tomatoes / chalupas up .034 cents ?

JBrown72073 at cs.com JBrown72073 at cs.com
Sat Jul 20 12:23:02 PDT 2002



>On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, Michael Perelman wrote:
>
>So we could pay the workers in both industries a handsome wage and the
>cost of the goods wouldn't more than, say, double?
>
>That's great to know, somehow.
>Michael

Yeah. The going pay rate for farmworkers harvesting tomatoes in Florida is 1.2 to 1.5 cents a pound.

So the pickers' pay would nearly double overnight if the big buyers paid an extra cent per pound, and if that cent were passed on to the pickers. Resulting in your Taco Bell chalupa costing perhaps .034 cents extra to make.

This is according to the folks doing the Taco Bell boycott, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (http://www.ciw-online.org).

In the mid-90s my dad did a rough calculation of the average workers earnings in the U.S., including profits, executive compensation, sports stars, farmworkers, et al. It came out to around $30 an hour or 60K a year. He was trying to figure out what the current pay would be under Edward Bellamy's scheme of paying everyone equally.

His own extension of Bellamy's idea is to replace the labor market with a central 'job market' computer which adjusts wages to pay more for less popular jobs and less for those more popular, within a legislatively-set maximum and minimum.

Picking tomatoes in a heat index of 129 F would, under this system, pay much more than any air conditioned Wall Street job, and employers who want to cut labor costs would do well therefore to make their jobs as appealing as possible. His book on this subject was completed shorty before his death in 2000. (James Cooke Brown, 'The Job Market of the Future: Using Computers to Humanize Economies,' M. E. Sharpe, 2001. www.jobmarketbook.com)

Jenny Brown Gainesville, Florida, heat index 115 F



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