Sorry, I am going to be the insensitive sleazeball here.
The point of staying at home is not that if you get this disease you are going to die. The issue is that if we ALL get it then a larger proportion of people are going to die because we don't have enough hospitals.
We had to choose some people as being important enough that they are allowed to be out and about and use some of that valuable limited healthcare resources while the rest of us try really hard not to get sick and risk going to the hospital. If this goes south, you may wish that you were one of the people who got the disease early.
Farm labor has always gotten the short end of the stick and this is an added burden. I would vote to give them extra income during this period if that was being considered. But the fact is that they are part of the food chain in this country and so are considered "essential" people to continue doing their jobs.
Who gets to choose who gets sick first - do remember that in the US a farm worker getting sick might bankrupt them and kill them not because a hospital bed isn't available - but because they can't afford it or end up having a heart attack after dealing with the stress of those costs.
Additionally Covid-19 isn't super fatal, but it isn't just a get sick and whatever disease. Folks with health problems absolutely can die from this disease and it looks like healthy people can end up being saddled with respiratory issues like Pneumonia which is a bucket of fun for the rest of your life.
I don't think you were intentionally being insensitive in this manner (even barring your disclaimer your point is balanced and reasoned - it isn't unnecessarily cruel and has grains of truth). But do recall that this disease can be fatal or otherwise debilitating - I'd find it reasonable to treat essential workers, like these farm labourers, like we treat vets[1] give them life long coverage from the government for any complication resulting from their labour.
I don't want some farm worker who kept working through this to end up bankrolling Aetna.
1. At least, how we act like we treat them - America is pretty terrible to veterans.
>Who gets to choose who gets sick first - do remember that in the US a farm worker getting sick might bankrupt them and kill them not because a hospital bed isn't available - but because they can't afford it or end up having a heart attack after dealing with the stress of those costs.
But this is literally a every day risk and problem with or without covid-19 as there is a whole host of diseases they could catch any day, especially the flu. The bigger problem is our shitty healthcare system.
They're as essential to our survival even if we're not in a pandemic. It's maybe time we recognized that and stopped exploiting labor just because it's unskilled. If we paid them by the value they actually create.
I'd really urge you to reconsider your stance, and be there to help them advocate for fair pay even when this is over.
I think their pay being market driven is fair, honestly - the government granting them hazard pay or whatnot will just end up being eaten by the farm owners in the long run - but I do think we need to seriously reconsider privatized healthcare in America - it's insane that yall folks can end up destitute because you get sick.
Things like "fair pay" and "living wage" are political talking points.
In short, what the living wage is really about is not living standards, or economics, but morality. Its advocates refuse to come to terms with the fact that wages are market price–determined by supply and demand, the same as the price of oil, steel, corn, or coal. And it is for that reason, rather than the practical details, that the broader political movement of which the demand for a living wage is the leading edge is ultimately doomed to failure: For the amorality of the market economy is part of its essence, and cannot be legislated away.
I think the doom to failure part is due to a scarcity of resources (especially an environment to pollute), which inherently causes distribution issues.
If the world had an infinite number of detached single family homes in places with fresh water and secure food supplies and good weather, making things "fair" would be quite easy. We can certainly do better than we currently are, but the underlying reason things aren't fair is that nature doesn't offer fair.
Lol, the price of corn, or even oil, coal, and steel are constantly adjusted by gov policies. You've proven the opposite of your point - market price is political and can be controlled when it is politically favorable.
You've missed the point of my comment. I never said that the government can't manipulate markets through price floors, ceilings, or subsidies.
I said the market system is amoral. We can't will it to do what we want. You can't force a job to suddenly create $20/hr of economic value by placing a mandatory $20/hr price on it. Basic mathematics doesn't allow that.
The market and it's values are a manifestation of the people participating in the market and therefore the any morality or values a market has would simply be a reflection of the values and morality of those people.
You could just as easily say it's the market that works in the context of politics, the market can only go so far, due to policy limits. I.e you can't build a nuclear reactor without approval so policy can durectly control market competition.
