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October 16, 2011 in City
Apple growers desperate for pickers to gather crop
TACOMA – Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire says the shortage of apple pickers in the nation’s top apple-producing state is dire.
In the Wenatchee Valley, apple growers have posted help-wanted signs across the countryside. For the first time in years, growers have also launched a radio campaign, offering up to $150 per day.
“We’re not getting anybody to take a bite on these jobs, so we don’t have anybody to do these jobs,” Gregoire told the News Tribune.
The governor returned home Friday after leading a 15-member delegation of farm group representatives to the nation’s capital. The group urged members of Congress to oppose a Republican bill that would force employers to use a federal database called E-Verify to determine whether their employees are eligible to work in the United States.
Gregoire criticized anti-illegal-immigration rhetoric prevalent in Washington, D.C., saying Congress should instead be focused on ways to get more foreign workers to help with harvesting.
Washington isn’t the only state in such straits. In Alabama, where a new state law is aimed at cracking down on illegal immigrants, the construction, agriculture and poultry industries all report huge shortages of labor. A University of Georgia study this year found that state had a shortage of 5,244 workers in the fields. In California, farmers have complained of too few workers to pick the avocados, and in Texas, growers have appealed with little luck for more help picking their organic crops and vegetables.
Gregoire and farm groups want nothing to do with E-Verify. Roughly 66,000 of the 92,000 workers who are needed for seasonal harvests – nearly 72 percent – are in the country illegally, according to the state’s farm groups.
“All we’re going to do is penalize employers. We’re going to lose jobs and we don’t have any way to get those jobs back,” Gregoire said in an interview at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, where she and her entourage had met earlier with the office’s chief agricultural negotiator. “Now why – in this recession, as hard-hit as we are – would we, the state of Washington, support that?”
Jon Wyss, president of the Okanogan County Farm Bureau, called the potential results of the bill catastrophic. He represents more than 900 farm families in the county and said growers are facing a bleak harvest this year. He read an email that he’d just received from one of them, who complained about a harvest that was two weeks behind schedule because the farmer was 200 pickers short and it had rained on four of the past seven days. Wyss said all of his growers were struggling to find labor this fall.
“You can’t drive down a road in the Wenatchee Valley, between Cashmere to the Canadian border, without seeing a sign that says, ‘Pickers wanted,’ ” he said.
Wyss said Congress should streamline the procedures to allow more foreign workers to be hired as farm laborers.
© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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billysuckit on October 16 at 7:17 a.m.
maybe they should be paying minimum wage and not allowing illegals to break the law in the first place
Truthbtold on October 16 at 9:09 a.m.
Truth of the matter is most Americans are lazy and would not do hard labor like pick fruit all day….it is much easier for them to stand in the welfare line or hold a sign on the corner.
IDEA: Have the inmates do it, (the low risk for flight ones, I am sure there would be a few thousand who would love to make a little extra money or see sunshine) or the fathers who can’t/won’t pay their child support.
I know I will receive lots of flack for posting this, but it is how I feel.
Truthbtold on October 16 at 9:10 a.m.
PS. Stop blaming the illegals for doing a job no one else wants to do…
DHF on October 16 at 12:44 p.m.
It should be work fare instead of welfare. Where is all the unemployed. To good or to lazy to pick fruit.
misjustice on October 16 at 1:57 p.m.
Hmmm, maybe we need, hardworking, undocumented workers afterall?
*sigh*
With the high unemployment numbers for ‘Mericans, one would think that these jobs would be filled; especially since the paying wage has been increased.
This article would seem to indicate that we, the ‘Merican people, have grown too fat and too lazy. What a shame!
Where’s my tax cut?
DeadHandsofChe on October 16 at 5:14 p.m.
ShannonSullivan wrote: PS. Stop blaming the illegals for doing a job no one else wants to do…
The issue is not that illegals are doing a job that most Americans don’t want to do, it is they are doing a job most Americans don’t want to do at that wage.
The illegal workers are driving the wage down. There is a solution, pay the American workers more money; however, that is going to drive up the price for produce.
gopin2012 on October 16 at 6:12 p.m.
The illeagles serve a purpose; drive a wedge between lazy ‘Mericans and the rest of the global wage slaves. May the lowest wage pervail!
keithj on October 18 at 8:22 a.m.
It is ironic that we have record unemployment in this country at the same time we have a dire shortage of workers.
RedCedar on October 18 at 9:05 a.m.
Must have been a tough decision for Ms Gregoire — piss off the unions or piss off the farmers. She chose “unions” this time. The reality is that the issue with Mexican farm workers isn’t about American jobs. You could offer Americans $30/hr to pick apples and a few would hire on, but even so most of them wouldn’t do nearly as good a job as the Mexicans do. A large fraction would sort of try, but they don’t know what they’re doing and they’d damage a lot of fruit. A larger fraction would go at it with the chip-on-the-shoulder “they’re not paying me enough” attitude that became a lifestyle at big American factories, which are now in China.
Americans, as a whole, don’t want to pick fruit, or pull weeds, or train hops, or prune orchards, because they don’t need to. Even in our recession, there are plenty of doles to get on, and plenty of minimum wage jobs (“Hi, welcome to Wal*Mart”, “Would you like fries with that?”) that are less grueling than the all-day outdoor labor of farm work. I would like to know, truthfully, from the people who keep kvetching about Mexicans stealing American jobs, exactly what rate of pay they would personally need to receive in order to work as hard as a Mexican at the same job. It’s easy to talk in generalities, but let’s put a number on it — and then let’s see them go out and work through the whole harvest, dawn to dusk, at that rate.
