Seed For Thought: The E-Verify Challenge
July 21, 2011 Tweethttp://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Ordinarily, I’m an optimistic sort, definitely a glass-half-full guy. I’m a big believer that your attitude determines to a great deal how things will go for you. So when I heard that some growers in California’s Salinas Valley had come up with some great labor-saving strategies, I thought, “Terrific, I can put a positive spin on this labor situation, and provide our readers with some ways that they can reduce their labor needs and give their bottom lines a boost.”
Also, I get tired of writing about all the problems associated with labor, from shortages to increased regulation. It would be nice to pass along some good news for a change.
So a few weeks later I’m out in the field with Art Barrientos, the vice president of harvesting for Ocean Mist Farms of Castroville, CA — the Artichoke Capital of the World — and I’m asking him about his big labor-saving strategies. Art is a little surprised at my line of questioning, but he’s a gamer. He tells me how they came up with a new system for harvesting spinach a couple years earlier that made the crew a good 10% more productive, which certainly saves on labor costs in the long run.
What else? As I’m asking Art, now I can really tell that he’s wondering what in the world I must be getting at. After I explain to him how I’d gotten his name, etc., it became clear that I’d gotten my wires crossed with the person who’d referred Art to me. Once Art and I got that cleared up, I asked him just how they were preparing for the possible passage of the E-Verify legislation. He again looked at me a little quizzically. Then he gestured at two spinach harvesting crews, and asked: “What are we going to do without them?”
Glass Is Half-Empty
As I look back now, I realize that I so badly wanted to find growers who had found a way to withstand the loss of labor that E-Verify promises that I kind of forced the situation. This is one time when it’s really hard to be an optimist.
Because if you spend enough time with growers like Art, you learn they wouldn’t trade their guys for anybody. Somehow, people get the idea that these guys are just transient laborers, but nothing could be further from the truth. He knows these guys. Of the 1,200, a good 25% have worked for Ocean Mist for 20-plus years. He can’t just pull in some guys off the street and expect them to do as good a job. Of course, that’s assuming the unemployed “domestics,” as Art calls the legal American workers, would try.
“They want to work,” says Art, emphasizing the first word, and making it clear that he doesn’t know what in the world he’s going to do without them. No one seems to yet have an answer.
Stay tuned.