Ex-farm worker here.
We need to talk about this whole "But a living wage for farm workers would spike the cost of food!" thing.
Not true AT ALL.
Y'all don't understand how fast experienced farm workers are.
The average tomato picker pulls 650lbs per hour.
At $20/hr, that's $0.03/lb for labor.
I know "650 lbs an hour" sounds crazy, because it kinda is.
But that also just means filling one of these buckets every ~3 minutes. That's doable for the average healthy adult.
(Doing it 10hrs/day for weeks in a row is the hard part.)
The average orange picker pulls 876 lbs/hour.
At $20/hr, that would cost 2 cents per pound for labor.
Here's the source I'm using for lbs/hr btw:
https://swfrec.ifas.ufl.edu/docs/pdf/economics/extension/econ_labor_pr.pdf
A *slow* strawberry picker can get 20lbs/hr. If they make $20/hr, that's only $0.75 for a pint basket.
Sure, that's a noticeable price difference. And it's still nowhere near "doubling or tripling" the cost of food, as I've seen people claim repeatedly.
This helps explain why it's so hard to automate farm labor!
It's not that it's too hard to make a robot pick crops.
It's that humans are really, REALLY good at it. It's hard to make a robot that's BETTER at it than people.
We even have a real-life experiment that proves paying farm workers a fair wage can be done. And prices went up so little, PEOPLE DIDN'T EVEN NOTICE.
In 2005, tomato pickers in FL struck a deal with Yum! Brands (Taco Bell, KFC, & others) to guarantee higher wages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_Immokalee_Workers
The deal?
Yum! Brands would only by from farms that had signed on to a fair food program with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. They'd pay extra for those tomatoes, and the extra $ would be passed through directly to tomato pickers as a raise.
This deal nearly doubled tomato pickers' wages.
And guess how much this big, ground-shaking deal raised the price of tomatoes?
ONE PENNY PER POUND.
That's it.
This program was so successful, others have signed on.
McDonald's, Burger King, Whole Foods, Subway, Trader Joe's, Chipotle, Walmart, Fresh Market, & several food service co's (Compass, Aramark, Sodexo, Bon Appetit) have all agreed to pay an extra $0.01/lb for CIW tomatoes.
To be clear, the program isn't without controversy.
FL-based Publix has famously refused to sign on.
Its donations lean Republican. Publix heiress Julie Fancelli is a heavy right-wing donor who sponsored the Jan 6 riots.
CIW has been incredibly successful at showing exactly how we can afford to pay farm workers a fair wage.
And certain Florida farm & food interests really, really haven't liked that. It's legitimately fueled MAGA as a political force in Florida.
Surely it's a total coincidence that Trump's first large-scale immigrant detention facility is in Florida. In easy commuting distance of the tomato fields around Immokalee
The reality is lots of farmers would just rather not pay fair wages.
The yields on hand-picked fruit & veg is several tons per acre.
So every penny per lb they cut from wages, is hundreds of dollars of profit in the farmer's pocket.
It sucks to think about. But that's the reality of farm wages.
Farms usually blame "large corporations" for not paying them properly, so they're "forced" to pay poor wages.
That's why CIW made these bargains directly with the large corps. To stop farms from passing the buck and playing "Aw shucks, I'd love to pay fair wages but I can't afford to."
And you know what? It took time to get the big food corps to the table. But most of them ultimately signed on. In the end, they were a lot more amenable to proper farm wages than most of the farms.
The corps like Publix that get mad about CIW & fair farm wages, it's not bc proper farm wages will put them out of business.
It's because they get upset when ANY workers get collective bargaining wins. It's just generic anti-labor politics- not an existential threat to their business.
Anyway. When you see people hyperventilating that "B-b-but paying farm workers more would make food unaffordable!" please correct them up for me.
They might mean well? They might be trying to make a point about how much we owe the humble farm worker?
But that kind of talk is exactly how you get people believing "Gosh shucks golly. I guess we just need slavery to live."
Cut it out already.
This is usually when I tell people "and go follow CIW (Coalition of Immokalee Workers) if you haven't already." But it looks like they're not on Mastodon.
So uhhhh go follow UFW if you haven't already, they're at https://mastodon.online/@ufwupdates@union.place
Ever heard someone say "We SHOULD pay farm workers more! But then oranges will cost $3 each?"
Here's the debunk in video format- with additional info that didn't make it into the thread.
Send to anyone who'd find it useful!
@Szescstopni Thanks for asking, no I don't plan to do that at this time. For those who don't like YouTube, most of the info's already in the thread above.
My goal here is to get the info in front of as many people as possible. I don't have the bandwidth or frankly the size of following that would justify adding yet another platform & the additional workload that comes with it.
@Szescstopni (If you can't tell, I get this type of question a lot. I would suggest that folks at least stop & consider that they're asking people, who are already providing them well-researched content for free, to do yet more work that would most likely be unpaid.
Also if it's that important to you to only consume content on open platforms..........it's already posted on Mastodon as a thread. Which you are reading right now.)
@sarahtaber
We already have slavery. No one cares. Unfortunately.
Fast-food chains use Alabama prison inmates as slave labor ...
Same argument the Walton family makes about Walmart employes.
Every time I see someone saying that basic human rights and reasonable pay would raise the price of food beyond affordability, I want to spit rivets.
Hon, an extra cent a pound isn't what's made your burger cost 2-3 times what it did twenty years ago, it's the fact that corporations will raise the price of their goods to the very limit of affordability and then keep ratcheting it, click-by-click, at every opportunity, while refusing to provide their workers a fraction of what they're worth.
