from Hacker News

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

by hrshtr on 3/17/17, 7:48 PM with 217 comments

by palewire on 3/17/17, 8:03 PM
I work at the LA Times and conducted the data analysis of wages included in this story. We published all the code behind it on GitHub. AMA. https://github.com/datadesk/california-crop-production-wages...
by greedo on 3/17/17, 8:14 PM
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, and the area was becoming more affluent.
Fast forward five years, and 99% of the staff was now Hispanic, including several illegal immigrants. The restaurant had to do what it could to make money and stay in biz.
I don't know how high wages would have to be to attract the previous demographic to that type of work. The area is far more affluent than when I was growing up, and house prices start at over $700K and go higher easily.
I do think something is missing though when kids don't learn what it's like to hold a retail type job dealing with the public. You learn hard work, humility, and often an appreciation for higher education.
by lacampbell on 3/17/17, 10:01 PM
This persistent myth that first world western countries need mass migration because there are jobs "$NATIONALY won't do" really needs to die. Japan is a high income first world nation, very low immigration, and yet somehow they are able to find people to drive taxis, serve food and sweep streets.
It's nothing more than an emotion based persuasion technique to get the first world working class to accept lower wages. Don't fall for it.
by itchyjunk on 3/17/17, 8:41 PM
"Trump’s border crackdown is supposed to help U.S. citizens. For California farmers, it’s creating a desperate shortage of help." (Disclamer: I am an immigrant whose paper work is still ongoing)
From the article, it seemed like at least for some their business model was questionable. If the only way to be profitable is to rely on illegal immigrant or non-competitive wages (one of the farmers mentioned could only stay profitable at $8/hr but it seems anything above $10/hr seems unprofitable. "Wineries paid $700 for a ton of grapes, and Klein could make a solid profit paying $8 an hour, the minimum wage.") than you're better off growing something else anyways. (almond and olive trees in this guys case). Even if there was a way to get visas to get labor, the cost of application and transportation might still prevent some of these low margin farms.
Googling shows that other manual labor type jobs in Napa valley [1] seems to be $17+ and often offers training + transport. Seeing as how grapes seems to be used in wine industry, wouldn't the wine industry pay more for the grapes as supply dwindles and make it profitable again?
If I could go work at a farm during summer to save some money for my college, I would consider it. But looking at cost of living/risk involved/ lack of benefits for season workers/ pay, it doesn't appear to be worth it.
So, yes, preventing people willing to work and make it work from doing so it not a good solution. But the narrative that Americans would never work on a farm given the choice is also not true, imho. I've met plenty of white Americans who would like to do it, but lot of the work seems to be seasonal.
by dropit_sphere on 3/17/17, 8:29 PM
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 comparison to its size.
It's like how Stranger Things HAD to be set in the 80's---because you can't have sympathetic characters in small towns in the modern era, because anyone with a head on their shoulders gets out as their first order of business.
by Animats on 3/17/17, 8:35 PM
Walking around handing out business cards in a bad neighborhood is not effective recruiting. Nor is the wine industry that important. It's good to see wages rising, though.
Machine picking is taking over. Every crop which can be machine harvested already is. All the staple crops were mechanized decades ago. Fruits and vegetables are mostly mechanized. Orange picking has been mechanized.[1] (The mechanism is brutal, but over 10 years, production isn't affected.) There's a newer, more gentle mechanism.[2] The orange picking machine is a big version of a grape harvester.[3]
Very few kinds of produce require full robotic picking. Apples to be sold whole do, and robotic apple picking exists, but is still experimental.[4] Robotic strawberry picking machines are available.[5]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyI6-jKIfoo [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av17eM1Ruyo [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXTnd90XFWE [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI
by stale2002 on 3/17/17, 8:03 PM
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.
by jeremyt on 3/17/17, 8:15 PM
If you raised wages and nobody wants the job, you haven't raised wages enough.
by SloughFeg on 3/17/17, 8:27 PM
The staggering low wages on Californian farms is preventing proper incentivisation to automate these processes. It reminds me of how slaves in the antibellum south prevented the area from becoming industrialized.
by ysavir on 3/17/17, 8:14 PM
> 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?
by gmarx on 3/17/17, 9:06 PM
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
by temp-dude-87844 on 3/17/17, 9:03 PM
There is always a desperation factor: how badly the worker needs the income from a particular job's wages to get by, or in come cases, support their entire family.
Farm work is seasonal, physically exhausting, hazardous to health, requires long hours, offers no long-term advancement, and the job sites often vary and are far away.
One only need look at the EU, an advanced economy that (mostly) offers freedom of movement across its diverse constituent states, to see how legal workers from less prosperous areas travel to more prosperous areas to perform skilled manual labor. In the EU's case, the internal economic disparities are often severe enough that the marginal utility of increased income to be gained elsewhere is very high, therefore internal migration is commonplace for blue-collar work.
