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Mexicans Afraid of Being in America Create Farm Worker Shortage – Crops Suffer

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Re: Mexicans Afraid of Being in America Create Farm Worker Shortage – Crops Suffer

#61

Post by rgbrenner »

knz wrote: post #24
rgbrenner wrote: post #18

Good. These are some of the worst paying jobs in the country.. because they have used migrants to solve their labor problem, removing the need for them to compete for workers. They need to raise their wages, pay what it really costs for labor. And as a bonus, the increased costs will provide an incentive for future automation.

I don't entirely disagree but I also suspect that many Americans would be shocked by the cost of food if workers were paid higher wages (especially if it was done for everyone who touches your food as it travels from the farm to the table) and that most farmers would prefer a phased approach to reform so that crops aren't rotting in the fields.

most farmers would prefer a phased approach to reform so that crops aren't rotting in the fields.

I think everyone would prefer that.. but this is a problem the farmers created themselves. They've been using migrants for so long, that they've created a substantial difference in pay between themselves and the rest of the labor market. And with a sudden change in the supply of migrants, they're now trying to figure out what that difference is--what the true cost of labor is for their industry.

If they never relied on migrants, they would already know the answer to this question.

Re: Mexicans Afraid of Being in America Create Farm Worker Shortage – Crops Suffer

#62

Post by philipodonnell »

louprado wrote: post #47

In two recent conversations I was told that the coyete[1] rates are $10,000 from El Salvador and $8,000 from Mexico. The Mexican fellow told me he wouldn't return to the US not only because the rates were high too but the smugglers now seem more menacing. The fellow used to perform home construction in the Bay Area. Incidentally, a recent report in the area cited labor shortages as the #2 road block in the SF builder…

> The US administration seems to believe that our economic growth was cash constrained

I'm not going to point fingers at anyone, but corporate cash levels were already hitting records before the tax cuts passed and money was already available at record-low interest rates. Anyone who thought our companies were cash-constrained was intentionally not paying attention.

Re: Mexicans Afraid of Being in America Create Farm Worker Shortage – Crops Suffer

#63

Post by monksy »

rgbrenner wrote: post #18

Good. These are some of the worst paying jobs in the country.. because they have used migrants to solve their labor problem, removing the need for them to compete for workers. They need to raise their wages, pay what it really costs for labor. And as a bonus, the increased costs will provide an incentive for future automation.

I agree with this from a perspective that we've depressed the industry for so long with artificially low rates. This has exacerbated the problem and now we have a much more expensive problem than what we would have had. (We've also have been suffering the consequences culturally, economically, and on a QOL basis of this. [There are people that should have been getting skilled in this.. but we don't have the time and experience from doing that])

That being said, due to the currency leveraging, many central American economies, cultures, and peoples have suffered from the illegal immigration as well.

Re: Mexicans Afraid of Being in America Create Farm Worker Shortage – Crops Suffer

#64

Post by dragonwriter »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #58
knz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't entirely disagree but I also suspect that many Americans would be shocked by the cost of food if workers were paid higher wages (especially if it was done for everyone who touches your food as it travels from the farm to the table) and that most farmers would prefer a phased approach to reform so that crops aren't rotting in the fields.

I doubt that. I once read it would add 2 cents to the cost of a box of cereal to pay farm workers better. (It has probably been a few years, but the point stands: the cost of labor is a small portion of the cost of food.)

> I once read it would add 2 cents to the cost of a box of cereal to pay farm workers better.

Well, clearly you can pay them better with an even smaller increase, it's just a question of how much better; without quantifying that, commenting about how much the cost increase would be to achieve it is meaningless.

Of course, in any case, farm workers aren't the whole cost of labor in the farm-to-shelf pipeline, either.

Re: Mexicans Afraid of Being in America Create Farm Worker Shortage – Crops Suffer

#65

Post by DoreenMichele »

dragonwriter wrote: post #64
DoreenMichele wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that. I once read it would add 2 cents to the cost of a box of cereal to pay farm workers better. (It has probably been a few years, but the point stands: the cost of labor is a small portion of the cost of food.)

> I once read it would add 2 cents to the cost of a box of cereal to pay farm workers better. Well, clearly you can pay them better with an even smaller increase, it's just a question of how much better; without quantifying that, commenting about how much the cost increase would be to achieve it is meaningless. Of course, in any case, farm workers aren't the whole cost of labor in the farm-to-shelf pipeline, either.

