The Minimum Wage and Cotton Pickers
After reading a Walter Williams column on the effect of the minimum wage law on American Samoa, I started thinking about my experience as a cotton picker when I was about 14 years old (I mean manually picking cotton; I was never a machine.). At that time there was no minimum wage law that applied to farm labor and, apparently, no child labor laws. Farmers paid based on level of production rather than by the hour for most farm labor.
The farmer I picked for was paying three cents per pound of cotton picked. I managed to pick about 100 pounds per day so I earned about three dollars per day. Another boy the same age as me could pick about 200 pounds per day so he earned twice as much as I did. It never occurred to me that this was unfair. He was bigger and stronger than me and could put more cotton in his sack before having to carry it to the truck to be weighed and emptied. He also took shorter rest breaks.
What do you suppose would have happened if a minimum wage law required the farmer to pay each of his pickers six dollars per day regardless of their production? I would not have been hired and I wouldn't have made enough money that summer to buy a bicycle and clothes for school. And the other boy might not have picked 200 pounds per day. It would raise other issues like the length of a day and the length of work-breaks during the day.
What if the farmer was a socialist and announced that he was going to add up all of each day's production, divide it by the number of pickers and pay each picker for that amount? That is, pay each picker the same regardless of their individual production. First, the 200-pound-per-day boy and the other top producers would go find another farmer to pick for. Second, animosity would grow amongst the remaining pickers over the level of each picker's production and overall production would decline dramatically. Third, the socialist farmer would be forced out of business because of his inability to get his crop to market.
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I posted a link to this blog post on Anhinga. Your words deserve wide distribution. You have a way of cutting to the chase and making situations understandable even to liberals. Okay, maybe no one is that good, but we can always hope.
Thanks anhinga.
The response of clueless "progressives" to this post might be something like this: So, rather than pay their pickers an equitable wage or even continue to pay based on level of production, the cotton growers conspired with big business to invent and manufacture mechanical cotton pickers that put the poor manual pickers out of work.
Would love to see a show of hands among progressives to of how many have actually done physical labor.