I can't regularly find fruit that was plentiful a few years ago at my grocery store. Produce this year was poor quality and wasn't available at the same times.
There's plenty of food for everyone on the planet but we are very poor at distributing it to everyone. It's terrible seeing fruit rotting on their trees due to lack of migrant workers to exploit and also people deliberately dumping supplies to keep prices high
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.
> What's your solution to this? Replacing migrant workers with locals by quadrupling the price of fruit?
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!
You're still talking about a 30% increase in the price of food, which would have enormous ramifications; and it would not stop there. To take your math, a laborer at $5/hr is currently getting 10% of the retail price, $50, of 100 lbs of onions. If the laborer's pay is mandated to go up to $20/hr and the cost is passed to the consumer, they are now making about 30% of the retail price, $65, of the same box. That sounds alright, but here's the trouble: The rest of the cost of an onion to the consumer is not going into the profit margin of a corporation. In fact the margins are extremely slim. Virtually all the rest of the cost is going to sorting, transportation, stocking, and operating retail markets.
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.
reductio ad absurdum! If I was earning $5 per hour I wouldn't be looking for $20. It would be nice to get $5.50 and $6 would of course be better.
> 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.
I addition to the other comment about the inaccuracies and fallacies in your arguments, there's two other points. Hyperinflation didn't happen in Argentina because of changing demand, it was trying to stop that (amongst a lot of other things). This is simple supply and demand, the supply of workers is down and the demand is up, so the wages must go up.
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.
That's not my argument. My argument is that the market adjusts to value labor accurately, and no matter what you do, someone picking onions is going to earn a wage that's difficult to live on once all the prices adjust. Yes in the short term they can buy more Big Macs, but then the price of Big Macs will go up, and they'll be back where they started. You're correct that this is not what triggered the waves of inflation in Argentina. But if the government then steps in and prevents retailers from raising their prices, in an attempt to make sure the worker's wages can buy what they bought yesterday, you end up with Argentine- or Venezuela-style purchase limits and shortages on basic foodstuffs, and ultimately a black market for those as well as a blue market for hard currency.
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%.
IMHO salaries should be tied to units produced or customers served. I one time earn 35 euro per day making half a million boxes of cookies with 5 other people. The desire to push wages down that far has nothing to do with the price of the product. It makes things more fragile and more expensive if uninterested unskilled people do the work. If something went wrong the employees just laughed. No one rushed over to help.
I don't understand. One cookie is not as valuable as one hamburger, or one steel knife or one fighter jet. I think it's pretty awesome to make half a million boxes of cookies, but if it only pays 35 euro per day then it's really just a hobby or an art. A lot of art is like that. But not every painting can sell for a million dollars. I have had many great projects that turned out to be economic failures even though they made me happy and made other people happy... At the end of the day, I have to look at the results and say, this was my fault because I was in my own world, and I expected something unrealistic.
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.