Other than being pedantic, do you have a concrete point? Are you generally agreeing or disagreeing that we could pay them better without seeing some huge spike in food prices?

Re: Mexicans Afraid of Being in America Create Farm Worker Shortage – Crops Suffer

#66

Post by mc32 »

philipodonnell wrote: post #60
mc32 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If the Koreans and Japanese can farm their farms and feed their pops. despite tight labor markets, depop of rural areas and expensive labor, we can do it too. In addition, higher prices might make us less wasteful. What is it, 30% of food ends up in the rubbish bin?

Worth pointing out that rapidly rising food prices are often drivers of civil unrest and inflation-combating monetary policy. Slow rises are fine, the economy will adjust, fast rises, say from eliminating a large portion of the workforce at once, will cause much more disturbances in the economy.

That's a good point. In this case i don't see the prices rising much above the price of organics. In addition, the slice of people's income taken by food is small relative to places where price increases lead to unrest.

Re: Mexicans Afraid of Being in America Create Farm Worker Shortage – Crops Suffer

#67

Post by logfromblammo »

rgbrenner wrote: post #38
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increased labor costs provide an incentive to reduce labor costs. When labor costs are higher than automation costs, there's an incentive to automate. If you consider the existence of human labor undesirable then automation is always good. If you consider jobs the end-goal of human existence then automation is always bad. In all likelihood you're somewhere in between those, and whether automation is good or not depen…

GP seems to lean more towards the "human labor is bad" side. Actually no. But farmers have created a special problem for themselves: In a normal industry, wages increase and over a period of time, technology and techniques are developed to reduce the use of labor.. increasing labor productivity and controlling costs. This increased productivity is what allows firms to pay high wages. In the farm industry, this hasn't…

They have a choice now.

They can try to soak up the shrinking pool of human laborers as new entrants avoid entering the field, because they don't want to compete with robots.

Or they can start building the robots.

If they don't seek productivity gains, a well-capitalized startup can eat their lunch by shoving productivity gains from other industries down the throats of agribusinesses. We already have robots that can differentiate between weeds and crops in a flat in the lab and kill the weeds by pounding them into the dirt.

It's going to start with rail-bound robots tending to niche specialty vegetables and pharmaceutical feedstock plants in hydroponic containers. It's going to end with cereal crop farmers committing suicide as the capital requirements for operating a competitive farm rise beyond their means.

Re: Mexicans Afraid of Being in America Create Farm Worker Shortage – Crops Suffer

#68

Post by emtel »

rgbrenner wrote: post #18

Good. These are some of the worst paying jobs in the country.. because they have used migrants to solve their labor problem, removing the need for them to compete for workers. They need to raise their wages, pay what it really costs for labor. And as a bonus, the increased costs will provide an incentive for future automation.

And presumably the migrants are now earning even less. Which is bad, right?

Re: Mexicans Afraid of Being in America Create Farm Worker Shortage – Crops Suffer

#69

Post by logfromblammo »

trs80 wrote: post #56
jayd16 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of argument is this? Any policy that doesn't completely destroy America is good policy?

They're not slaves proper so it wouldn't be nearly as destructive. More like a healthy correction in the market.

Lettuce be honest. The end of slavery in the South was immediately replaced by slavery-like exploitation of second-class workers without enforceable rights. When a massive nationwide movement for equal civil rights finally made that non-viable a hundred years later, the farmers just did a global search-and-replace in their business plans from "black" to "foreign" and continued as usual.

Having zero abusable second-class workers would be more destructive. 150 years of dragging ass on modernizing their farming operations will come back and bite them all at once. But they probably won't learn their lesson and just use robots. They will beg and squeal for prisoner labor first. And then the cops will be ginning up bogus traffic offenses right before harvest time, so the people who can't pay the fines will have to pick vegetables instead.

Re: Mexicans Afraid of Being in America Create Farm Worker Shortage – Crops Suffer

#70

Post by meheleventyone »

dazc wrote: post #48
DanBC wrote: post #8

We're seeing the same thing in England, with seasonal farm workers not coming over.

I think the problem in the UK is that this kind of work has become monopolised by gang-masters who have an interest in recruiting workers from the poorest areas of the EU. I'm not so sure there is any great shortage of willing workers at the moment but it may be a problem in the future once free-movement comes to an end? As has been mentioned about the US above, there is this myth, propagated by the media, that nativ…

There’s numerous articles about the food being left to rot, for example from a couple of days ago: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-crops-eu-f...

So it seems very much to be an issue pre-Brexit.

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