You didn't get what I told you. No one wants to work these jobs. They're tough. Pay is adequate, you just have to be willing to work (hard) for it. It's up to the employee how much they make. And, these are seasonal, temporary jobs.
LOL - again, no one wants these jobs. They're too hard for your average Joe and they're seasonal, temporary jobs.
Again if you have a legal labor shortage it is because the pay is inadequate. Its called supply and demand. The supply of workers you have is low, therefore the demand for farm workers is very great, therefore the wages go up until you can actually attract a adequate supply of workers. A adequate wage implies the lowest wage you can get away with paying and still have a good supply of workers.
I didn't say you suggested it, I'm pointing out reality. Driving up to a parking lot where there are people who have filled out applications and passed employement interviews, etc. - in a perfect world. Who does all of this interviewing & vetting?They're seasonal, temporary jobs. Do you want this cost passed along to the consumer as well?
Are you saying that farms just let any schmuck off the street, no application, no interview no nothing? You do realize that if you want a job anywhere then you have to fill out an application, you have to go to interviews, sometimes even have a back ground check and drug test. Have you ever had a job?
But the number one reason is - no one wants to do this!
Its not that no one wants to do this its that no one wants to do this for the pay that is being offered.
Do you really think we don't put ads in the paper, word of mouth, checking around? Of course we do.
The obviously the pay is not high enough.If I lived next door to you would you mow my lawn for a dollar? **** no you wouldn't mow my lawn for a dollar
And, the types of places you're talking about where you pick-up day labor,
Day laborers are mostly illegals and do not fill out applications.I didn't say a day labor site.
I'll answer this again.
1. Pay is adequate (much better than minimum wage - you can make quite a tidy sum) if...and here's the rub...You Work For It.
Again supply and demand dictate that you up the pay.
2. What you're suggesting would end up bankrupting farmers and consumers who like to eat. There is a finite amount of money to go around based on what the crop will bring in - real world.
Local News | Low-paid illegal work force has little impact on prices | Seattle Times Newspaper
More than 7 million illegal immigrants work in the United States. They build houses, pick crops, slaughter cattle, stitch clothes, mow lawns, clean hotel rooms, cook restaurant meals and wash the dishes that come back.
You might assume that the plentiful supply of low-wage illegal workers would translate into significantly lower prices for the goods and services they produce. In fact, their impact on consumer prices — call it the "illegal-worker discount" — is surprisingly small.
The bag of Washington state apples you bought last weekend? Probably a few cents cheaper than it otherwise would have been, economists estimate. That steak dinner at a downtown restaurant? Maybe a buck off. Your new house in Subdivision Estates? Hard to say, but perhaps a few thousand dollars less expensive.
The underlying reason, economists say, is that for most goods the labor — whether legal or illegal, native- or foreign-born — represents only a sliver of the retail price.
Consider those apples — Washington's signature contribution to the American food basket.
At a local QFC, Red Delicious apples go for about 99 cents a pound. Of that, only about 7 cents represents the cost of labor, said Tom Schotzko, a recently retired extension economist at Washington State University. The rest represents the grower's other expenses, warehousing and shipping fees, and the retailer's markup.
And that's for one of the most labor-intensive crops in the state: It takes 150 to 190 hours of labor to grow and harvest an acre of apples, Schotzko said, compared to four hours for an acre of potatoes and 1 ½ hours for an acre of wheat.
The labor-intensive nature of many crops is a key reason agriculture continues to rely on illegal workers. A report by Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center who has long studied immigration trends, estimates that 247,000 illegal immigrants were employed as "miscellaneous agricultural workers" last year — only 3.4 percent of the nation's 7.2 million illegal workers, according to Pew statistics, but 29 percent of all workers in that job category.
Eliminating illegal farmworkers, by shrinking the pool of available labor, likely would raise wages for those who remain. Philip Martin, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Davis, noted that two years after the old bracero program ended in 1964, the United Farm Workers union won a 40 percent increase for grape harvesters.
A decade ago, two Iowa State University agricultural economists estimated that removing all illegal farmworkers would raise wages for seasonal farmworkers by 30 percent in the first couple of years, and 15 percent in the medium term.
But supermarket prices of summer-fall fruits and vegetables, they concluded, would rise by just 6 percent in the short run — dropping to 3 percent over time, as imports took up some of the slack and some farmers mechanized their operations or shifted out of labor-intensive crops. (Winter-spring produce would be even less affected, they found, because so much already is imported.)
If illegal workers disappeared from the apple harvest and wages for the remaining legal workers rose by 40 percent in response — and that entire wage increase were passed on to the consumer — that still would add less than 3 cents to the retail price of a pound of apples.
