That would only be true if, when I went to the supermarket, there was a display of strawberries that said over it "Low Low Prices Enabled By Virtual Slavery And Other Worker Abuses!", and another display of strawberries next to it that said "Slightly Higher Prices, But Their Workers Live Well!"
You can't claim the market will resolve things when there is no meaningful opportunity for customers to "vote with their wallets". It requires not only equal access to the two products, but also full information about what the differences are.
I think it's more than slightly higher. Cherries and peaches are both stone fruit. They're grown in similar regions, and the trees are so closely related you see hybrids commonly marketed. Cherries are regularly 2x-3x the price by weight because the smaller fruit means they're more labor intensive. Raspberries are also noticeably more expensive than strawberries, and I assume it's because they're harder to pick.
These are labor-intensive produce, so labor drives the price. Staples like wheat aren't, so an extra $5 per hour for someone driving a tractor really would be "slightly higher prices."
That's very informative, thanks! I do not pretend to know much about the details of the economics of these things.
That said, even 2x the price for strawberries (at least around here) would only be another $3-5, depending on what size container you bought. That would still fall in the range of "slightly higher" in my book, at least in an absolute sense.
Chipotle is big; they can do this. Most of their costs are also in store labor and rent, not food. If you're a small farmer, the distributor will pay you $x regardless of how you produce it. There's no market for strawberries picked by well-paid workers, so they don't care.
What you're saying only works if you're Driscoll's and tell farmers to pay workers more or enough consumers demand it, but I just don't see much demand for this. The most we've seen is Fairtrade chocolate, coffee, etc., but there's only limited demand for it.
What? No. Automation doesn't need a new tax, it's just capital investment like any other. Tax the proceeds from investment (in automation and everything else) at a rate commensurate with taxes on labor...
automation is expensive. it is not like a company or franchise can just flick on a switch to automate jobs. It has taken millions of dollars and decades to make robots that walk on stirs, let alone do anything that a low-skilled human worker can do.
I disagree. Not everyone needs a livable wage (e.g. teenagers) and by removing entry level positions we eliminate the lowest rung of the ladder. This is not a good outcome.
...but imagine the economic benefits of giving teenagers a living wage. People who have loads of extra money to spend on unnecessary items (because presumably they're not paying for the bare necessities like food and housing).
<Gasp! Some might even save some of that extra money for use in the future!>
But they already get a living wage, since for almost all working teenagers, their biggest expenses are usually taken care of by their parents (rent & health insurance).
Unless they want to save money for college. Remember when you could work an entry level job and make enough money to pay for a substantial portion of college?
That's the point. Absent any competition (which there won't be, because everyone is subject to the same minimum wage), the cost is fully passed on to the customers (ie. "everyone else"). Therefore your conclusion is incorrect.
In the short term or long term? I skimmed the study and it looks like they only looked at two years? In the short term I can see it happening due to psychological effects like price stickiness, but I'm skeptical that in the long term the trend would hold. As evidence to the contrary:
>Ashenfelter says the evidence from increased food prices suggests that basically all of the "increase of labor costs gets passed right on to the customers."
I'm talking about your claim that the cost of raised wages would be inevitably passed on to consumers.
I'm sure there's a good reason why employers lobby so hard to keep wages down even when it doesn't affect them in the slightest cos they can just pass the costs on...
