What's your solution to this? Replacing migrant workers with locals by quadrupling the price of fruit? Or allowing more migrants in?
FWIW my family worked as day laborers and it wasn't viewed as exploitation but as a chance to stay in America and become legal. It was better than where they came from. My grandfather ended up becoming a translator and negotiator for the union, but he never had a bad word to say about how America had treated him.
How would it quadruple the price of fruit? Serious question. Prices would go up, but lets say a worker can pick, what 100 lbs of onions per hour. Onions cost between 30c-$1.50 a pound, so lets go low at say $0.50/pound. So in that hour, if they pick 100 pounds, that's around $50 of revenue. If they make, say $5/hour, and we quadruple their pay to $20/hour, if we increase the cost of onions so that one hour's worth of onions (100 lbs) costs $15/hour more, up to $65/hour, that would be $0.65 per onion. Far from quadruple. If we quadruple the cost to $2.00/onion, then that's $200/hour worth of onion revenue, and we could increase the worker wage from $5/hour to $105/hour!
Lots of research seems to back all this up.
https://www.epi.org/blog/how-much-would-it-cost-consumers-to...
I think laborers are simply exploited.
So our onion picker is making $20/hr. The stock boy in the market is still only making $5/hr, but his cost of food goes up by 30%. He's clearly being exploited - he makes less than an onion picker. He needs his pay quadrupled, too. So do the sorters, truckers, the mechanics, fuel attendants, market managers, every person along the way who touches that onion. All those increases get factored in so the final price of an onion will continue to rise, and then have to rise again, because no more value has been produced. When you put your thumb on one end of the scale, the inflation will ripple until that $20/hr will only buy the same number of onions that $5/hr would buy originally. Ultimately, after a period of economic contraction and devaluation of currency - and concomitant loss of personal savings in the bank, which will be soaked up by the financial sector, and those able to speculate against the dollar - everyone will be doing the same job they were doing before to be able to afford the same amount of onions.
I speak about this having lived through two periods of hyperinflation in Argentina. Fixing prices of goods or labor ends up destroying savings, and destroying people's lives. There needs to be a baseline - minimum wage - to prevent a race to the bottom. But when shortsighted people come into power promising to raise that faster than the rate of inflation, look out, because they're inextricably bound, and inflation will quickly catch up to it.
> For one pound of iceberg lettuce, which costs about $1.20 on average, farmers receive 40 cents and farmworkers get 13 of those 40 cents.
An 1.6666666% increase in price would be a 15% increase in salary. (say 1.7%)
>The BLS data show that expenditures by households (referred to in the data as “consumer units”) in 2019 was $320 on fresh fruits and $295 on fresh vegetables, amounting to $615 a year or $11.80 per week. In addition, households spent an additional $110 on processed fruits and $145 on processed vegetables.
$320 fresh fruits + 1.7% = $325.44 per year
$295 fresh vegetables + 1.7% = $300.01 per year
sub-total:
$615 + 1.7% = $625.45 per year
$11.80 + 1.7% = $12 per week
$110 processed fruits + 1.7% = $111.87
$145 processed vegetables + 1.7% = $147.46
$255 + 1.7% = 259.33
Total without extra pay:
$255 + $615 = $870
Total with extra pay:
259.33 + $625.45 = $884.79
The difference is $14.79 !!!
Related, I like how the argument is that the only way our economy will work is if there is a population that works for much less than a living wage. As if a form of near slavery must exist for capitalism to work. It's crazy.
If you want to make the argument that the middle class can afford to pay more for the goods they buy, and that money should find its way to the laborers who produce the goods, I think that's a worthy moral goal. But I think if you look at the price increases and the housing crises going on around the US, it's pretty clear that "livable wages" have aggravated those things rather than make anything more livable. All it's done is essentially made the money the middle class had in the bank less valuable than it was last year. The main beneficiaries of inflation, and the people who have maintained or increased the value of their assets, are landlords and investors. Minimum wage increases and price controls are two sides of the same inflationary coin, and they both serve to funnel value upward to the top 10%.
I accept that the money I get paid for my work is the only true indicator of what my work is worth. Lots of people can say they love my music, or my writing. But if no one buys my albums or my novels, I know they weren't very good albums or novels. I find a lot of peace in this knowledge. I don't have to wonder why the world is against me. I know that my work isn't good enough...and I have to try harder. Making not enough money from a long project is just the world telling me that I need to do better.