Lol, the price of corn, or even oil, coal, and steel are constantly adjusted by gov. You've proven the opposite of your point - market price is political and can be controlled when it is politically favorable.
Subsidies paid directly to farmers are not indirect. The Energy Policy Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005), which sets a mandatory minimum amount of corn that must be made into ethanol, is not indirect.
For Oil the US has a strategic reserve that they dole out whenever they need to appease the public - you could say this is an indirect effect, but selling it for cheap on the open market to drive the price down is reeeeally close to just directly setting the price.
>How would the value they create [...] be measured?
Even if it could, that value would be so enormous that there are simple economic constraints on what's possible in terms of remuneration. Lot's of people are allocated what are probably criminally small portions of the value they create.
For instance, if the sanitation engineers in a city disappeared, you wouldn't want to be in that city 3 months later. The city's streets would be filled with rotting garbage, and that would be the least of it's problems. Its grey- and black- water processing systems would be long since collapsed. And that city'd better hope that no industrial actors took the opportunity to dispense of troublesome pollutants despite the lack of a functioning sanitation system.
The thing is, despite the critical importance of the guys running our sanitation systems, and the enormous value the environment they maintain confers on us, in my own city, not one of them makes USD300 grand a year. (Or even USD200 grand. You get the idea.) A lot of civilization collapses without them, but they are still some of the lowest paid professionals in all of engineering.
All that's due to the same economic limitations that constrict remuneration for farmworkers. They are absolutely essential. They create enormous value. Unfortunately, the way the system is set up, there is not much in the way of resources to reward them.
We can discuss changing the system, but I doubt most people would like the outcome of that exercise. That would definitely go under "Be careful what you wish for."
>Lot's of people are allocated what are probably criminally small portions of the value they create.
My comment was written to elucidate why "value they create" is a useless sentiment. For example, none of the paintings in Louvre or whatever museum have any value to me. But they do to other people, so it would be impossible to have a consensus on "value". Some people like strawberries and would value them more than people who don't like strawberries.
The purpose of paying someone is to perform the desired work. The amount paid is the signal to the person performing the work that the work you want to be done should be done rather than someone else's.
The purpose of paying someone is not to provide them with some nebulous concept of value or to make sure they have a minimum standard of housing and fed, etc. Those goals should be accomplished by other means (UBI or some other type of societal welfare system).
Our form of greed-centered capitalism is not some inevitable natural truth. We've chosen to live that way. We can choose otherways. We can choose to pay people to recognize their contributions to society, as opposed to how much they do to enrich an individual. We can choose to ensure everybody has decent living conditions, no matter what to do. We can choose to live vast swaths of humanity in dirt and squalor. We can choose to commit collective suicide.
It's up to us. Right now? It's a point where events are pushing us to consider our choices.
>We can choose to pay people to recognize their contributions to society, as opposed to how much they do to enrich an individual.
You have yet to provide a formula with which to calculate this amount. And since it's such a complicated concept, I'm going to go ahead and assume it's impossible to calculate.
That sounds wrong. It is a natural truth, that if somebody will do a job for less, folks will hire that one instead. Competition, capitalism are a reasonable fallout of currency and trade.
We can choose some things, but not how a free market behaves. And experiments in non-free markets have not gone so well (see Chile, Venezuela etc etc).
Like it or not, I don't think I have this wrong. Wishing isn't the same as logic.
"fair pay" -> well, let's start with "treated like human beings, not chattel", "afforded basic hygiene & health measures", "kept safe in a crisis".
From there, we get to "would you die without them? If yes, maybe they're underpaid. Maybe $18K a year just isn't fair pay under any circumstances, not if we can't force people via a "well, you could always die" clause.
As for the value they create - you have food available to you. How valuable is that to you? Would you like it if farm workers applied the "well, you could always die or do it yourself" clause?
If I were a business owner trying to figure out how much to pay, I would not be able to deduce the numerical figure from your comment.
