“We aren’t attracting young people to our industry. We aren’t getting an influx of immigrants. How do we deal with that?”

You could try paying your employees better. The geniuses who run large businesses rarely seem to think of that.

When Henry Ford revolutionized the automobile industry, he didn’t do it solely by embracing new technologies and production methods, although that certainly helped; the aces up his sleeve were the 5$-per-day paycheck and the 5-day work week. 5$ a day was more than double what Ford auto workers had been paid previously, and many industrial labourers at other companies were paid less than 2$ per day. Additionally, a 5 day work week was something of a rarity in America at the time, and Ford extended the increased leisure time to his office employees later on. These changes made Ford an extremely attractive place to work, and allowed his company to retain employees and massively reduce the turnover rate. Many modern business owners could learn a thing or two from Ford.

Pretty awkward by the NYT to shoehorn immigration into this.

Mr. Montoya is among a new generation of farmworkers here at Taylor Farms, one of the world’s largest producers and sellers of fresh-cut vegetables, which recently unveiled a fleet of robots designed to replace humans — one of the agriculture industry’s latest answers to a diminishing supply of immigrant labor.

You replace humans not because there is a lack of immigrant labor but because as robots become cheaper, more reliable and controllable, it becomes economical to replace immigrant humans.

The smart machines can assemble 60 to 80 salad bags a minute, double the output of a worker.

No wait, you can replace TWO immigrant humans.

Meanwhile, from Nautilus, an article where immigration is not mentioned once:

Herbicide Is What’s for Dinner: How the biggest farming practice you’ve never heard of is changing your food.

After the canola, we stop by a field of wheat. It is mostly yellow, but there is still a tinge of green in places, and the occasional deep, green weed, which is the real clue that it hasn’t been desiccated. We enter the field, pushing aside the prickly, barbed awns. He slides some grains off a head and hulls them in his palm.

“We’ll probably spray it this week, could have sprayed earlier, ” Shewchuk decides, chewing on some berries.

Why spray—why spend the extra fuel and herbicide, if the crop is ready to go?

“Insurance. When we spray we can harvest within 10 days.”

Given that he has roughly one month to get the crops off the field before the frost, I’m starting to see that it might be impossible to do any other way. The farm is so big that its fields are never ready to cut at the same time. It’s not the big machines that allow Shewchuk to farm such a massive operation—it’s the herbicide.

“Farms these days are huge,” Chris Willenborg tells me. “A large farm is 30,000 acres.” Willenborg is a farmer as well as an academic, at the University of Saskatchewan. “In my ‘farmer’ hat, desiccation makes sense because it’s efficient,” he says. I can’t visualize the scope of a farm that big, so he spells it out for me: “Think of a farm 60 miles wide, and 100 miles long.” A farm that big would have different soil types, different climates even. It would be hard, even impossible, to have good weather long enough to harvest it all.

Ford famously said that by paying his employees well, he was creating customers.
No point in building massive amounts of product when few can afford to buy it.

And the article only concerns itself with the financial advantages to the farmer. The savings in social costs of schools, healthcare, policing and incarceration costs and just the general overall squalor a re several orders of magnitude higher.

Mexicans are stronger than Americans. Literally. Americans deny it. Because they are the strongest in the world! They lift weights! They are mighty.

Try picking tomatoes for 8 hours. Just one day. Try it for one day, weaklings.

Ford famously said that by paying his employees well, he was creating customers.
No point in building massive amounts of product when few can afford to buy it.

That’s the opposite of Say’s Law, so it’s false. But paying higher pays dividends in quality worksmanship.

Fordism, like Georgism, seems attractive at first, but it’s too cute and tied up in a bow. Simpler economic practices work better.

I like how the (((NYT))) dances around the fact that Americans don’t want to do farm labor BECAUSE THE WAGES ARE COMPLETE SHIT.

That was certainly another bonus to the policy.

For quite awhile now the NYT has been pushing two contradictory narratives.

On the one hand, Americans are aging and won’t do hard work, so there is always a looming labor shortage. This requires low wage immigration.

On the other hand, we are about to be replaced by robots, so there will be a huge surplus of unemployed workers. This requires a Basic Minimum Wage.

Basically, they want both immigration and more welfare, so they tell whatever stories justify those outcomes. They don’t really notice or care that they contradict themselves from day to day.

Robots are going to replace human workers and we won’t need human workers any more and that explains why wages are stagnant and falling. Also, we are in desperate need of more workers so we desperately need to either have more babies or import more immigrants or the crops will rot in the fields and we will all starve.

Note that as robots replace humans, it will take very few humans to supervise an automated factory which is why, on average, productivity is declining and it takes more human workers to produce the same output.

The reality: The rich are importing immigrants and outsourcing jobs to flood the market for labor and drive wages down and profits up. But that doesn’t sound good, so when wages decline, blame robots for taking our jobs.

Bottom line: it’s not how efficient a machine is. It’s how costly it is to purchase and maintain. Industrial machinery is expensive – cheap third-wold labor has no up-front capital costs, and a sick worker can just be thrown away and replaced with a new one. Consider that for decades we’ve known how to build automated shirt-sewing machines, but virtually all of your clothes are sewn by hand using cheap labor. Because sure, a million-dollar plus maintenance costs sewing machine maybe be able to outperform any single human worker, but if those workers can be had for a dollar an hour, well, the machine is less economic. Automation is a reaction to expensive labor, it is not generally a cause of low wages because the costs are so high.

And the tax rate on those who remain employed will have to go up … seems like slave labor to me.

Robots do not call in sick or go on strike. And they do not require health insurance. On the other hand, they never get any original ideas and they never buy your product. Kind of a mixed bag. So how about we quit importing low skill immigrants and train Americans for the jobs that do exist. None require a degree in Ethnic or Gender Studies, BTW.

It’s not contradictory if immigration means low cost workers, welfare subsidises low cost workers, and the NYT articulates the interests of employers. The robotics for jobs like picking crops will be the last to arrive.

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/robots-to-radically-transform-fashion-industry

Totally automated clothes manufacturing is still not here though it may no be long due to a stiffening spay to make the fabric easier for machines to handle. All jobs will be under threat, not just low level ones.

Robots … never get any original ideas

Yet. Decades away, but it’s coming

When did we start calling normal imdustrial equipment “robots”? I’m surprised there was ever a time when putting lettuce in a plastic bag wasn’t an automated process.

It’s the big hype of the present age – “robotics!” AI!” “automation!” formerly known as “machines and programming”. Just like the idea that a machine will ever care enough to think, the notion that we are really super innovative these days is largely overblown marketing and PR hype. There is an inherent problem with replacing humans with machines – what to do with the humans? You don’t need “intelligence” in a machine to program it to kill people – simple instructions will do. Still people prefer to see the machine as one of those silly toys in Saudi Arabia pretending to be a person. Machines should be tools to serve us – we don’t need them to think, even if it were possible. Unfortunately I think many people these days are too lazy to even think anymore.