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.
Sarah Taber
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Dan Riley