I understand what you're saying, my intention is to display how easy it is to say, but how difficult it is to execute. Currently, we pay people what it costs to replace them, but it would be nice if we could snap our fingers and give everyone a global standard of living equal to whatever the top 5% live in. Unfortunately, that's not possible, and short of a country wide or world wide effort to implement some type of UBI, I don't see much chance of success.
I think it's pretty sad we passed a $2.2T stimulus bill, with $500Bn in unemployment benefits, so the average person that gets laid off can make about $60k a year (adjusted for taxes) to not work -- and we did hardly nothing to protect people that actually need to work and are at high risk!
Worst of all, most of these jobs are low paying -- much less than you'd get from the current unemployment. We basically created an incentive to quit your job over fear of the virus and make more money collecting unemployment.
I mean, even in hospitals there are A LOT of jobs that pay less than you'd make from this new unemployment bill.
After taxes, the average nurse aid makes about half what they could collect on unemployment right now.
I'm not saying beefing up unemployment was bad. I'm just worried this is going to backfire, and it doesn't seem fair to people working in grocery stores, on farms, and most of all -- in hospitals. It would be nice if these workers got paid AT LEAST as much as if they became unemployed, for example.
Look, the vast majority of folks like to work. Some people will stop working but there are a number of older folks who worked as Doctors who are coming out of retirement to do their part.
I understand where you're getting this from but unfortunately it's an old conservative Meme that gave us such hits as "The Welfare Queen" - people legitimately don't like being on unemployment when they can be working. Perhaps we need to beef up social safety nets in general, and I'd be ecstatic if we came out of this crisis with a more healthy view of public healthcare - but this issue you're concerned about isn't an issue.
In the majority of cases, one cannot receive unemployment benefits if they quit their job. Unemployment benefits are generally for those have been laid off. Additionally, one must be actively looking for work in order to receive unemployment benefits, so those collecting benefits are not just "not working".
The reason many nurses go into the profession is to help people, not because of the pay. Not everybody lets money govern their lives.
In the future, I'd actually read before you spout off. Your numbers seem very dodgy and your logic even dodgier.
Over the next 4 months, if you get laid off and you were making less than $60k, you're almost guaranteed to not be negatively financially impacted. Over a longer horizon, who knows what else congress might pass. Maybe in 5 months you'll be screwed. Maybe not. Who knows?
The government is sending everyone making less than $60k a one-time $1200 transfer (federally tax free), plus $600 (federally tax free) per week. This is a total of $11,600 (if you're laid off). Adjusted for taxes on an annual basis, that's over $50k.
Then you add in state unemployment. Even somewhere like Florida that has one of the lowest maximum unemployment payouts in the country ($275/week), will almost certainly push you over $60k on an annualized basis.
California, Texas, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio (representing about 40% of the country) all pay roughly a max of $460/week.
Generally, if you make $50k, most states will pay you out close to $460. Some like Florida will pay much less. Some like Massachusetts will pay much more.
Over the 4 month period, this would push your income up to $11,600 (federally tax free) + $8000 (taxed). On an annualized, tax-adjusted basis, the average person making $40k who is laid off would now be making close to $80k.
That's better than 78% of Americans.
Additionally, you could read the bill. The bill sates you can file for unemployment if you quit your job because you are impacted by Coronavirus -- which includes 1) if you get the virus, 2) if you take care of someone that has the virus, or 3) if you believe working puts you in danger of contracting the virus.
Additionally, do you have a source that most nurses go into the job to help people and not make money? Anecdata is not data, but I'm good friends with several nurses, and every single one of them doesn't like the job, but thinks it's a good option because the pay is good. Maybe you have the opposite experience. A study would be nice, but I'm not able to find one.
Can you provide references with regard to your unemployment claims. Here in minnesota you receive about 50 percent of your weekly wages up to a max of $740 a week. That hardly seems like an incentive to get laid off (note that you don’t collect unemployment if you voluntarily leave a job, i.e. quit).
