[ale] Off topic - And now, Arizona

[Jim Kinney]

On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 1:53 PM, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 1:24 PM, Jeff Hubbs <jhubbslist at att.net> wrote:
> >  Whenever someone around me gets all wound up about illegals, I ask
> > them if they're ready for $10/lb strawberries and chicken more expensive
> > than lobster.
>
> I seriously doubt chicken has more than a $2 of labor per chicken.
> (More if its not whole.)
>
> Most of the process including feeding is highly automated, and a fast
> processing line for whole chickens (not cut-up) can handle
> 100/chickens a minute, so the butchering is very efficient.  (Max of
> 50 or so people on that sort of line, so that works out to about 30
> man-seconds per chicken to kill it, de-feather, etc.)
>
> It's a very low-margin business, so they want as cheap a labor as they
> can get, but even if they had to pay $15/hr it would not be too
> expensive to eat.
>
> Now paying car factory union rates of $50/hr would have a bigger
> impact, but still not lobster prices.
>

recheck the $50/hr.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/11/24/opinion/main4630103.shtml
and
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aRViSBJZq45k

The $51/hr in the bloomberg article is pay + benefits.

Important numbers are here:

The Detroit-based automaker's current assembly workers get $31.75 an hour in
pay, including overtime and bonuses, and $19.25 in benefits, according to an
analysis by Laurie
Harbour-Felax<http://search.bloomberg.com/search?q=Laurie+Harbour-Felax&site=wnews&client=wnews&proxystylesheet=wnews&output=xml_no_dtd&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&filter=p&getfields=wnnis&sort=date:D:S:d1>,
president of Chicago-based Stout Risius Ross Inc. Adding pensions and other
retiree costs raises the total to about $73.

Toyota <http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=TM:US>'s U.S. workers
cost about $47.25 an hour, including $31.50 in pay and $15.75 in benefits,
the study found. Toyota doesn't have additional expenses for retirees
because so few of its U.S. factory employees have reached retirement.

>
> Greg
>
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness
Doing pretty well on all 3 pursuits

 Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by
faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits.
   Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith", 1992
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