For years, I was suffering under a labor shortage: I couldn’t find anyone to mow my lawn. I made it very clear I was willing to pay $7.50 for someone to mow my lawn, but nobody showed up.
If I were the American Farm Bureau, I would start lobbying Washington for policies to boost the supply of labor, and I would call reporters to write about the lawn-labor shortage.
Grass is literally going unmowed.
I could complain that neighbors are being turned against one another in order to hire up lawnmowers, just as Kristi Boswell of the AFB put it: “We’ve got neighbors literally competing against each other just to have enough of a workforce to harvest their crops.”
But now, a group of innovative farmers have inspired me on how I can solve the lawn-labor shortage without needing federal policy. Check out this story, (linked in today’s Morning Examiner):
“It is getting very competitive out there and employers are having to offer incentives to find the labor they need,” said Oscar Ramos, a grape farmer and Kingsburg-based farm-labor contractor. “And one of those incentives is higher wages.”
Farmers and agriculture industry leaders say wages have risen $1 to a $1.50 an hour this year compared to last year, or as much as 12%. Among Valley farmers, hourly wages are hovering between $9 and $10 an hour, which is higher than California’s minimum wage of $8.
Wow! Who would have guessed that you could magically eliminate a shortage of something by paying more for that thing? It’s almost as if the industry lobbyists asking Congress to fix labor shortages – from the agribusiness industry to the tech industry – just want the government to actively drive down wages.