That's clearly not the strategy any more. I mean, I was just as wrong as I was saying the same thing a week ago. But the numbers don't add up.
You can't have 100,000-200,000 deaths in a country of 327 million people if it infects 80% and has a mortality rate of 1-2% if you have medical intervention (which is their best guess).
Without intervention I assume it kills the up to 20% (probably more like 10% as we're still not clear on asymptomatic infections) who require hospitalisation.
For the US that's 2.6-5.2 million dead to reach herd immunity with a shallow peak, or something like 25-50 million if its not flattened and the health service get overwhelmed.
By saying only 100,000-200,000 will die, the strategy must ultimately be lockdown to stop spread, then release the lockdown and contain the infections using test, trace, quarantine like S.Korea, China and Japan. Or lockdown until a vaccine is ready in 18 months, which I can't see happening.
>If this goes south, you may wish that you were one of the people who got the disease early.
Maybe, but the safer bet is that science will discover treatments (and ideally a vaccine) over time and so we are better off being one of the last infected. Let science learn on someone other than me. There are already media reports of both treatments and vaccines - only time will tell which work though.
Yes the Spanish flu happened differently. That is always the risk, but overall I think I prefer to wait.
Planet Money did a good podcast on this topic recently. I learned that it's hard to follow CDC guidelines when you're sleeping 20 in a garage and there's only enough water to shower every few days.
It's kinda crazy that we can produce all these water-intensive crops in the central valley, and producers are draining aquifers for basically the cost of drilling and pumping ... but workers can't afford to shower regularly or wash their hands often. Somehow I don't think the farms that own the wells and the workers are paying at comparable rates.
I would think out of every job in a supply chain field workers would be some of the best protected by default. Not (often) working in air-recircuculated environments, many already wear face masks and gloves, less crowded than warehouses, working in the sun and often more humid environments.
The big issues I think would be sick pay (mentioned), or migrating workers who travel very far, including across borders.
I think one major challenge right now is that nobody can get masks and gloves. Frontline health workers can barely (if even that) manage with the supply at hand. I think this is the major reason for 'flattening the curve', i.e. to make sure our supply chain ramps up to provide necessities like masks, gloves, ventilators, disinfectants etc.
In a hypothetical world where there are no shortages of these items (+ publically and easily available test kits), the economy wouldn't need to have halted to a near stop, and we could weather the pandemic much easier. Hopefully, we can learn from this.
It's kinda hilarious that you blame "conservation" instead of the farms housing people in abysmal conditions (or not paying them enough for decent housing if they live off-site).
Remember, flattening the curve doesn’t necessarily mean that fewer people in total get sick, the area under the curve might be the same, esp. if it becomes like the common cold in terms of evading our immune system.
We are just trying to buy time to ramp up production of materials that can reduce the burden on the medical system.
The case fatality rate changes quite dramatically when hospitals are overloaded. Additionally, the fatality rate of _other_ causes increases when hospitals are overloaded.
Flatting the curve saves lives even if the total number of infected people remains the same.
The issue I see now is that some areas are locking down when there is no curve to be flattened. This is likely causing more harm than not, because hospitals are sitting empty waiting for when people will inevitably get sick.
There's a national (and international) shortage of nearly all covid-adjacent medical supplies and you think it's a problem that we're not using more of those medical supplies right this very moment?
I'm not sure about strawberries but aren't farmworkers in general essential workers? Our food supply and delivery chain is what allows others to stay at home.
> I'm not sure about strawberries but aren't farmworkers in general essential workers?
Yes, but that doesn't mean they're immune from the coronavirus risk. The whole point is that they face the coronavirus risk because they're continuing to work.
That... I'm sorry, but that's just an utterly uninformed take.
Nobody "has" to be exposed, protective gear would work just fine. And no, exposing farmworkers doesn't help to flatten the curve. The curve would be equally flat if they weren't exposed.
What you just said is "Somebody has to die, let's kill the farmworkers so we're safe". You might want to rethink.
