Trigger warning: This is strong stuff. The LA Times is running a horror story about the effects of a decline in available cheap immigrant labor on the agricultural sector.
The $47-billion agriculture industry is trying to bring technological innovation up to warp speed before it runs out of low-wage immigrant workers.
California will have to remake its fields like it did its factories, with more machines and better-educated workers to labor beside them, or risk losing entire crops, economists say.
Technological innovation.
Increased demand for skilled labor.
But, wait, it gets worse:
[W]ages for crop production have climbed 13% from 2010 to 2015 — a higher rate than the state average, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of Labor Department data.
And worse:
Growers who can afford it have begun offering savings and health plans more commonly found in white collar jobs.