39
Trump has no plan for who will grow US food: ‘There is just flat out nobody to work’
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
39 points (100.0% liked)
The Guardian - US
133 readers
217 users here now
Latest US news, breaking news and current affairs coverage from theguardian.com
founded 4 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Wait till you see what grocery prices balloon to! We Americans have trapped ourselves exactly as the South did with slavery. Again.
The price of the people who do agricultural work is roughly 0% of the cost you pay at the grocery store. They could literally be using slave labor (some places they already do) and would pocket roughly 100% of the difference as profit. It simply doesn’t matter, unless you own stock in agribusiness or are employed on behalf of someone who does.
Not getting it. You're saying labor costs are not 1% of getting our food produced?! Even if true, how about we now pay minimum wage? Which is not the federal $7 and change bandied about in most conversations. Check major producers like CA ($16.50) and FL ($15) for examples.
And BTW, now you the farmer, is competing in the wider, and legal, labor market. Going to cost hella more than wages! Now you pay state unemployment insurance, worker's comp insurance, and at least some benefits if you want to compete with the local gas station. Also, you need professionals handling payroll, outsourced or in-house. At rock bottom, that's 1-3% cost. All that amounts to about double the paid wage. (SOURCE: Worked it for a payroll firm who mainly handled min. wage employers.)
I'm as jaded as anyone with all this shit, but labor is the #1 expense in about any business.
Yeah, maybe fair. Let's put real numbers to it.
https://vegetables.ces.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Tomato-Budget-2021.pdf?fwd=no
So, for each acre of tomatoes, the total cost is $15,562, of which $7,673 is all labor combined. That's for 42,000 tomatoes. So the total cost of all farm-related labor per tomato is 18 cents out of a 40-50 cent tomato. Profit per tomato is roughly ten cents.
My point was that if they have to pay people a living wage and worker's comp and whatnot, it won't impact the price you pay at the supermarket. Maybe that's not true; I could see it that if the labor doubles because all of a sudden they're paying more than $12/hr (probably relatively accurate even for an under the table worker; maybe they might get $10/hr and literally no other costs to the business, whereas if all of a sudden they were treated like a human, the employer would be paying $25/hr for salary and all HR related expenses roughly speaking), then you'll pay more at the market.
So, I think you're right. I think the tomatoes might cost 60-65 cents each instead of 40-50 if the people growing them got paid more than $10/hr and no health insurance or anything of the like. I think I would be okay with that, but I do think it would be a significant increase maybe, just looking for this one expense breakdown.