March 30, 2014
The NYT, even more than other newspapers, tried to maintain a clear separation between its news and opinion sections. It apparently abandoned this distinction in an article today that could have been a press release from the California farmers’ association.
The article tells readers:
“A work force that arrived in the 1990s is aging out of heavy labor, Americans do not want the jobs, and tightened security at the border is discouraging new immigrants from arriving, they say, leaving them to struggle amid the paralysis on immigration policy.”
The piece never tells readers how much farmers look to pay their workers, but it does give us the bad news:
“Last year, the diminished supply of workers led average farm wages in the region to increase by roughly $1 an hour.”
If these workers were getting the median wage then it would imply a pay increase of 5 percent, which hardly seems especially lavish. if the workers were getting much less than the median, then it says a great deal about the NYT’s assertion that “Americans do not want the jobs.”
In a market economy, when there is a labor shortage wages are supposed to rise. Apparently the NYT doesn’t want wages to rise for farmworkers. Newspapers usually try to restrict such editorializing to the opinion page,
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