Growers Say U.S. Wrong, Labor Is in Short Supply

If this is the future--and farmers everywhere tell him it is--then Mike Osumi does not like it one bit.

His beans are rotting on the vine. He can’t find anyone to pick them. His cabbages molder in the sun. He has no workers to take them to market. Heck, Osumi can’t even find a qualified tractor driver to plow under his unpicked crops.

“It’s been a disaster,” he says from his cell phone as he scrambles through his Tustin farm, trying to salvage what he can.

Osumi’s woes began this fall when the Immigration and Naturalization Service started picking up his field hands and deporting them as illegal immigrants. His seasonal work force of 160 quickly shriveled to three.

Desperate for legal replacements, Osumi requested help from the local unemployment office. So far, it has sent him just 14 referrals. Only one has stuck with the work.

Osumi’s plight resonates with growers across California who express frustration with a recent federal report concluding that the agricultural industry does not face a labor shortage--and won’t in the foreseeable future.

Based on interviews and an analysis of labor statistics, the General Accounting Office found that farmers have an ample supply of foreign labor, including illegal immigrants. Should growers run short in the future, the report recommended hiring U.S. citizens forced off the welfare rolls. In sum, there’s simply no need to import large numbers of workers when unemployment in the top agricultural counties is as much as double the national average, the report said.

Those conclusions have touched off a provocative debate, not only within the agricultural industry, but also among social workers and economists who wonder whether it’s feasible--or indeed necessary--to shift welfare recipients into field jobs.

The debate starts with a stark reality: Agriculture as it is currently structured relies on illegal immigrants to do a lot of the dirty work.

Though growers like Osumi say they check each prospective hire’s documents, they admit they are often conned by forgeries.

The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that up to 40% of agricultural workers across the country are illegal. Farm officials peg that figure in California at closer to 70%. If all those workers were to vanish--hauled off in an INS crackdown or kept away by a tougher Border Patrol--growers across the state would find themselves in the same fix as Osumi.

That’s why they find the new federal report so baffling. In insisting that there will be no labor shortage in the future, the report assumes the INS will continue to let illegal workers do much of California’s planting, picking and pruning.

Farmers say they can’t afford to make that assumption. The INS is developing a computerized verification process to sniff out phony documents within minutes. Border patrols are getting ever tougher, and many growers assume that a crackdown on illegal field workers is inevitable.

“[What happens] down the road, that’s the scary part,” said Roy Gabriel, legislative director of the California Farm Bureau. “We’re simply not going to wait for our crops to rot in the field.”

To the bureau, the solution is simple: Bring more legal laborers into California as temporary “guest workers” who will spend a few months drying grapes into raisins or picking fresh peaches, then return to their native countries.

Current law allows guest workers to enter the United States for agricultural jobs only after the Department of Labor has certified that no workers are available domestically. California farmers want a new, more flexible program that will let them import workers when they feel they need them, not when the government declares a labor shortage.

But the federal report released last week concluded that such a program would not be necessary.

The report found that there are already too many field workers in the United States--an oversupply that depresses wages and drives unemployment rates as high as 20% to 30% in some agricultural counties. If farmers need more workers, the report suggested, why not hire off the unemployment rolls? Or why not reach out to welfare recipients, who are now being pushed ever harder to find jobs?

As Osumi’s experience demonstrates, that’s not always practical.

When he appealed to local churches, community groups and the unemployment office for laborers, Osumi got applicants who who had never set foot in fields, much less worked a day picking corn. Before he could even put them to work, he had to teach them such basics as the importance of good hygiene and the proper way to walk down a row without crushing plants.

Several of his recruits quit after just a few hours, unable to take the heat and the strain for pay that started at minimum wage, he said. Others gamely struggled through a few days, but he said they ended up creating more problems than they solved. With one group, for instance, Osumi had to chuck half the beans picked; the workers had not known to separate good beans from ones flecked with decay.

Despite the problems Osumi encountered, farmers elsewhere are determined to attempt to hire more unemployed residents and welfare recipients in an ongoing effort to build a legal work force.

“We’ve got to try,” said Manuel Cunha Jr., president of the Nisei Farmers League, which represents 1,000 Central Valley growers.

Agricultural economist Philip Martin is not so sure.

A professor at UC Davis, he suspects that California farmers are crying wolf in warning of future labor shortages. When an earlier guest worker program was phased out in the 1960s, some farms did go under and some crops did rot--but most growers adjusted by making do with fewer field hands, Martin said. In fact, he argued that the temporary labor shortage actually spurred innovation by prompting growers to use machines instead of people wherever they could.

If the INS cracks down on illegal foreign farm workers--a move he does not anticipate--California agriculture will survive, he said.

Growers will use fewer people. Or they’ll make the jobs more attractive to domestic workers by raising wages, adding benefits or buying new equipment, such as lighter ladders to ease the physical strain of field work.

“That’s the way market economics works,” Martin said.

But farmers, frightened by stories like Osumi’s, are not counting on innovation to bail them out.

The California Farm Bureau will continue to press for a new guest worker program. And in Fresno, Cunha recently convened a meeting of 350 farmers, social workers, county officials and labor contractors interested in moving welfare recipients into field jobs. Their conclusions: It won’t be easy, but it’s worth a shot.

Because agricultural work tends to shift from field to field as crops mature--and because the jobs are often miles from bus stations--transportation will be one big hurdle. Since work schedules vary depending on the weather and the task at hand, child care is another concern; a 9-to-5 day care program won’t always do the trick.

Perhaps the most crucial problem, however, is that agricultural work is seasonal.

About a third of the Central Valley’s welfare recipients already work in fields--it’s just that they can’t find year-round jobs. They may earn considerably more than minimum wage while they’re working, but they’re laid off for four to six months at a stretch.

The question is: Are [welfare recipients] going to be able to support their families on these jobs?” said Nancy Pindus, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute who has studied both farm workers and welfare reform. “Certainly, the jobs will have to be better, in terms of pay and benefits, than those the migrant farm workers are getting now if these people are going to get off welfare.”

To deal with this fundamental problem, participants in the Fresno conference suggested that both farmers and would-be workers will have to give a little.

Farmers might have to diversify their planting to stabilize their labor needs so they can employ a year-round work force instead of hiring in spurts at harvest time. They will also have to put in the time to train greenhorns who may not have any experience handling vegetables outside the supermarket produce section.

For their part, new hires might have to travel for work, at least within their county, rather than waiting for jobs to open up near their homes.

“There’s a lot of fear on both sides,” said Alan Peters, acting director of Fresno County’s Department of Social Services. “[But] we’ve got the people, and they’ve got the jobs. What we’re all struggling to do now is to solve each others’ problems.”

That can-do attitude does not much impress Margarita Rocha, executive director of the Centro la Familia advocacy group, which counsels 4,000 low-income Fresno families each year.

The farmer says, ‘I don’t have enough workers,’ and the government says, ‘You have so many unemployed in your area, you should hire them.’ But it doesn’t get beyond that rhetoric,” Rocha said. “No one has come up with a plan” for making it work.

Thinking of the destitute families she deals with, Rocha added: “I don’t think we’re going to solve their problems by telling them to go work in the fields.”