Posted by rntn 10/28/2024
There is no shortage of labor, but a shortage of people willing to work at the wages on offer for the job (in the US). Without shortages, humans are treated as a surplus resource. Force the system to achieve an outcome more favorable to the human.
Edit: @potato3732842 and @vivekd Strongly agree with both of your comments.
I wonder if this is a self fulfilling cycle. I mean if migrant labor and automation were unavailable would we close all the farms and starve to death because labour costs are too high? Or would we increase farm wages and pay the higher food prices if that's the outcome.
It seems to me that the low wages on offer for farm work are a result of so many farms utilizing migrant labour and driving down wages in that sector. And if that option was unavailable we would probably have higher wages in the sector and more people developing expertise in farm work. It would likely also solve the problem of struggling rural economies.
Additionally, we'd be pinching the labor market further in whatever areas those people left to work on farms instead.
It's not like we have 18% unemployment.
That is a rather strange claim. The US is represented all up and down this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_producing_coun...
Certainly, farmers will complain they no longer get a cheap labor discount, this is a common refrain in any industry where their labor costs are no longer discounted due to structural demographics. The desire to pay humans the least possible for their labor is universal. Automate or die, those are your choices. If there is a need for subsidies, cost of capital assistance, whatever, we can do that; capital is a fiction, labor is real.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/agriculture/our-insights...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/23/mexico-farmw... | https://archive.today/8rmWI
https://www.axios.com/2024/04/25/trump-biden-americans-illeg...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/647123/sharply-americans-curb-i...
(I am once again asking to think in systems)
This is tying your hands behind your back and not accepting it.
There's a difference.
There is, to my knowledge, no country that has solved its labor supply challenges with mass immigration in a sustainable manner. I am happy to be proven wrong if my understanding and model is inaccurate.
Qatar's population has been happy with their system for a while.
I’ma say most nutrition is highly-mechanized (even if it may not make up the entire grocery bill if you buy lots of produce).
Highly mechanized would also include carrots, potatoes, onions, beans/pulses, oats, the flavourless tomatoes that make up 98% of the market, peanuts, lettuce & spinach.
Plenty of fruits I’d say are semi-mechanized: apples, pears and most citrus can use a machine that violently shakes the tree onto a net to catch the falling fruit.
I meant to say cereal instead of wheat which would have caught oats and barley and some specialty cereals. Beans/pulses generally use the same machinery as cereals.
Definitely didn't mean to include tomatoes, lettuce & spinach, though. I know those are partially mechanized, but don't they still include a large unskilled labor component? Or am I out of date?
That's certainly a statement. It's ludicrous but it technically counts as a statement.
Wages are increasing, but the country is just about maxed in in productivity and looks to be at serious risk of collapsing.
Also, they're in serious trouble because even before the war they were not reproducing fast enough to replenish the labor supply, and immigration was supposed to account for that.
And, in general, the answer to your question is that more immigrant labor actually creates more and higher value jobs than are replaced by immigrant labor. Not just the services they need and want in exchange, but also the comparative advantage of non immigrant labor being able to focus on more valuable tasks.
I'm not so sure about this argument. Migrant workers come into a country for a reason. Removing this opportunity does harm to the migrant worker. Any migrant worker human rights issues do need to be addressed, however I'm not convinced it is a good reason for automation.
I'm Canadian, moving to America would open many doors for me and put me in a better economic position and give me more well defined constitutional rights. Does this mean I have a right to migrate to America.
I understand people in desperate circumstances like refugees should be given special consideration. But expanding that to all migrant labour seems to be a strained definition of human rights
Do you believe migrant labor in the U.S. are treated with dignity and are treated well? What about illegal immigrants working in slaughterhouses? More generally speaking, do you believe there are classes of people who are treated poorly?
If such people exist then isn’t it valid to describe them accurately and to describe how “the system” treats them?
That's exactly the point. Only people with a fairly direct interest in the industry and its inputs and outputs would discuss it.
Look at how HN discusses political matters.