What we need to do is stop exploiting them. They're not at high risk because they need to be, they're at high risk because we're not paying them well. Because we withhold even the options for basic hygiene for them. Because we value profit over human life.
You could bring in the harvest just fine without exposure. We're choosing not to, because it'd cost precious money, and that's the god we'd like to worship.
With the exact same kind of logic you use, one could also argue that it's not necessary work. Some starving just needs to happen. No? Not good logic? Then explain to me why your life matters more than farm worker lives?
Zero exposure is probably unrealistic for everyone, but it's not unrealistic to give farm workers disposable masks, gloves, hand sanitizers, and washing stations, put effort into keeping them six feet apart as they work, and provide sufficient paid leave so they don't feel pressure to keep working even if they believe they're sick. I think that's really what we're talking about here.
"As they work" is not the problem. Many of them are migrant worker who will reside in temporary housing akin to a bunk-house/dorm. They will be very exposed to the many people they are living with.
Force farms to implement social distancing. Just use a drone. Immediate shut down for noncompliance. Owner goes to jail, farm and equipment get seized nationalized and sold back to the public. Illegals get deported, legals get unemployment.
It takes everyone making sacrifices to stop the spread. Especially the landowners and leaders.
The lockdown still reduces the risk to essential workers in three ways:
1) Much of our normal daily contacts is outside of work, that part of a lockdown affects everyone;
2) The essential workers encounter less people because others are out of the streets;
3) If the general spread is lower and slower, then there's less chance for everyone, including the essential workers to get infected.
It's just as with vaccination - if we get a sufficient number of people vaccinated, then everyone is protected because the disease doesn't spread; and if everyone non-essential is on a sufficiently strict lockdown (instead of classifying anything remotely related as essential) then everyone including the essential workers is protected as the disease dies down instead of infecting everyone who's susceptible.
I have been farming for 8 years and asking for Meaningful Ag automation for 5. Applied twice to YC.
Simply put there is no $$ to replace manual labour. All Agtech is a sham. They are pimps for data collected from farms and fields that get fed to Wall Street and input and pesticide and tractor companies that use it to sell more stuff to farmers.
It doesn’t save farmers money. It doesn’t bring them meaningful Agtech or being Agbots and Farmbot to replace farm labour. The only agtech worth investing is Agtech that harvests data. That’s why probably all the Agtech and Agbot startups have investments from Ag input companies. It’s a dirty little secret that anyone can find out with a little bit of digging around...
Off-topic, but how did zoom become the Kleenex of video-conferencing apps? I’ve been doing a lot of video-conferencing, but haven’t used zoom. Is it the best one, or is there some other explanation?
Better performance and UI than the others. I work in an environment where I use just about every major video conferencing tool available when working with customers.
We use Zoom internally, some customers are on Webex, still others use Hangouts.
Webex has been having difficulties ever since the mass exodus to work-from-home. Audio quality especially has been inconsistent over the last few weeks. Hangouts is pretty good from a quality standpoint, but I (and others, apparently) find their UI confusing.
I've never been asked yet to use Jitsi or any of the other also-rans.
Interesting. I've been using Webex, Zoom, and Slack calls.
Webex has been having some issues but has done better the last few days.
Zoom has been OK, but with some audio cutouts yesterday.
The one Hangout I was on the video and audio quality was horrible.
Teams seemed to use tons of video bandwidth, looked good, sounded good, but seemed to use excessive network bandwidth. It's video quality actually seemed excessive for a lot of use cases.
I use webex multiple times, every day of the week, and audio, video and scree sharing.
Maybe it depends on your timezone, but I honestly haven't noticed any issues at all with webex.
One of my colleagues was complaining about it the other day - I asked if he was connected to the company VPN, and sure enough, he was. Once he disconnected, he said webex was back to normal again.
Like many others, our company has had to quickly buy a lot more VPN licenses, and is finding out it doesn't have the bandwidth to service everyone using the VPN.
