New Wage Survey Pt 2
From the Ag Information Network, this is today’s Fruit Grower Report. Ag workers must be surveyed to help determine the prevailing wage, thanks to a bill passed in the last legislative session, HB 2226.
Washington State Tree Fruit Association President, Jon DeVaney says you’re really just collecting a lot of information that is already available through other sources …
DeVANEY … “The other part is that the Employment Security Department every year does a worker survey for wage information and a separate employer survey for wage information.”
DeVaney says that’s so you get both sides of the story …
DeVANEY … “The employer survey is used to set prevailing wages that are required in the H-2A program. The worker survey is just used as a basis of comparison. They do that survey, and it just checks if they’re both in the same ballpark. You can have some additional confidence that your information is probably correct.”
And, DeVaney says a new $25 survey incentive to help them reach their goal of minimum responses is a bit sketchy as well …
DeVANEY … “They have specific targets for specific crops, the number of respondents. But we had concerns that there was not requirements to have that distributed across multiple employers. So, the ability to determine if it was representative or not was not there necessarily. If you only have to get 100 paired employee responses, you could get those from one grower and have a very distorted view of what the overall labor market looks like.”
Again, that’s Jon DeVaney, President of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association.
