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January 23, 2007
What’s Cheap Labor Got to Do with the Price of Oranges?
There is an old saying, “People make plans and God laughs.”
No sooner had the new Congress returned to Washington, a bipartisan group of legislators, led by California’s senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, introduced an agricultural amnesty and guest worker bill designed, in their words, to ensure that American consumers could continue to enjoy low cost produce. We’d all be paying $10 for a pound of oranges if we didn’t have access to low wage foreign labor to pick our crops, we have been warned by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Then God had a good chuckle. A freak cold snap hit the Golden State, destroying much of the fruit and vegetable crop and sending prices skyrocketing. Gov. Schwarzenegger responded quickly to this disaster with assurances that all of the state’s agricultural workers – the majority of them illegal aliens – would be taken care of, thanks to the generous taxpayers of California. Now we have an excess supply of cheap foreign workers who are collecting unemployment, AND high prices for fruits and vegetables.
There are two lessons we can take away from God’s little joke: Labor is one of the least important factors in the cost we pay for produce at the check-out stand. And, even more significant, the workers don’t go away, even if the jobs do. They just go on unemployment.
Posted on at January 23, 2007 06:22 PM