On Sat, 01 Jun 2013 11:42:00 -0700, Jeanne Douglas wrote:


I always ask people how much more they're willing to pay for their
produce in order to avoid having them picked by undocumented workers.

It's a pretty pointless question, I'm afraid, Jeanne.
What people will tell you is that they would do the same job
for reasonable and sutainable wages -- it's the
ideologically correct thign to say. What people DO, on the
other hand, is to sit and kvetch about the lousy labour
market without ever even going anywhere near a farm. People
will likely tell you that they are prepared to pay more for
fruit or meat or services if that helps save American jobs.
Then they will go and buy the cheap stuff which they know
cannot have been produced without cutting corners -- and
labour costs are the single biggest corner to cut.

Several years ago in Germany, the government, pressured by
trade unions, passed a law forcing farmers to pay their
casual and illegal foreign seasonal labour the same rate as
native German workers. As a direct result, that very year
the asparagus crop rotted in the fields as farmers found it
cheaper to let their crops go unharvested than to pay these
excessive wages. The law was very quickly modified.