"Attila Iskander" wrote in news:koe7qg$mb1$1
@dont-email.me:

"Alex W." wrote in message
...
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.




Yup
The pinkies still haven't figured out how market forces work and that
ultimately prices will settle for what the market will bear..


More rightwing ignorance.

The US has ALWAYS depended on a large pool of
cheap labor, from indentured servants to chinese
coolies to Irish immigrants to slaves to (always)
Mexicans. Have YOU ever picked crops for a living?
Do you really think our current generation of
Gen Xer's is going to put down their Ipads and
pick lettuce 10 hours a day?