Tag Archives: Labor

The Liberal’s Head Will Explode

Blow Your Mind

How is a liberal to think?  On one hand you have technology improving the delivery of fresh produce to markets thereby reducing the need for processed goods.  On the other, you have technology reducing the need for labor:

SALINAS, Calif. –  On a windy morning in California’s Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants. Engineers from Silicon Valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds.

The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can “thin” a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand.

The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization — fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market, not processing, which have thus far resisted mechanization because they’re sensitive to bruising.

Me?  We don’t have  workers willing to work at the price being offered.  Technology is a win-win.

Unions: The Beginning of the Beginning?

One thing is true.  Unions increase unemployment and raise the cost of goods.

Period.

The modern concept of Union is able to accomplish this by the force of sword and gun.  Laws have been passed that allow Unions to access the police force of the state to intervene on the Union’s behalf.  With this access, the Unions are able to negotiate benefits for themselves that would not otherwise be possible in a relationship between two parties.  In short, the Union uses legal coercion to obtain their benefits.

And this increases unemployment and raises the cost of good above what they otherwise would be.

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