

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

#160

Post by mahyarm »

rogerbinns wrote: post #93
hkmurakami wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any insight into what does In n' Out does differently? They seem to continue to attract that demographic.

They don't have franchises like the other chains. That is also why their rollout seems slow. This means the boss is the company, not a franchisee who will have their own way of doing things. They then make a reasonable effort of benefits for their employees: http://www.in-n-out.com/employment/restaurant.aspx

Do affluent teenagers care about benefits although when their parents very likely have benefits for them already?
Post reply on HN