Some others buckled under the load. Our organization had plans to use Microsoft Teams, the first time we needed multiple mass meetings at the same time, it didn't work for whatever reason, so the organizers sent out a Zoom link and that worked then and there. So we've been using Zoom instead since that.
It has good usability, and not much trouble in video conferencing. No nonsense. Plus it has a catchy name: Compare "Google Meet" or "Microsoft teams" vs "Zoom".
Look at those photos. Those citrus trees are canopied trees. You can let an Agbot roam in that orchard. It won’t even pick up signals. There is no systems approach. If you can’t harvest data, no Agbots. I understand the importance of data with tech. But if the end result is data, then it is the product. It doesn’t enable Ag.
There's a big difference between "the job can't be done safely" and "the way the job was done previously wouldn't be safe if they continue doing it that way".
There's literally no step in "picking strawberries" that can't be done while maintaining social distancing. It will increase the cost of labor, and force humans to be treated like... humans. But farming isn't inherently unsafe re: coronavirus.
You say "increase the cost of labor" like it's nothing. Fact is, industries like this couldn't be operated on the up and up in the US- people wouldn't buy the product at the price it'd need to be sold for.
I'm not saying this to justify the current conditions, I'm just pointing out that it's this or an eradication of the industry.
If the industry can't survive by following the rules then the leaders of that industry who profited from illicit behaviors should go to prison for decades and their assets should be sold off to pay damages to the effected. The industry can correct itself or die off. If no one wants a product at a humane price then the industry should go extinct in a functioning society.
> The industry can correct itself or die off. If no one wants a product at a humane price then the industry should go extinct in a functioning society.
Okay, but is there a functioning society? Is there some welfare system where these people could take refuge?
I don't think so. These workers come all the way from some place where their situation wouldn't be any better, otherwise that's where they'd stay. Should the industry go extinct, they'd be strictly worse off.
That's exactly what the southern slave owners tried claiming as well... and some slaves chose to stay because they believed the alternative would be worse. It doesn't mean we should support inhumane treatment of other people so that a handful of "Farmers" can get rich.
> That's exactly what the southern slave owners tried claiming as well... and some slaves chose to stay because they believed the alternative would be worse.
That's not my argument. Of course, if a slave owner has to give up on their "property", they're not gonna provide housing, food and equipment to their former slaves anymore. The price of labor kicks in.
Perhaps that price is lower than keeping a slave, perhaps it is higher. There's some arguments as to why free workers are actually cheaper. In any case, that price is always in flux.
You're not going to discover that price while maintaining slavery, because the slaves have no opportunity to name their price. That's why the slave owner's argument is invalid.
By contrast, the workers at these farms do have the choice. Nothing forces them, besides their own economic situation. They have no claim to welfare, no other skill that would pay better.
> It doesn't mean we should support inhumane treatment of other people so that a handful of "Farmers" can get rich.
By and large, farmers don't get rich. They're under price pressure from the store chains that buy their produce. Those store chains don't get rich either, they're under price pressure from consumers. Margins are razor-thin.
We can all stop buying strawberries and let those farms go bankrupt, everything will be strictly worse.
>Nothing forces them, besides their own economic situation.
Right - starving to death is always an option, nothing is forcing them. Free market at work!
>By and large, farmers don't get rich. They're under price pressure from the store chains that buy their produce. Those store chains don't get rich either, they're under price pressure from consumers. Margins are razor-thin.
It's not 1980, that's a fallacy and has been for a long time. By and large, "farmers" are large corporations printing money.
>The shift has come at the expense of small farms. Small family and nonfamily farms accounted for 46 percent of production in 1991, but by 2015, that share had fallen under 25 percent.
> Right - starving to death is always an option, nothing is forcing them. Free market at work!
The free market is not a welfare system, though it can contribute a great deal to welfare, by keeping consumer prices down. It can support a welfare system by being sufficiently productive to raise taxes to pay for stuff.