In the US, this (mal-)adaptation is largely absent and is relegated to a few high-risk, high-income categories of manual labor, e.g. oil field roughnecks, Alaskan fishing; and to the similarly time-intensive long-distance truck driving. The phenomenon of a family's primary income-earner relocating elsewhere, leaving the family behind to perform a standard day's shift of blue-collar work is commonplace elsewhere in the world, but among non-immigrant legal US residents.
by nilkn on 3/17/17, 9:38 PM
> Trump’s border crackdown is supposed to help U.S. citizens. For California farmers, it’s creating a desperate shortage of help.
I'm immediately skeptical. What has Trump even done on the border that would have any effect on this at all right now?
Trump has done almost nothing on this front. Even his controversial travel ban (which is completely unrelated to Mexican immigration) has been shot down three times.
by whalesalad on 3/17/17, 8:28 PM
Yeah no shit no one wants the job. The industry needs to adapt. You can't keep paying people more to solve the problem, it doesn't work. No one aspires to earn 30k a year anyway.
Ultimately the jobs need to be replaced by machines or the cost of labor needs to get passed on to the consumer. It might be the end of two buck chuck.
by throwaway862 on 3/17/17, 11:19 PM
For California farmers, it’s creating a desperate shortage of help.
I am now offering $15k for a new BMW, up from $10k, but there are still no takers. Clearly, there is a "desperate shortage" of BMWs...
Does the LA Times seriously expect us to believe that immigrant labor is immune to the Law of Supply and Demand--that no wage or no combination of wage and benefits is enticing enough to persuade American citizens to work in agriculture, or that if the price is so high as to be unsustainable for most farms, that automation wouldn't come to be viewed as an increasingly viable, cost-effective alternative if cheap, illegal labor were denied to them?
The LA Times should be ashamed of itself for publishing this propaganda.
by relaytheurgency on 3/17/17, 8:08 PM
Farming is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US. There are reasons aside from money that people choose to pursue other careers.
by samirillian on 3/17/17, 8:27 PM
This argument is a bit double-edged. Okay, so it's implicitly immoral to keep immigrants out. But it's moral to hire them for jobs that Americans won't do because they're so unpleasant?
by PaulHoule on 3/17/17, 8:18 PM
The story is not too different for dairy (and other) farms in Upstate New York.
Most agricultural jobs pay a few more dollars an hour than the minimum wage, but they are much harder jobs than minimum wage jobs. It is one thing to wake up early morning to milk the cows if you own the farm, it is another thing to do it for other people's cows.
I don't know about Alaska and Hawaii, but illegal aliens are a big part of the agricultural workforce throughout the lower 48.
by frgtpsswrdlame on 3/17/17, 9:22 PM
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.
by busterarm on 3/17/17, 8:26 PM
Have a friend whose family owns a tree nursery in Texas. They tried very hard to hire Americans. Most of the people they talk to just aren't up to the job. Most people they did hire quit the first day because the work was too hard.
After the fourth American cut the tip of their pinky off in the first couple of hours on the job and sued, they stopped trying.
by WillPostForFood on 3/17/17, 8:08 PM
There has to be more to the story here because the unemployment rate in Stockton is 9.5%. So what's the disconnect between people not working, and employers who are apparently trying to pay more and aren't getting workers?
by theparanoid on 3/17/17, 8:25 PM
This seems like a victory for labor. Improving working conditions for unskilled labor is a good thing.
by __jal on 3/17/17, 8:43 PM
If it weren't for the human suffering involved in all this, I'd be laughing at the farmers, who are simply getting what they asked for[1]. Well, do I still find it funny, but in a much darker way.
I still think the answer to all of this is to call the Republican bluff, and just continually push E-verify any time anti-immigration nonsense comes up. Demand universal E-verify use, hit recalcitrant employers really hard (jail time, or at least business-crippling fines), and send the ICE thugs currently tormenting immigrants who try to speak out after the employers.
If nothing else, it would be amusing to listen to Ryan explain why he's suddenly soft on "illegals"[2].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/us/california-farmers-bac...
[2] There is no such thing as an illegal human.
by TheCoelacanth on 3/17/17, 10:37 PM
It's a difficult, dangerous, unpleasant job and the wage rise they are talking about still puts it at half the average wage for workers in the state. Why would they want it?
by Glyptodon on 3/17/17, 10:05 PM
Wonder if any high schools in nearby affluent areas need a new mandatory paid 1 week internship program for their students...
by supercanuck on 3/17/17, 8:04 PM
I see a potential solution to Los Angeles's homeless population.
by chiefalchemist on 3/18/17, 4:16 AM
Don't want the job? Or too obese to do the job? It's funny how can't do can be spun as don't want.
by gthtjtkt on 3/17/17, 8:50 PM
Good!
How does that saying go? "If you can't pay your employees a living wage, your business shouldn't exist"?
And maybe it's about time consumers learned the true cost of the goods they buy, without the artificial price suppression of abundant, cheap labor.
by kingmanaz on 3/17/17, 8:05 PM
Immigration laws seem likely to be enforced, illegal alien labor scabs self-deport in advance, and wages rise. Not hard to understand.
by datatan on 3/17/17, 8:08 PM
> Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don’t want the job
No. Californians don't want the jobs. Americans live in more than just CA, I know a lot of people in CA find this hard to believe but there is a whole world outside of Sillycon Valley.