Here's a real example: you can work as an electrician on a mine site here in Australia on a fly-in, fly-out ("FIFO") basis. Typical rosters are 11/3 (days on/off), 2/1 (weeks on/off), etc. You work through weekends when you are on, and often do ~12-13 hour days. Food is good, beds aren't bad, Internet connectivity is 'passable' and the weather is extremely hot.
Many of these jobs pay (substantially!) more than what an electrical designer or electrical engineer may make - e.g. the ones providing a design, drawings or specifications to the electrical contractors. Many designers & engineers hold their relevant tickets or certs—or could quickly obtain one—in order to be an electrician on these sites.
So why would anyone still want to be a designer or engineer? Quality of life, quality of work (mental engagement), transport/commute, safety, overall career progression, etc.
It therefore does not surprise me that people aren't scrambling to pick fruit for hours per day.
> So why would anyone still want to be a designer or engineer?
Because the other, tough job, doesn't pay enough. People prefer the easy, fun job that pays enough.
edit: This is so obvious that everyone who makes the argument that Americans won't take jobs always elides over the exact number of the pay difference as if it isn't the most important factor. This article is pretty great because it doesn't. It makes clear that they're paying a pittance, which due to legislation has become a significantly larger pittance over the past 30 years, massively improving the lives of some of the most vulnerable people.
How many children got a winter coat because people paid an extra 50 cents for a bottle of wine?
I don't mean to be overly sensitive, but I can't help but think there's a more appropriate way to state your point without calling all of Africa "AIDS infested" - if HIV/AIDS is even relevant to the story.
I really forget what he was addicted to. It's been a long time; 30+ years. While he didn't come back exactly right in the head, he eventually recovered. The point of this was that he went through a bit of hell for an oil company to pay off his grad school debts.
Ok, but that would mean that the price of produce would need to grow nearly just as much. And then nobody would buy it. So at some level of price of labor it's better for the producer to close the shop and take the losses instead of rising wages even more and risking more losses due to crashing demand.
"Labor costs comprise only 6 percent of the price consumers pay for fresh produce. Thus, if farm wages were allowed to rise 40 percent, and if all the costs were passed on to consumers, the cost to the average household would be only about $8 a year."
That's correct. As a society, we ought to either accept this, and the resultant (probably large) increase in wine prices, or create a legal program for transient low-wage workers.
But by trying to have our cake and eat it too, we're placing illegal workers in a rather unpleasant situation (or motivating them to place themselves in such situations, if you prefer). They're ripe for all kinds of abuse, and lack the kinds of stability we all want.
Of course, it's the most basic rule of markets. Currently, they're paying unskilled data entry/retail clerk wages, eventually they'll reach semi-skilled, toil in the fields wages. They started at sit in a chair next to a door reading a book, and once every hour or two when somebody arrives, press a button to open the door wages.
I'm not sure what element of this story is supposed to be negative.
Is that really relevant, though? If the cost of having cheap food is that we create an underclass that are willing to put up with low wages out of economic desperation, is that really an acceptable moral compromise?
The people picking chardonnay grapes often aren't the target consumers to begin with, but your core point is correct, wage inflation usually leads to price inflation, but it doesn't always follow that therefore the product becomes unaffordable.
Or more likely you just get automation. We don't use a lot of man hours per lb of corn. Which means even without massive subsidies it would still be dirt cheap.
No matter how much the job pays, it's still very hard work. 60 hours a week of manual labor is no joke. I grew up on a small farm and have a bit of experience with how difficult farm work can be. Honestly, I might even hesitate to do it at $200 an hour (and we all know that's an insanely unrealistic figure).
On top of that, it's a job with zero job security and basically no potential for advancement. It's no surprise that people take other options whenever possible.
That may be true, but markets can take a while to balance, there are frictional costs associated with switching jobs, and you may need internal migration to happen to fill these jobs etc.
If money was the sole determiner of what kind of job you'd choose to work, you'd be in finance, enterprise sales, or medicine, not webdev.
There's no amount you could pay me to be a farmer, just like there's no amount you could pay be to become a doctor, a salesman, a lawyer, etc. I'm in tech because I like what I do.
Medicine requires many years of your life in training, and going hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
Also, it is extremely competitive and I'd probably fail out of it. High risk for no guaranteed payout.
Finance also doesn't actually pay that much. I had friends working at banks right out of college making <100K for 80 hour weeks. That's bad compared to Tech. Maybe Traders make more? But I have no idea how I'd even get a job as a trader and what it entails.
Being a lawyer at a not top tier institute also sucks in terms of pay/requires debt and training .
Tech really is quite high paying and good for people at all levels. I know people who did bootcamps and are now making 100K with a couple months of training.
> Tech really is quite high paying and good for people at all levels. I know people who did bootcamps and are now making 100K with a couple months of training.
It depends on where you live. I'm in Texas; you will never see that kind of salary where I am. I know a guy who had something like 15 years of experience, and he didn't break 100k until he moved to NYC.
When I graduated college in 2007, some of my friends got jobs at a local video game company. They got paid 38k and worked at least 80 hours a week, if not more. It was your stereotypical exploitative "crunch time all the time" game developer. I personally got a job in telecom, and I was making 42k. From talking to various people, 38-45k was the norm for a fresh college graduate then (it might be a little higher now because inflation, but not much). Back in late 2013/early 2014 I was looking for a job, and I was told by everyone that the going rate for somebody with my experience was 60k. I ended up putting my job search on hold for personal reasons, picked it up again in late 2014, and landed a position that paid 65k.
Those inflated six-figure entry-level salaries are only found in high-cost-of-living places like the Bay Area and NYC.
"Those inflated six-figure entry-level salaries are only found in high-cost-of-living places like the Bay Area and NYC."
The same could be said about the finance salaries. My point is that in these high cost of living areas, when comparing apples to apples in terms of tech vs anything else, tech wins.
Finance is shit, being an entry level lawyer from a tier 2 school is shit, consulting is shit, and the only thing thats not is tech.
In other areas of the country tech pays much less, but so does everything else! So tech still wins.
> Tech really is quite high paying and good for people at all levels. I know people who did bootcamps and are now making 100K with a couple months of training.
Having survived the original dot com bust, I feel compelled to point out that there's no guarantee that the happy circumstances you're describing will continue indefinitely. Too many people attempting to ride the same wave will eventually result in unfortunate economic consequences.
Get stuck on an underpopulated island and gathering food would very much become your day to day job. What your referring to is the diminishing marginal value of money which is a real thing, but we also don't need a lot of farmers so it's not about your job it's about convincing enough people to swap jobs.
Here's a real example: you can work as an electrician on a mine site here in Australia on a fly-in, fly-out ("FIFO") basis. Typical rosters are 11/3 (days on/off), 2/1 (weeks on/off), etc. You work through weekends when you are on, and often do ~12-13 hour days. Food is good, beds aren't bad, Internet connectivity is 'passable' and the weather is extremely hot.
Many of these jobs pay (substantially!) more than what an electrical designer or electrical engineer may make - e.g. the ones providing a design, drawings or specifications to the electrical contractors. Many designers & engineers hold their relevant tickets or certs—or could quickly obtain one—in order to be an electrician on these sites.
So why would anyone still want to be a designer or engineer? Quality of life, quality of work (mental engagement), transport/commute, safety, overall career progression, etc.
It therefore does not surprise me that people aren't scrambling to pick fruit for hours per day.