Oh there’s a lot of people who can do that work. Just pay a living & decent wage with all the securities that come with the legality.
Or, hear me out: Prisoners
He’s thinking that’s the same people. In one case, they work hard, but are always living in fear, trying to make a better life, and then deported. In the other, they are given no way to make a better life and forced to work and then deported.
I think the endgame is likely to be a vast expansion of the prison system into all these new facilities that are being built, and then all the back breaking labor that used to be done consensually by migrants for pay is going to start to be done non-consensually by prisoners for nothing.
If some of those prisoners are citizens who spoke out against Trump or attended a protest, then so much the better.
So, slavery
With extra steps
Not all that many
On food? Fam, if I was a prisoner being made to farm food I’d make extra sure to piss and dump on it.
Wait till you see what grocery prices balloon to! We Americans have trapped ourselves exactly as the South did with slavery. Again.
The price of the people who do agricultural work is roughly 0% of the cost you pay at the grocery store. They could literally be using slave labor (some places they already do) and would pocket roughly 100% of the difference as profit. It simply doesn’t matter, unless you own stock in agribusiness or are employed on behalf of someone who does.
Not getting it. You’re saying labor costs are not 1% of getting our food produced?! Even if true, how about we now pay minimum wage? Which is not the federal $7 and change bandied about in most conversations. Check major producers like CA ($16.50) and FL ($15) for examples.
And BTW, now you the farmer, is competing in the wider, and legal, labor market. Going to cost hella more than wages! Now you pay state unemployment insurance, worker’s comp insurance, and at least some benefits if you want to compete with the local gas station. Also, you need professionals handling payroll, outsourced or in-house. At rock bottom, that’s 1-3% cost. All that amounts to about double the paid wage. (SOURCE: Worked it for a payroll firm who mainly handled min. wage employers.)
I’m as jaded as anyone with all this shit, but labor is the #1 expense in about any business.
Yeah, maybe fair. Let’s put real numbers to it.
https://vegetables.ces.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Tomato-Budget-2021.pdf?fwd=no
So, for each acre of tomatoes, the total cost is $15,562, of which $7,673 is all labor combined. That’s for 42,000 tomatoes. So the total cost of all farm-related labor per tomato is 18 cents out of a 40-50 cent tomato. Profit per tomato is roughly ten cents.
My point was that if they have to pay people a living wage and worker’s comp and whatnot, it won’t impact the price you pay at the supermarket. Maybe that’s not true; I could see it that if the labor doubles because all of a sudden they’re paying more than $12/hr (probably relatively accurate even for an under the table worker; maybe they might get $10/hr and literally no other costs to the business, whereas if all of a sudden they were treated like a human, the employer would be paying $25/hr for salary and all HR related expenses roughly speaking), then you’ll pay more at the market.
So, I think you’re right. I think the tomatoes might cost 60-65 cents each instead of 40-50 if the people growing them got paid more than $10/hr and no health insurance or anything of the like. I think I would be okay with that, but I do think it would be a significant increase maybe, just looking for this one expense breakdown.