Look at how HN discusses computer industry matters.
Every industry that can be converted from "everybody weighs in because it's sort of a social issue" to "mostly only people with a horse in the race weigh in" is a huge plus for humanity.
> Every industry that can be converted from "everybody weighs in because it's sort of a social issue" to "mostly only people with a horse in the race weigh in" is a huge plus for humanity.
Not if that horse is just wanting to use money to make more money, consequences for humans be damned. Everything can be viewed as that, or as a "complex systems", and then the people who like abstract musings about complex systems can weigh in, and you're free to do that -- but to 99% of all living humans and 99.999% of all who historically lived that is both monstrous and uninteresting. At least that would be my "bet" -- so if your claim is that it would be "better for humanity" (not even "better for HN" where you might have a point) for only experts or capitalists or people who like machines more than vulgar, average people to weigh in, as I said, I'm very confident "humanity" would soundly disagree, and would be correct in doing so.
The ideal of Hard working laborers is a lot more attractive than the concept of welfare queens, ect.
Slavery was a terrible thing but at least there was the deal that the masters had to house, clothe and feed their slaves. The government wasn't gonna do it for you. In modern capitalism everyone wants to escape their responsibilities.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
I’m not sure if this is the right graph, but I read somewhere, household size has been going down over time, so using household income is a bit misleading actually.
It is economically ridiculous to imply that, as technology advances, un-teched sectors should continue paying people similar real wages. The only thing that will accomplish that when some sectors are being improved with technology and some aren't is working to apply that benefit as broadly as possible.
1. There is never a "labor shortage". There is only "insufficient wages";
2. In the US in particular, the agricultural sector would collapse without undocumented migrants;
3. Companies love migrants being undocumented because it suppresses wages for both documented and undocumented workers. We used to have extensive programs for temporary workers (eg the Bracero program [1]).
Automation is going to be a huge issue in the coming years and there are two ways it could go.
The first way is the capitalist way. That is that workers will be laiid off. Unemployment will be used to suppress wages further. Why? So the capitalists can eke out a few extra dollars in profit. This is the dystopian view and the one I consider most likely.
The second way is tha automation makes work easier and take less time. This is essentially the socialist way. This could vastly improve everyone's lives. After all, making it so people don't actually have to work dangerous or just horrible agriculture jobs (or in an Amazon warehouse for that matter). I consider this, given the current political climate, to be highly unlikely.
Our society is rapidly marching towards a future when nobody owns anything (particularly housing). You'll live at the whims of whoever provides worker housing. You'll largely work in service jobs that haven't been automated (yet) at low wages. Things like aged care and maintaining those estates you don't own but are granted housing on.
Welcome to neofeudalism.
[1]: https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/bracero-program
Yes, it probably would. Which is why it's good they're replacing them with automation rather than continuing to lean on illegals.
If a job is fully replaceable with automation, why do you believe it should simply be "made easier" with no cuts to wages, keeping people employed for no particular reason? I think a better discussion is what we can do with the growing chunk of the population who are economically useless and refuse to pick up new skills to make themselves useful.
> The agricultural sector in the United States relies on foreign workers; 86 percent of agricultural workers [3] in the United States are foreign-born and 45 percent of all US agricultural workers are undocumented.
This is particularly rife in the meatpacking and agricultural industries. The employers themselves call in ICE raids when their workers start demanding fair wages with little to no consequence.
[1]: https://cmsny.org/agricultural-workers-rosenbloom-083022/
This is such a bizarre claim. Are you not aware of the existence of illegal/undocumented immigrants? Or their prevalence in agriculture?
How long do you think it takes to ship spinach from wherever it grows to every grocery store in the US?
Not overnight.
How long do think it sits on shelves before it sells?
Not <1 day on average.
This has much less to do with automation and more to do with spinach being available almost everywhere in the US at almost all times of the year.
It is a modern miracle that you can buy fresh spinach in the dead of winter in North Dakota.
Do you remember hearing stories of your grandma doing the same?