I strongly suspect that most of the “Mexicans are stealing our jobs” talk is really code for, “I don’t like seeing Mexicans all over the place.” The trouble is it’s good politics in some states to give illegal migrants all kinds of benefits that used to be reserved for US citizens, while it’s good politics in other states to try all kinds of dramatic anti-immigration enforcement. Nationally, both parties are split down the middle on it. The business half of the Republicans want Mexican labor. The redneck half wants the greasers kept out.of their country, if only because they look funny and talk funny. The social justice half of the Democratic party wants to be generous with everything to everyone, but especially to the poor, which by definition includes all illegal immigrates, since they wouldn’t sneak into this country if they weren’t poor. The labor half of the Democratic party wants all jobs to pay union scale, and there are none worse in terms of everything that unions value than farm jobs.
So, the politicians on both sides need to triangulate between their diametrically-opposed constituencies, even within their own party in order to decide which side of their mouth to talk out of. The result is this ridiculous mess in which we now have a nationwide shortage of farm labor, with no drop in the American unemployment rate. Meanwhile one really bright spot in the US balance of trade, agricultural exports, is going to be badly hurt by the political grandstanding on both sides.
The_Seer on October 18 at 9:59 a.m.
This labor shortage is because Mexican Drug Cartels pay way more than $150.00 a day. Sheesh, you can even get your own business in Spokane and not have a single customer for days but still post profits…
One fifty for a twelve hour day of picking, after taxes, is about minimum wage. Most U.S. citizens are overweight and completely out of the type of shape this work requires. Didn’t a bunch of Hispanics just leave Alabama because of anti-immigrant legislation? Why not just put up a “Bienvenidos a Washington” sign at all our state borders.
I know what I’ll do: I’ll invent a machine to replace the pickers!. Yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket!
RyanBoru on October 19 at 12:40 p.m.
Red Cedar,
Excellent post, but I have to add a few things.
Farmers want good, reliable labor to harvest thier crops and the jobs are typically very short-term. Many of the migrants move from crop to crop and are good enough to harvest the crops efficiently without damaging the fruit. Domestic workers want a long-term, permanent job with benefits, and don’t want jobs that are labor intensive and associated with workers who they deem below them. Their efficiency will be anywhere from 20-60% of the migrant worker at best and they are much more likely to damage the fruit. Even if you paid domestic workers $50/hr, they wouldn’t likely make it past the first few days (you can thank extended unemployment benefits for that).
Many of the domestic workers who might try it out, oftentimes live hand-to-mouth anyway, needing a job to get a bill paid (cable tv), or their car out of the shop, or whatever. Once they reach that threshold, they lose the urgency to show up for work until the next bill is due.
Another point that is often overlooked regarding hourly wages for farmworkers it the fact that labor is a significant portion of the overall cost of the end product. Additionally, agricultural commodities, particularly short shelf-life items, are price takers, not price setters. If the price for apples or lettuce is too high, the consumer passes until the price is reduced to the point where they sell, otherwise they are thrown out. Farmers will go out of business if they consitently lose money on their crops and we will see the agriculture industry move overseas as much of US manufacturing has. There are also many crops where mechanical harvesters are simply impractical. Apples cannot be harvested in a combine like wheat.
The H-2A program allows US Ag employers to bring in workers from Mexico & other countries to fill thier farm roles but it is very cumbersome and expensive with the employer having to cover all of the expenses including travel costs & per diem expenses, housing, and other expenses. They are also required to pay the Adverse Effect Wage Rate which is typically much higher than minimum wage which many people claim is too low. And it doesn’t end there. The DOL has recently sent out agents of their enforcement division, Wage & Hour, to audit the companies and the fines associated with the smallest violations can oftentimes be thousands of dollars, many times more than what a non-H-2A employer would pay for a similar violation. This will discourage companies from using the only program to hire workers but won’t reduce unemployment one bit.
MrTachyon3000 on October 26 at 9:58 p.m.
I am proud to say I was once an apple and pear picker in WA. It is a tough job, especially the bartlett pears. It’s like picking rocks, and only the tough hombres can handle it. Definitely not for the weak or people with allergies, especially with the excessive amounts of pesticides dust in the leaves of the trees. It starts with the thinning, then the picking, and then the prunning. Going up and down a 20 foot ladder with a heavy sack is not easy and injuries and falls do happen. The prunning season can be brutal, since, often done in the snow.
All those haters who wanted the Mexicans out, grab a picking sack and start filling those bins, then tell us how it feels. You will learn to respect other humans and their contributions to the US economy.
It’s sad, but I’m sure many of the growers will loose big and the whole industry will take major damage. Jobs will not be filled, but lost. Lucky for me, I now have a good job, but you have to start at the bottom and that’s what most people fail to understand. They want to start earning the big bucks with zero experience in their resume. If you haven’t picked apples, pears, or strawberries, you don’t know what hard work is. Peace!
jherron on October 27 at 9:23 a.m.
well i just called washington work force and asked how could i get a job pickin apples they told me that i had 2 be screened 2 pick an apple im out of state and need a job im an american thats willing to pick apples ive done it before when i was growin up but work force said that they want people that were fast and did this before so if any one can tell me where i can get in touch with these apple workers that need a good strong back and someone thats not afraid to work have the contact me @ thatwildhillbilly@yahoo.com in need a joband have worked 4 less
jherron on October 28 at 7:36 a.m.
as i thought these apple orchard dont want americans to pick apples they are dependent on illegal immagrants not on the welfare of fellow americans so i say shut the orchards down also the borders and get back to being americans