Meanwhile, those countries that do not employ a free market are poor across the board. Wealth is only achieved through corruption. That poverty is then blamed on "foreign intervention". Well, fair enough, but if your system can't handle that foreign intervention, it's still inferior.
> It's not 1980, that's a fallacy and has been for a long time. By and large, "farmers" are large corporations printing money.
Just because they're larger today doesn't mean they are printing money. It's a highly competitive business. Of course a large farm can be a bit more profitable due to economics of scale, but there's always pressure from the bottom, because the threshold to market entry isn't that high.
Just try to accept that nothing is wrong with business profits per se. Let's say farming businesses have a 12% profit margin[1]. That's the price you pay for them to take the risk of running the business, and to do so efficiently. The profit margin reflects the real price of that service, just like the price of labor. Absent of any monopolies, it's a fair price. You couldn't get it any cheaper by, say, making the government do it. To the contrary.
Then people shouldn't buy the produce. There's no universal law saying you're entitled to your strawberries.
If this approach is unsustainable (and it would be), then there are a lot of other things that need to change. What doesn't need to happen is us shrugging our shoulders, saying "meh, farmworkers need to suffer, it's too expensive otherwise"
What price do you think strawberries would be with better conditions? I think the market would support double the price, there would just be lower sales.
It's a fallacy to say "people wouldn't buy the product because it's too expensive" when the product is food. People kinda have to buy food, no matter what. If every food producer is subject to the same regulations, every food retailer's prices will go up.
Countries tend to protect their agricultural industry from foreign competition fairly effectively, particularly for staples.
If every fresh strawberry producer is held to the same standards, people will either buy the strawberries at the new price or go without. The strawberry industry isn't going to be wiped out.
My wife works with 14 H2As who serve only one property for 9 months a year in about the best possible situation and it is definitely true that they live in bunk houses, but for better or worse you find this everywhere in the world, even singapore[1]. In 10 years of working in the ag industry though, every place she has worked they have always been documented, whether FLC or H2A. The majority I've worked with while helping out during harvest are looking for some order and steady pay to send home while avoiding cartel chaos in Michiocan; they are all upstanding individuals, some who even had professional jobs back home, for example one is a dentist.
It is very uncommon in our experience to find undocumented workers in these regulated environments, though you will still find plenty at the even city sponsored "day laborer" centers, or working for the crews that end up selling their fruit on street corners in cities. From what we have hears, 20-30 years ago there was a much larger truly undocumented immigrant issue.
Note that big farmers tend to be careful about illegal labor. When you have millions of dollars in land, you stand to lose a lot if some prosecuter is looking for an example. Smaller guys don't have as much to lose and can appear sympathetic against the big government so they are more likely to risk it.
For context, housing is not something they are required to take. The they can live in a tent which is what they were doing 70 years ago when the farmers felt sorry for them living in a tent and built a bunk house for them to live in if they wanted. Bad as a bunkhouse is, almost everyone agrees it is better than a tent and so they live in that. (I love sleeping in a tent, but that is because it is a vacation I do once a year, most of my nights are spent in a house)
Consider a title that's meaningful.
Anyway nitpicking aside, folks all over are still going to work. So you can 'shelter in place' and get your Amazon delivery or groceries delivered or whatever. If they're young and confident, or really need the money, bless them.
As for the useful part of my comment, have you used a drive-thru? Did you see the close quarters and unmasked/ungloved employees there? Meeting a customer a minute for 8 hours?
Picking produce at least puts you in an enormous field away from crowded city conditions with a small cohort of people. Its risky, but likely no riskier than 100 other jobs.
Strawberry pickers typically work very close to one another with hundreds in the same area of a field at once, with lots of trucks as central points to put the fruit, etc.
Workers also typically live on caravans near/on the fields in very cramped quarters to save commute time/cost.
That could easily be changed to a more distributed method with per-worker wheelbarrows or backpacks, but presumably that would decrease throughput and increase costs.
