Quote:Are we throwing out farming credentials here? I can assure you mine are pretty top notch.
I know how it works but what your describing is not a "sub-minimum wage." I pay my crew $.28 a vine to prune. Is that sub minimum wage?
The workers can do roughly 2 acres a day @454 vines per acre. 2 X 454 X .28 = $254.24 a day. That's hardly what I'd consider sub minimum wage.
Workers are rarely paid cash under the table. If you hire you're own workers you have to provide them proper safety training, which isn't very effective if you're employing seasonally or for a specific task. For something like that, it's much much more common to hire a licensed labor contractor, who keeps trained and licensed workers for a 33% surcharge. These guys are definitely NOT getting paid under the table.
Lastly, the farmer has a very limited amount of control over the price of his individual crop. I belong to two different co-ops that I trust to get me the best price, but it's not as if I can go in there and say I had to hire x amount of extra work this year, so I need $100 more per ton of grapes. It just doesn't work like that.
If you go it alone, the vast majority of the time you sign a pricing contract well before your crop is ready and you costs are fixed. If you have some unexpected cost arise, you sales contract was most likely signed months prior and it's not changing.
minimum wage is not calculated by they day or by
"per vine" Per vine indicates what is called piece work
...You get paid .28 cents per vine and nothing by the hour which is minimum wage is all about...If you prune 100 vines and your pruners break, and you have no back up, so you get sent home, you made $28 for the day...I understand that is a far fetched scenerio, but the premis is the same...
Piece work and hourly wage can't be compared...
Some production welders/fabricators fabricate certain pieces as one part of a blueprint such as base plates to support columns on metal buildings...They may get paid ( for example purposes only) .25 for every base place fabricated and welded to the support column...That is also a situation where minimum wage is not in play...
I am not talking about credentials, I am talking about small owner operator farmers just as I said...
Most pricing agreements have clauses about raising prices...There are price increases in all parts and times of pricing agreements...Fuel increases, are a major one...Not everyone sells to a co-op either...some farmers sell to other farmers who are specialized in one area such as corn, beets, mint, potatos etc...and need hay for their own beef and horses...some sell to the local feed mills, some farmers sell to other farmers who sell to the co-op or local feed mill at a better rate than they get themselves,so the farmer does have some control over pricing
