Politics: No hand-weeding in Cali

Do you ever catch yourself debating whether something is one of the best or worst ideas you've ever heard?

California passes a ban (not a total ban, but an effective one for growers of most crops) on weeding crops by hand. Farm workers, many of them migrant, lowly paid, and poor, wind up with terrible back problems spending mega-long hours hunched over. But of course, most of these crops are grown in tons more places than just California, so how do California crops compete in a marketplace with other places that do not protect their workers? And is this really enforceable?

So the alternative is using a weeding tool of a certain length that prevents workers from leaning over all day. Sounds reasonable to me. Also, organic farmers, who have far greater problems with weeds since they don't use chemicals that give us all cancer, are exempt, since this restriction would effectively sink the California organic farming industry.

So bottomline: I have to like a law that sticks up for the broken backs of workers who aren't being treated so well in a capitalistic system. My capitalistic worth in a few years, somewhere in the very low six digits, greatly exceeds their capitalistic worth pulling weeds. But our rights of human dignity, while widely disparaged on the free market, fall very close together on a curve of moral justice. Might this law do more damage than good by killing the jobs of the workers it's designed to protect? Maybe--but I seriously doubt it.

Ben @ BGR, I'd love for you to chime in on this one.