Mechanization Long Term Solution to Ag Worker Quandary

By Joe Guzzardi
May 7, 2014

Last month the non-profit immigrant advocacy group Farmworker Justice wrote to the Department of Labor to block a Washington State berry grower’s effort to displace domestic legal and illegal workers with new foreign-born pickers. The new workers would enter under the seasonal, temporary H-2A visa. 

The Sakuma Brothers Farms’ case is fascinating because it has at its heart the apparent exploitation of existing farm workers as well as the broader questions of whether the U.S. needs to import more unskilled, foreign-born labor and if there’s a better, permanent solution, namely mechanization, to fill agriculture labor shortages than immigrant labor.

Sakuma Brothers Farms, headquartered north of Seattle in Burlington, WA, employs migrant seasonal berry harvest workers and supplies fruit to gourmet ice cream maker, Haagen-Dazs. Last year, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, a union organized by Sakuma Brothers’ employees, sought improved wages and working conditions. Subsequently, workers were fired in retaliation for demanding those upgrades. Last fall, the union filed a wage and hour class action lawsuit against Sakuma for not receiving rest breaks and other rights violations under the federal Migrant and Seasonal Agriculture Protection Act.

One of the H-2A visa requirements is that growers like Sakuma must demonstrate a shortage of available farm workers. Employers must also contact employees from the prior year to determine if they will return. Familias Unidas forwarded to Sakuma letters from more than 460 members who expressed their intent to work this season, evidence that puts Sakuma in an untenable position.

The reality is that as long as immigrant labor is readily available, either because of porous borders or guest worker bills, growers won’t move forward on mechanization. Because the agriculture industry represents a large donor base for its congressional representatives, Capitol Hill will continuously lobby for more guest workers, falsely claiming that unless legislation is passed immediately, “Crops will rot in the fields.”

Californians, for example, can count on Senator Dianne Feinstein to predict that consumers face looming produce shortage unless Congress acts immediately. In 2008, Feinstein made this 100 percent incorrect forecast: “It’s an emergency. If you can’t get people to prune, to plant, to pick, to pack, you can’t run a farm.” Six years later, it’s obvious that growers did indeed find enough people every year “to prune, to plant, to pick, to pack ….” Feinstein’s hysterical exaggerations were political theater intended to scare voters into supporting a guest worker bill.

For more than 25 years, I lived in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Since my home was within a three-mile radius of strawberry fields, cherry and peach orchards, as well as many of Lodi’s famous vineyards, I had a front row seat to what goes on in the agriculture labor market. When I heard growers and their congressional advocates like Feinstein insist that a worker shortage will cause an acute fruit and vegetable shortage, I asked myself why mechanization isn’t further along. Until it is, I posed the same question as Farmerworker Justice: “What about last year’s workers?”

To end unfair farm worker treatment and move toward a 21st Century agriculture model which relies on mechanization and robotics, immigration must be limited. Efficient mechanical picking equipment that’s in advanced stages of development could do much of the delicate hand work now done by humans.

But as long as an abundant supply of cheap labor is continuously available, the incentive for growers to endorse mechanization will be a long time coming. 

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Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow whose columns have been syndicated since 1987. Contact him at [email protected]