How do you create inflation and lost jobs? The way Newsom did for the fast food industry—you have government determine wages. The Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors will on Tuesday discuss mandating a $26 an hour wage for farm workers. If they implement this, workers will lose their jobs, farmers will either move toward closing down and selling out to developers or buy technology to replace the workers.
“A federal appeals court sided with Elon Musk and X Corporation against a California law requiring companies to report and create definitions for a wide variety of speech violations, finding the law violates the First Amendment by unlawfully compelling companies to provide opinions on contentious matters, including defining what hate speech or misinformation is.
This plan alone would cost $300 million, if you believe the government study. Of course most government studies are silly, biased and totally wrong—just remember Fauci.
| An Urgent Plea and Call to Action to Save Our Economy! |
Andy Caldwell, COLAB, 9/5/24
| Dear Friends of COLAB and Agriculture, On Tuesday, Sept 10, the board of supervisors are going to initiate an ad hoc subcommittee to study the potential for a $26 per hour minimum wage for farmworkers in Santa Barbara County. Such an action would create an unprecedented impact that would collapse the economy of the entire north county. Please contact all five county supervisors at the link below and tell them they have no business messing with minimum wages at the county level for all the following reasons! |
| An Urgent Plea and Call to Action to Save Our Economy! “Atlas Shrugged” came to life in the chambers of our county supervisors on Tuesday, August 21, a day that will long live in infamy for the people who produce our food, build our communities, and deliver our goods. County supervisors Joan Hartmann, Laura Capps and Das Williams set in motion that day two multi-billion-dollar actions that is causing every sector of our economy to writhe in anticipatory agony, especially our farmers. The two actions? The approval of the county’s climate action plan and the future consideration of a $26 minimum wage for farmworkers. If you are not familiar with Ayn Rand’s seminal work “Atlas Shrugged”, you soon will be. The novel warned of a day when the producers of the world, who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, would shrug off the burden, thereby debilitating every segment of our economy and society. Regarding the climate action plan, the supervisors had their staff calculate the cost of the plan for the first six years of implementation to the county itself, i.e., how much would it cost county operations to go all electric, including replacing vehicle fleets, including heavy construction equipment, along with furnaces, water heaters, etc. The answer was over $300 million. So, how much will it cost the private sector? We don’t know because the board admitted that it did not consider or bother to estimate the costs to the private sector, including the cost to every business and every homeowner, every construction company, every trucking company, and every farmer. That is, money was no object! How can they pass a mandate and not reveal the costs? I can assure you it is going to cost billions. In fact, the largest trucking company and the largest winery in the county have already closed due to similar mandates being imposed by other agencies. The second item, the proposed $26 per hour labor rate for farmworkers was suggested by some social justice activists who are economic illiterates. Please consider the fact that the largest sector of our local economy (over $2 billion per year) is agriculture and that agriculture in the form of wineries is also the largest tourist draw to our region (tourism, too, generates over $2 billion per year in our county). Farmers in every sector of our economy have told me in no uncertain terms that a $26-hour minimum wage for farmworkers would create their immediate and certain bankruptcy and the certain layoff of their entire workforce! The truth is strawberry producers have already been losing money for the past two years and so have wine grape and flower growers. This would be the last straw. Unlike the fast-food operators who have a mandated $20-hour minimum wage, farmers do not have the luxury of simply raising their prices and passing the costs on to their customers. The buyers of produce, including grocery stores and restaurant chains, dictate the price they will pay daily based on global competition. That is, farmers are price-takers, not price-makers. The market prices have not kept up with the costs of inflation for growers, especially in California, as our farmers already have some of the highest labor, water, land, and fuel costs in the country, if not the world. Farmers would be taking a double hit with these two board actions. Supervisors Hartmann, Capps, and especially Williams (Williams is a lame duck with a mere four months left in this, his last term) have no business setting a unique minimum wage for any sector of our local economy, least of all the most vulnerable to state, national, and international competition. Moreover, as was pointed out by Supervisor Bob Nelson, the county hypocritically has some 400 of their own employees, nearly 10% of the county workforce, that don’t make $26 per hour! One of the most famous lines in “Atlas Shrugged” was from Karl Marx, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. Our supervisors have decided that due to the inflationary policies they themselves supported (read that Bidenomics!), farmworkers need a “living wage”, regardless of their ability to produce associative value for their employers, and the farmers should be able to give it to them, as if money was no object, again! Please ask the supervisors to save our farmers by refraining from devastating the entire north county economy here at: https://www.countyofsb.org/1599/Board-of-Supervisors Andy Caldwell COLAB Contact Information COLAB PO Box 7523 Santa Maria, CA 93456 For more information, Andy Caldwell, 805-929-3148 [email protected] |
$26 per hour for farm workers is not unreasonable when you consider a hamburger flipper and a counter worker in a fast food restaurant makes $20. per hour. Farm workers work is more labor intensified and is preformed under sever weather conditions, not air conditioned facilities. Farm workers preform their tasks doing hours of back breaking work directly under the sun.