> > Declaring a minimum wage doesn't guarantee that anyone will 
> turn up to 
> > do the job anyway, and if they averge colledge graduate 
> thinks they're 
> > much worth more than that, they're usually wrong.
> > 
> > In Australia there's currently a discussion about importing labour 
> > from a few Pacific islands in order to pick fruit (about 2,500 
> > people), presumably they'll be paid minimum wage, and 
> presumably because no Australians want to.
> > IIRC, unemployment is about 3-4%, and it's always higher in rural 
> > areas, oddly enough where one grows fruit.
> 
> Why would you bother picking fruit when you could just 
> collect welfare/unemployment insurance and spend that 30 
> hours a week looking for a decent job instead? (or just lie 
> to your caseworker)
> 
> Besides, frankly picking fruit is a hard physical job that 
> lots of people just can't realisticly do. Obesity and other 
> forms of poor health is much more common in the poor, and the 
> cause and effect go both ways.
> Again, it's a work-vs-reward thing, if the alternative was 
> starving to death, more people would do it, but the whole 
> point of social safety nets is we don't leave that as an option.


That sounds like what I said...

Fruit picking might be hard work, but so is mining.  Nothing seems to be
stopping people travelling 4,000km across the country to go dig iron ore.

I wonder why that is.

Oh right, mining boom, big money.

So why don't the growers raise the wages?  Because that increases the price
of the produce, and they have contracts with supermarkets etc that have
fixed prices.  The buyers won't pay over a certain amount.  Or the
supermarkets play one grower against the other, or against imports. 

There ya go, it's all the capitalists fault, or the consumer who won't pay a
decent price.  It's always someones fault.  Ah hell, let's just blame the
guvmint as usual.

Tony

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