[DoughtyOne]

Let me tell you a little story about lettuce.

The story used to be told like this.  Lettuce pickers made low wages.  When they would try to get their pay raised, people would state that the market just couldn't bear the added cost.

Then the facts came out.

The fact is, the field labor wage is a very small percentage of the overall cost of a head of lettuce.

A picker can pick an awful lot of lettuce heads in an hour.  Even if the wages were $20.00 an hour, the labor cost per head was quite minimal.  If a worker can pick 100 heads of lettuce an hour, the individual cost per head is $0.20 cents.  If you subtract what the old wage rate was, perhaps $8.00 and hour, you only see an increase in $0.12 cents per head.  Is $0.12 cents per head going to ruin the average family or restaurant wanting lettuce?  Of course not.  But that isn't the end of the story.

The cost of a head of lettuce is contingent on planting, watering, weeding, harvesting, sales to local distributors who mark up, sales to intermediate distributors who mark up, and the super-markets who mark up.  Labor is only one small component of the cost of a head of lettuce.  The additional cost of a head of lettuce, would be insignificant.

And if a wage rate was $20.00 per hour, guess what.  You don't need poor people from foreign nations to pick the lettuce.

[mo]

“And if a wage rate was $20.00 per hour, guess what...”

You don't need welfare benefits. Your constituency then SUPPORTS border integrity more aggressively...and the parasitic Federal and state bureaucrats are fewer in number?

Have I got it right?

[1rudeboy]

I see that canard a lot. Tell me, if labor costs (financial or otherwise) are such an insignificant factor in business decisions, then why are auto plants locating in TN, AL, and SC over, say, CA, NY, and PA?

[khelus]

... And if a wage rate was $20.00 per hour, guess what. You don't need poor people from foreign nations to pick the lettuce.

And ... we wouldn't be subsiding new low wage immigrants by $20,000 per household per year, nor would we be subsidizing illegals by $ hundreds of billions per year, etc ..... not to mention security implications.