You know paying pickers decent wages would only raise the retail price of a tomato a tiny little bit and the quality would be much higher and so worth it. Corporate America can f up anything. Even tomatoes.
I’m not unsympathetic to the pickers’ working conditions. They were paid very little (they were excluded from minimum-wage laws), they had no toilet facilities in the fields, and they were occasionally sprayed by crop dusters. But the farmers (most of whom were not part of corporate America) could not really give them what they were asking for.
The UFW had this dream that the pickers, if unionized, would get what other union workers had gotten—a middle-class lifestyle. I don’t blame them for the dream. But it just wasn’t realistic. Unionized farm-workers weren’t going to be able to afford to send their kids off to college. Their demands resulted in the use of machines which took their place.
Could Americans afford to buy hamburgers made by workers who make a “living wage” of $15/hour? Of course. We wouldn’t like it, but we could afford it. But at $15/ hour machines could take a lot of those workers’ places—and they will. At the end of the day there will be another set of low-skilled jobs taken away from people who have low skills. Are they better off working for $7.50/ hour or being unemployed at $15/hour. That’s pretty much what happened to a lot (but not all) of people who worked in the fields.
There are a lot of people who enter the world of work with few skills. They didn’t do well in school, and maybe aren’t too bright. Seventy years ago, many of them could have made honest livings doing jobs like digging ditches or construction jobs. By increasing the minimum wage to “help” these people, society has pretty much put them out of work. It’s easier and cheaper to rent s trench-digging machine or hire illegals “off the books”.