Personally, and I'd hope this is echoed by everyone:
I'd rather have less strawberries, that are more expensive, than have strawberries picked by someone who died as a result of contracting COVID-19 in a field whilst they were picking strawberries to earn money to feed themselves/their family.
And are you going to buy a different brand of laptop because the steel that made the springs in the power connector was recycled in a grimy workshop in Ukraine by a 6 year old child?
It turns out policing entire supply chains by consumers isn't viable. Either enforce regulations, or do nothing. The middle ground of trying to shame companies into doing 'good' things just leaves uneven playing fields for companies without a public face to shame.
Unpopular opinion: the fruit pickers need money also. I don't think eliminating these jobs shifts demand for these folks somewhere else, in fact they probably can't find other work at this time.
It's impossible to make these sorts of judgments without an understanding of what the end goal is. What the off ramp of Coronavirus town is in best and worst cases.
e.g. If a vaccine is realistically a year off (which is realistic, though we clutch onto every bit of preliminary news when in reality most are failures), in the relatively near term we will start to all have to take more risks, and the majority of us will go through COVID-19.
You can blame the customer all you want but you're only deluding yourself. Marketers, criminal farmers, pro business regulations, nonexistent law enforcement, and an economy that favors short term profits over long term sustainability are among some of the reasons why these things continue. It's not the customer buying random strawberries at a grocer that's the problem here.
Maybe they are advocating companies pay the liability, raising the price and incentivizing safer practices. Without some kind of labeling laws saying how many estimated to die per strawberry, you’d have to do a research project on every brand.
yeah, because there's no way to tell about labour conditions in the supermarket... (where most of us unfortunately have to shop) I would really like to have shop to tell production cost/per unit like they have to do with price/unit in the EU. Not gonna happen with "Big"-Ag writing paychecks to the MPs though...
Agree. Fast food workers are more likely to come in contact with super spreaders in the network than farm workers.
Would be interesting to see Italian, Spanish, French data on infections by profession.
I'd guess its going to be biased to travelers(travel related professions), travel sector(airports, hotels, stations etc), health workers, seniors/patients already in hospital for something else, and families of all of the above.
Social distancing is important in all sorts of jobs. What about this one makes that impossible? Looked in the window at your local McD's lately? Is it any different?
(If that comment was some sort of outlier, must not be reading much on HN.)
You can't pick strawberries over zoom, but it's pretty easy to distance yourself from others on a farm. And let's face it, if you have the physical fortitude for farm work, you aren't at risk from coronavirus.
We don't have sufficient information to determine this definitively - some of the folks that have "recovered" have had serious respiratory complications.
Also, just because the farm worker is alright is their mother fine too? What about the rest of their family? Are they going to be treated in a wonderful modern hospital or is a doctor going to send them home to be cared for by their family?
If they don't have insurance any medical costs they take own will come completely out of their own pocket.
There's nearly a million cases worldwide. There's enough data. The death rate between 19 and 39 years of age is 0.2%. The death rate from 40-49% is 0.4%.
And that's the death rate only taking into account confirmed cases (by contrast, seasonal flu death rates are used by estimating total infections). I know in Canada lots of people with all the symptoms aren't getting tested. Also, the more testing is done in various countries, the lower the death rate.
Well, not yet. Joystick and a little remote device (or something) and maybe one day we will do stuff like this without fully solving machine learning vision type problems.
Please be quiet kids! I'm picking strawberries. Actually, Bobby, come over here. Do you want to play a game while I take a nap?
The point of staying at home is not that if you get this disease you are going to die. The issue is that if we ALL get it then a larger proportion of people are going to die because we don't have enough hospitals.
We had to choose some people as being important enough that they are allowed to be out and about and use some of that valuable limited healthcare resources while the rest of us try really hard not to get sick and risk going to the hospital. If this goes south, you may wish that you were one of the people who got the disease early.
Farm labor has always gotten the short end of the stick and this is an added burden. I would vote to give them extra income during this period if that was being considered. But the fact is that they are part of the food chain in this country and so are considered "essential" people to continue doing their jobs.