I know "650 lbs an hour" sounds crazy, because it kinda is.

But that also just means filling one of these buckets every ~3 minutes. That's doable for the average healthy adult.

(Doing it 10hrs/day for weeks in a row is the hard part.)

The same concept applied to fast food workers infuriates me as well...

"If fast food workers get $25/hour, a burger and fries will cost $30!"

Uh... Only if they make one burger an hour. Restaurant workers in Europe make substantially more, and meals are still affordable.

Nevermind the fact that they keep minimum wage painfully low, but keep jacking up the prices anyway.

My dear, you are simply amazing.

I love all of your posts!

Y'all...in the US and Canada, you need to read the thread i'm replying to. If you're interested in just outcomes...read this thread. If you consume food...read this thread.

Gonna blow your mind totally: we've been systematically lied to by Big Ag and farm owners. I know, imagine, a huge capitalist industry lying to its consumers? Unpossible, right?

But it's true. OP has receipts. Go learn why food is expensive, and wages for food growers and pickers are cheap (hint: follow the money).

Seriously. Best thread I've read here this *year*.

EDIT: mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/11…

Sarah Taber

2025-07-13 23:04:57

Ex-farm worker here.

We need to talk about this whole "But a living wage for farm workers would spike the cost of food!" thing.

Not true AT ALL.

Y'all don't understand how fast experienced farm workers are.

The average tomato picker pulls 650lbs per hour.

At $20/hr, that's $0.03/lb for labor.

I live under the arrival and departure paths for half the private jets that fly in and out of Van Nuys, and no shocker, a lot of them are owned by Big Ag families and companies and are flying between Los Angeles and the Central or Imperial Valleys where they make their billions.

...in case people are wondering what their food budget is paying for.

(I'm guessing the passengers in those jets are pissed with Stephen Miller right now.)

txtav.com/en/journey/articles/…

#uspol

Business aircraft in agriculture

Essential for farmers: Business aircraft connect fields and feedlots, enabling efficient travel to remote facilities.

^txtav.com

I say pay everybody a living wage and deal with any downstream effects afterward.

Honestly, I don't understand why this is a controversial position. America is the richest nation in the world. It's a fucking disgrace that we have poverty here.

Just pay every-fucking-body a living wage. Ensure they have housing. And health care. And food. And education for themselves and their children. And connectivity. We could do it for a tenth of what we pay for cops.

people always complain that wages will make prices go up.

So when wages don't rise but prices do, they juat shrug and go "eh, what ya gonna do about it, thats the economy for ya"

And most people bitching about raised prices are mostly the ones least affected by them...

people who say this shit have never worked on a farm, try picking lettuce or tomatos faster than an experienced worker... they'd have finished 5lb of food before you're done 1lb, and honestly you'd probably cut off a finger trying to keep up with them

besides that, the majority cost of many foods is processing and stuff like pre-washing/cutting/preparing, because that counts as a "value added good" they just have way higher profit margins based on nothing but convenience... paying the farm workers more wouldn't do much at all to food costs lol

@LabSpokane Here in WA, they pay cherry pickers based on how much they pick instead of an hourly rate.

Also, I recently heard some news stories about migrant pickers being afraid to come to work (because of ICE) and that with more notice, Americans could have filled the gap and picked.

Bull-fucking-shit.

I've been living and working among cherry orchards for 20 years and I have never seen an American pick cherries.

"Banning slavery would spike the cost of cotton. Nobody would be able to afford clothing."

Most of the financial value added in a farm to store chain is well past the farm. Paying a bit more at the bottom of the value chain does not raise the price much.

This would also apply to the cobalt miners in Africa, for example. Treating them a bit more like human beings would not raise the price of an EV very much.