12/18/08 Improving Labor Rules

Improving Labor Rules. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. In the final days of the Bush Administration, the Labor Department announced new hiring rules aimed at cutting some of the red tape endured by employers seeking to hire foreign farm workers. SCHLEGEL: I guess you could say this is a baby step in the right direction. It's, frankly, much less than we need because of dairy and other sectors but it does look like it's an improvement. American Farm Bureau Labor Specialist Paul Schlegel says one positive change is the use of a new formula for determining wages for migrant workers. SCHLEGEL: What we want is a market-based wage, so that you're paying what customarily the worker would earn in the market. We think it goes toward that but we need to look at the details to make sure. But Schlegel says there are still a lot of problems with the program that need fixed. One of those is that sectors like the dairy industry can't use the program at all. SCHLEGEL: Dairy employs thousands of workers, but the department has said these are not temporary jobs; they're not seasonal jobs. Therefore, dairy can't use the program. So we will need legislation to do that. There are other parts of the sector, nursery and mushrooms, for instance, where the work tends to be year round. They don't qualify for the H2a program. Schlegel says the slumping economy has not made finding seasonal farm workers any easier. SCHLEGEL: Even though there have been layoffs of a half million people in the last month or so, from labor statistics, you don't see people going to the farms to do this kind of work. It's always been a challenge for the farmer to find American workers that want to do this sort of work. Schlegel says the Obama Administration may not be able to address immigration reform as quickly as hoped. SCHLEGEL: President-Elect Obama, when he was speaking to the presidents of the farm bureau back in the summer, indicated he would bring up AgJobs, which is an ag immigration bill, in his first year if he were elected. Now that was a very different economy back then. He's said he wants to look at energy. They need an economic stimulus and they want to do healthcare. Those are three very, very major proposals. So whether immigration can work its way into that agenda, we don't know. We're going to be continuing to communicate to legislators and policymakers that this is important and they have to bring it up. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.