California may ban pulling weeds by hand. Don’t worry. People pulling crabgrass out of their rose bushes aren’t going to be handcuffed and strip-searched. But the proposed law would ban hand weeding of most vegetable crops by hired farm workers.
This issue is of negligible importance to our society or economy as a whole. It won’t have any measurable impact on the average family’s food bill nor will it make or break the household finances of most California farm workers.
But it’s a perfect example, in microcosm, of the tradeoffs that our society faces, when it has to make real-life decisions about what sort of labor, health and safety regulations best balance the needs of workers and society.
The lesson: There is no right or wrong, but there are tradeoffs.
As someone who voluntarily pulled weeds out of soybeans for 50 cents per hour 40 years ago, I have mixed reactions to a ban on hand weeding.
My economist and libertarian side bridles at the state banning work voluntarily entered into by mentally competent adults. If farm workers don’t want to do it, they could look for other jobs. Why ban something that self-employed farmers, adults and children still choose to do, though not as frequently as when I was a kid?
But I also know that pulling weeds is terribly hard on backs and shoulders. Pulling weeds for a few weeks every summer as an adolescent is different from doing it 12 months a year, year after year, as a hired laborer.
And my historian side reminds me that the “free contract, voluntarily entered into” argument was used in opposition to every mining and industrial safety measure proposed in the last two centuries. The retort: “Sure, dust from rock drilling gives you miners lung disease, but if you didn’t want the work, you should have stayed in Slovenia” is familiar to Iron Range residents who remember times before World War II.
Banning hand weeding will increase the cost of growing certain crops. And either poorer weed control or damage to plants from hoes will cut yields. However, that need not hurt overall farmer profits.
Vegetable farming is a competitive sector. Higher production costs will reduce supply and the prices of affected crops will rise. Profit per acre, after some adjustment time, need not fall.
However, a reduction in supply and resulting higher price will also reduce the quantities of the affected crops that consumers will buy. The extent to which higher production costs cut consumption of the affected vegetables depends on how “elastic” demand for the crop is.
If sales of vegetables affected by the ban do not fall significantly, California grower profits may not be greatly affected. Or sale volumes may fall a great deal and farmer profits and farm worker employment may both be cut.
The long-term outcome is not necessarily clear to any single grower. Such an individual thinks, “Gee, it’s going to cost me more to raise artichokes or lettuce and I won’t make as much money.”
She seldom thinks through the fact that all other growers will face higher costs, too, and that product prices will rise accordingly.
There are more plausible outcomes.
Higher production costs caused by the ban will also furnish an incentive to find alternatives to hand weeding or hoeing.
Chemical weed control is one possible response. Midwest farmers don’t spend nearly as much time hand-weeding soybeans as they did in the 1960s because chemical herbicides for soybeans are more effective now than then. The quantities used are also much higher.
Another possible outcome is that growing of affected crops might shift to other states or countries. If California bans hand-weeding, crops for which such weeding is important may be grown in Arizona or Mexico.
In that case, the California growers would take an economic hit. And so would California farm workers.
Banning certain work practices may protect workers from back injury, but it doesn’t guarantee that there will be as much work for them to do. If weeding restrictions raise prices and reduce consumption of vegetables or move it across a state or national border, some Californians are going to lose jobs.
Having lived in poor countries myself, I’m skeptical of those who want to protect poor people from exploitation by ensuring that they have no jobs at all.
If California bans hand weeding and Mexico does not — as I think it should not for the sake of its poor — there’ll be no impact on consumer food bills for U.S. consumers.
California growers and workers, though, would both pay some financial price for a ban on hand weeding, and it is not clear who would get the bigger bill.
© 2002 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.