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Who's going to pick fruit and work in slaughterhouses, hmm? I suppose you can use prison labor, but it's not like there's a bottomless well of that either and it's not well-distributed or trustworthy enough.
The poor can go back to eating rice and beans, I guess. But there isn't a scenario where meat and fruits and vegetables prices rise lower than the wages of the american poor and working class. That's assuming the wages of nativeborn workers go up very much at all; illegals mostly work in different industries(eg fruit picking) than the native poor.
If the US government could control immigration, they could let in people who would credibly fill the roles that most need filling, if the polity wills it. And not let in, say, pregnant women who want citizenship with publicly funded healthcare and schooling for their baby, unless the polity actually wants that.
But, yes, the first part is still very difficult under current circumstances.
The pregnant women are more sympathetic than the workers, so the people who would be let in are reversed from how you've described it.
Possibly so, there’s nothing to say even a more functional democracy than ours currently is needs to optimize entirely for economics.
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Who does that in Japan? Who does it in Iceland (well they don’t have fruit, but slaughter houses apply)? Millions would be happy to do these jobs once the pay rises, just like you have dudes doing underwater welding. And the pay will rise in the absence of a pseudo slave labor class.
Sure there is. All of the increase in payment to “food companies” due to the rise in food prices is going to the lower class employee base (who need the money more), yet this increase in payment is paid for by everyone (lower-to-highest classes), meaning you necessarily see a transfer of wealth from upper to lower class; and on top of this, the increased cost of food for the wealthy makes prices more salient, leading to more cost-saving consumer practices which winds up enforcing more competition among food-related businesses.
It's not slave labor when someone voluntarily sells their time at a rate you don't like. It's not even pseudo slave labor.
It’s not slave labor, and it’s also not “not genuine” slave labor? That’s what pseudo means. The simplified point is that, just like slave labor is great for the wealthy employers but bad for the non-slave wage competitor, so is it bad when you import a class of people who are practically economic serfs within a given industry: no hope of ever obtaining a better position because of the language barrier / citizenship barrier / possibly no degree at all even in Mexico/Honduras/etc.
Actual slave wages are zero. People talking about "slave wages" are simply trying to use the negative affect of "slavery" (or "serfdom") to tar something that's entirely unlike slavery rather than argue against it on the merits.
There are people who will probably work low level jobs their entire life, yes. Some of them are (illegal) immigrants. Maybe this is bad, but I can't see how it's bad because they agreed on a wage you don't like. These people are free to go home if they don't like their conditions (and in fact some of them do).
For a practical discussion on the effect of wage depreciation on the lower and lower middle class, I fail to see a substantive difference between “these people signed up to work because they live in extreme poverty and so will labor for almost nothing”, and “these people genuinely work for nothing but room and board and food.” In both cases it is horrible for domestic workers who do not and cannot live like a Honduran who sends home remittance payments. Calling it pseudo slavery is no less manipulative than the economists’ misuse of the terms “efficiency”, “free market”, “low costs”, etc.
We can only hope one day the Indians become trained enough that we can completely replace our domestic economists with Indian-born workers. This would be highly efficient.
The mistake you're making is that "slavery" isn't about the effects on low class wages. It's about an involuntary labor arrangement. Just because you don't like something doesn't make it slavery.
There is plenty of actual slavery going on with illegal migrants as well.
What is the actual slavery? It's not like they can confiscate people's passports. These people don't have passports.
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Fruit and meat are very expensive in Japan per google. Citrus(the largest crop there that needs to be picked by hand) production per this source(https://calfreshfruit.com/2022/02/22/challenges-for-the-japanese-citrus-market/) is declining in part due to a labor shortage. Japan is a major importer of every category of foodstuff IIRC because the terrain's not suitable for mass agriculture, so I suppose agriculture works differently there. Oh, and Japan has southeast Asian guest workers harvesting crops(https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Agriculture/Japanese-farms-turn-to-foreign-workers-as-rural-population-ages).