More slave labour isn't going to make your food cheaper. Making sure that the ultracapitalists pay in spades for their inhumanity, now that might just do the trick.
@theogrin Yeah, it's just fundamentally wrong.
"If we pay these people enough then other people won't be able to afford food."
Then the solution is to pay the other people a fair wage as well! It's not rocket science! And yet it just seems beyond... ah, I think I have it.
As Upton Sinclair said, it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
@arafel @theogrin @sarahtaber I think it could be stated in an even more simple way.
There are only two real scenarios in which paying a living wage would make something unaffordable.
* We do not produce enough of the thing. (This is a cry for innovation)
* The general population is NOT paid a living/fair wage for their labor.
We live in the second one.
@sarahtaber To add to this - the Chocolate industry has a similar reckoning worldwide with chocolate farming - but some companies, after being dragged on it, realized that maybe they could just, you know, take steps to ethically source their chocolate [ https://www.reeveconsulting.com/2024/02/14/getting-chocolates-isnt-as-sexy-as-you-think-heres-why/ ].
Any extra increase in wages would likely be offset by a decrease in P.R. and marketing to make people want to knowingly buy child labour-sourced chocolate.
Valentine’s Day is here! Now you may be thinking, “I should buy these chocolates to show my love for them. It’ll be a great idea!”. Well not exactly… and that’s because not all chocolates are sustainably produced. You’d be surprised by the amount of chocolates being produced today that are still manufactured using unethical processes that contribute to deforestation and child labor. Ethical and ecological concerns in the chocolate industry are the biggest problems, so if you’re thinking of buying chocolate, make sure that you use your judgement in buying sustainably from chocolate producers that are ethically sourced. ...
@sarahtaber People need to realise that farmers arent generally "the good guys" or "the humble small business" or whatever they project onto them from the books they read and movies they watch. Sure some might be, some might try to be fair to their employees.
Where i am from, farmer protests are *extremely* far-right and routinely use Nazi iconography (that is in Germany). And i've read similarly from other places. And they do inhumane exploitation.
@EinsPossum @sarahtaber When I drove through farm country near my urban area, the Trump signs increased the further I got.
I have a theory that MAGA is a venereal disease spread by livestock.
It’s very distressing (that “lots of farmers would just rather not pay fair wages”) & it makes me ask questions about farm workers in my country (Australia) where we’ve had a number of scandals related to labour hire practices. 😐
Thanks again for shining a light on such important topics. 🙂
The Florida tomato heiress sounds like a nasty pasty; mean to fund the 6 Jan insurrection & entitled as all hell but surely we’re wrong to even think this:
“Surely it's a total coincidence that Trump's first large-scale immigrant detention facility is in Florida. In easy commuting distance of the tomato fields around Immokalee” 😐
[That was a comment dripping with sarcasm for those who don’t do irony or humour…]
@sarahtaber I live in an agricultural county.
Almost every day I see people working hard in the fields.
And every time I think: Perhaps this generation of workers won't experience the full American Dream, but among their children and grandchildren will be our nation's future Curies and Mozarts, future Twains and Spielbergs - a child of one of those workers may find a cure for cancer.
I am more than happy to pay extra $$ so that these people have a better chance of growing into (and enriching) our American culture and life, just as my great grandparents and grandparents did.
I also support UBI, free healthcare, and free education for all who are here (not just citizens.)
Many of our religions - including Islam, Christianity, Judaism - all teach us to care for the foreigner and stranger.
(I would add that we need to pull back on our national worship of advanced university degrees and note that often those who work with their hands are as skilled as a scientist with a PhD.)
Thank you so much Sarah! 🙂 for another incredibly educational, fact- & story-filled read on modern agricultural practices and workers (& those who belittle them & treat them unfairly & now meanly 😐 )
Thanks too for the link to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW): so inspirational! Hard to pick a snippet to share, they’re active in so many areas:
“Starting in 1993 from a foundation of farmworker community organizing in Immokalee, Florida, the CIW is best known today for its Fair Food Program (FFP), launched in 2011. The FFP harnesses the purchasing power of over a dozen retail food brands, from Taco Bell to Walmart, to compel compliance with a human rights-based code of conduct on participating farms. The Program was born in the Florida tomato industry and has spread to ten US states and Chile, including expansion into the cut flower industry and multiple additional crops, and incipient expansion efforts in South Africa and Mexico through the support of the US Department of Labor.[1] A new channel for co-ops and smaller independent grocery stores to support the Program is expanding through the FFP Sponsor Program.
“The FFP also gave rise to the Worker-driven Social Responsibility model (WSR), which has been successfully replicated in the apparel industry in Bangladesh through the Bangladesh Accord (now the International Accord), in Lesotho through the Lesotho Agreements,[2] and in the dairy industry in the state of Vermont through the Milk with Dignity Program. The CIW provides technical assistance to organizations that are interested in adopting the WSR model through an umbrella organization, the WSR-Network.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_Immokalee_Workers
Ha ha ha! Very good point: “Not to be flippant but evolution did see to it that we're really good at getting food off of trees & bushes. We have a rather meaningful several-million-year head start over the robots here.” :-😁
Why don’t we value & celebrate these amazing skills (instead of bankers & financiers who you might say are doing badly, stuff that computers do better… nonAI-infested computers I mean… talking about actual maths & stuff like that here). 😐
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