I'm a fairly liberal guy and believe in workers rights and all, but the objections to this are beyond me. Under the previous method, the incentive was for the pickers to be lazy. Why shouldn't that be corrected? No matter how much they're getting paid, that's a stupid way to do business and not exactly an ethical way to work (although I'm not going to blame them). And the second fix kept managers from playing favorites. This is a problem for you?

So what exactly is your problem here? Using money to motivate people? The fact that anyone would pay minimum wage at all? It's not like this is some nazi-esque psychological experiment where people are being tormented for the sake of knowledge. It's just an employer changing incentive schemes. It happens all the time. No big deal.