This reddit thread(https://old.reddit.com/r/Iceland/comments/chin8z/what_is_animal_agriculture_like_in_iceland/) claims that there aren't enough slaughterhouses but I would take that with a grain of salt.
According to the Iceland review(I don't read Icelandic so this is probably the best source I can find easily-https://www.icelandreview.com/economy/without-foreign-workers-slaughterhouses-face-staffing-shortages/), foreigners.
It seriously looks like the native lower-classes of wealthy countries cannot be convinced to do these kinds of jobs absent compulsion(slaughterhouses in the US are well known for using parolees who will be imprisoned if they don't work), and there will be a shortage if foreign labor isn't available. I would rather have Hondurans do it than Indonesians, personally.
I'm not excluding that some automation improvements can reduce labor but I think all of the low hanging fruit has probably already been picked, considering getting labor is so difficult.
It does not appear that foreign workers are big source of Japan’s agricultural workforce: https://fas.usda.gov/data/japan-foreign-farm-labors-role-growing-japan
Just half a percent of the agricultural population in 2010.
https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a06003/
Only 25k “guest workers” out of 1.5 million total agricultural workers, so 1.5%. This number is increasing though, coincidentally as the Japanese feel poorer and poorer…
We can convince them to spend 12 years in brutal school/residency to stab utensils in human flesh for 16 hour periods at a time, for nothing but money and respect. I promise you we can convince them to pick fruit — forestry workers have some of the highest life satisfaction and doctors perhaps the lowest.
I also looked and it seems that American born employees account for a little over 60% of slaughterhouse workers
https://www.epi.org/blog/meat-and-poultry-worker-demographics/
In Iceland a lot of the butchers come from Sweden: https://www.icelandreview.com/news/hundreds-foreigners-work-slaughterhouses/#:~:text=Foreign%2Dborn%20workers%20are%20now,further%20away%2C%20even%20New%20Zealand.
Also think people are missing the elephant in the room for agricultural work. Isn’t this something AI solves? We already have fruit picking robots and I think it’s fair to say they will continue to improve.
If we didn’t have illegals we would in time just automate fruit picking. Prices would spike for a few years and then my guess would be lower fruit prices. Same thing as in 2008 when oil hit $150 we invented shale oil a few years later. Getting rid of illegals would just speed up the automation process and by 2030 my guess is a fully automated fruit picking system.
I work in a related area. Picking objects (even human-made artefacts whose properties you know in advance) off a table is still an unsolved problem given real world constraints. These constraints include: equipment buying and maintenance costs must be tolerable (good cameras are very expensive, flexible grippers wear out very quickly), high picking speed, high reliability.
It's quite feasible to make Youtube videos and even tech demos, but actually rolling out the tech to make a profitable business at scale is very hard.
That said, the main barrier to AI use in robotics is that the tech is competing against very optimised pre-existing solutions. Near-slave labour is much cheaper, faster, and more flexible than AI-based robotics for most tasks. So trying to sell this stuff is very difficult because even if the AI is quite good, it's still worse than what your customers are currently using. If labour prices rose considerably, AI would be competing on a much more even playing field.
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The barrier for automating fruit picking is not software. The software has already been written to distinguish which fruit needs to be picked/should be left on the plant. It's inventing a robot that won't destroy the fruit as it's picking it.
You can(and some people have) train a monkey to pick fruit, but robots are a long way off.
The AI companies are working very hard on robotics as well. It's not just LLMs.
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I can’t say I am an expert at all on what can be done but I can watch YouTube videos and see plenty of harvesting machines. Some do look like they could damage the plant.
It just seems like we get a lot of what about this industry responses for illegals. When it does appear we figure out more automation when the price of labor goes up.
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I lived in Japan from '07 to '11 and haven't been back since, so this may be out of date, but the idea that fruit and veggies are very expensive matches my memories, but is a little incomplete. Sushi and ramen are incredibly cheap in Japan, and I would extrapolate that most of the food-service labor force is somehow attached to those two parts of the industry--sushi because Japan just plain has the best fish, ramen because that's usually served with beer or on a chuhai run.
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