They’d rather let their crops rot on the trees than respond to the market forces and increase their wages. There is no labour shortage in the US fruit picking labour market; there is a gap between the asking price for labour and the price the farmers are willing to pay.

It is much the same in Canada, although instead of Mexicans we have migrant Quebecois. They smoke almost as much pot, but they complain about the climate less, as you would, too, if you were from James Bay or some godforsaken spot.

In the Fraser Valley, just outside of Vancouver, there have been several convictions over the past decade for slavery, as well as numerous housing infractions (it is Canada; insulation and roofs are advisable and may be compulsory, imagine that!), assault (beating) charges, one murder that I can recall, as well as several cases of holding workers’ children or elderly parents captive until their work contract was up. Passports? Oh yeah, they keep the passports, too, which is one reason they’re not getting so many immigrants who want to work in this industry; the word has gone around India, and now the farmers are whining loudly about uppity brown people.

Which brings us back to the Americans:

“It’s a laborer’s market right now. My pickers all look at me and say, ‘How much are you going to pay?‘ ” he said. “They all have cell phones, and all they have to do is call up the road and see if anybody else is paying a little more.”

Farmers in that situation are left to decide whether it’s even worth picking the fruit, or just letting it rot, said Dan Fazio, director of employer services for the Washington state Farm Bureau.

“I can fill 10,000 jobs at $15 an hour right now,” he said. “And we knew this was going to happen. We’ve been warning people for years.”

Farmers across the West for years have complained about a labor shortage to harvest their fruits, vegetables and other crops. Critics have always discounted those claims, saying farmers who pay higher wages have plenty of help.

“At some point, it’s like the boy who cried wolf,” said David Groves, spokesman for the Washington State Labor Council. “It’s just that, at different points in time, we’ve heard this, and we’ve seen evidence that there’s not a labor shortage. There’s just an unwillingness to pay decent wages.”