BLUEFIELD — By BRYAN GENTRY
The News & Advance
RUSTBURG, Va. (AP) — For the first time in more than 15 years, Campbell County farmer Kevin Trent is not hiring farmhands from other countries.
Instead, he’s cutting his tobacco crop back to 10 acres, instead of the normal 35 acres.
The federal program that facilitates the hiring of guest agricultural workers “just got to be too expensive for us,” Trent said. “... The hourly wage is more than we can afford to pay.”
Trent is one of several farmers in the Lynchburg area who have employed guest workers through the Department of Labor’s H2A program, which lets farmers use temporary foreign labor as long as U.S. residents have a chance to get the jobs. It sets a minimum wage for H2A farm jobs to keep foreign workers from driving down the wages of domestic ones.
Last year, the minimum wage for tobacco workers in Campbell County was $9.02. Effective today, farmers in Virginia applying to hire H2A workers have to pay at least $9.59 per hour.
Combined with the costs of giving H2A workers housing and transportation, the new wage made Trent decide to drop the program. “It was actually a pretty easy decision when it got that high,” he said.
The Department of Labor changed its regulations on H2A wages earlier this year, reversing a change that the Bush administration made to the formula for calculating H2A minimum wages, said Libby Whitley, owner of Mas Labor in Nelson County, which helps businesses with guest worker programs.
Because of the Bush administration changes, H2A minimum wages varied by county. In the Lynchburg area, they ranged from $7.25 to $10 per hour in 2009, compared to the statewide $9.34 they were scheduled for, Whitley said.
The changes taking effect return the wage formulas to the previous method, causing the increase to $9.59, she said.
Jim Saunders, personnel manager of Saunders Brothers Nursery and Orchard in Nelson County, said that under last year’s wages, his H2A workers already earn $8.69 per hour, nearly $1.50 more than the federal minimum wage.
Saunders Brothers will not be affected by the regulation change because it already has its H2A workers for the year under contract. But next year their pay will go up 90 cents per hour.
“Most wages in the United States are going down. I question why this wage rate’s going up,” Saunders said.
Farmers usually cannot make up for the higher wage costs by increasing the price of their products, he said. “The markets that we’re involved in are down right now. The fruit market is down and so is the nursery business, so we have not been able to pass those on, which obviously will affect the bottom line,” Saunders said.
Trent said that tobacco companies offered less money to growers this year, which complicated H2A wage hikes more. “We hate not to produce what we are capable of producing, but it’s got to make financial sense for us to do it,” he said.
Saunders also is concerned about new regulations that will require farmers to hire any domestic workers that the Virginia Employment Commission refers to them for the first half of the work season. Currently, that requirement only stands for one month.
He would rather hire domestic workers, but it is hard to plan the number of foreign workers to request because there is no way to tell how many domestic workers will apply or how long they will stay on the job, Saunders said. If domestic workers quit in the middle of the harvest, the operation would be short-handed until a new foreign worker could arrive, he said.
Saunders wants the H2A program to return to the wage formula it used in 2009, which utilized localized wage data, and helped farmers plan their workforce needs by requiring domestic hires for only the first month of the work season, he said.
“The beauty of this program is (that) we have workers come in the United States, it’s a stable workforce, and we know exactly where all these workers are at all times, and then at the end of the contract, they go home.”
State News
March 16, 2010
Guest worker wages hit Va. farmers hard
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