WASHINGTON — Last month, the minimum wage for thousands of workers in Washington jumped by nearly 5 percent to $12.42 an hour.
Beneficiaries of Seattle’s march toward the nation’s highest minimum wage?
Actually, the raises apply only to a select group of people: seasonal farmhands. Foreign workers hired under the federal H-2A visa program — the main channel for bringing in temporary agriculture workers legally — must be paid wages intended to protect U.S. citizens and legal residents from being undercut by cheaper imported labor.
The “adverse-effect wage” rates for 2015, which are set by the U.S. Department of Labor and which went into effect Dec. 19, are significantly higher than minimum wages in most states. The $12.42 rate for Washington is 31 percent above the state’s new minimum wage of $9.47. It also exceeds the $11 rate that will kick in April 1 for many workers in Seattle.
The H-2A wages, many growers contend, are too high, deterring them from recruiting more workers despite dire shortages of seasonal help. Though reliable data don’t exist, experts believe a majority of the nation’s 800,000 hired farmworkers are undocumented. In fiscal 2014, 117,000 foreigners held H-2A visas.
Washington was the nation’s fourth-largest user of the program, with 9,077 workers certified.
In addition to mandated wages, guest agriculture workers are entitled to free housing and transportation to and from the fields.
Given that, “Washington farmworkers effectively earn more this year than the magic $15-per-hour living wage that Seattle is phasing in over the next several years,” said Dan Fazio, director of Washington Farm Labor Association, a Lacey group that provides labor services and advice to farms and other seasonal employers in the Pacific Northwest.
Fazio’s association hired 6,161 visa workers in fiscal 2014, making it the state’s largest user and the second-biggest H-2A employer in the country. Another Washington firm, Zirkle Fruit of Selah in Yakima County, was the fourth-largest.
Yet perhaps an even bigger grievance than the wages is the fact that many employers say the visa program is slow, chaotic and arbitrary.
Jason Resnick, vice president and general counsel for Western Growers, a trade group for produce growers, said procuring a visa requires navigating four government agencies. Delays often hold up workers days or weeks after they’re needed — which he called “economically devastating” when harvesting perishable crops.
In 2013, the U.S. Senate passed a bipartisan immigration overhaul bill that would have scrapped the H-2A program in favor of a new W visa category for lower-skilled workers. Among other things, the W visas would have allowed some guest workers to switch employers and to stay for up to three years instead of just one.
But House Speaker John Boehner never put the Senate bill up for a vote, bowing in part to pressure from conservatives opposed to granting eventual legal status or citizenship to immigrants here illegally.
Last year, Washington farmers brought in nearly triple the 3,194 guest workers they used in 2011, and the demand for legal, imported labor is expected only to grow. That’s because, Resnick said, Americans simply aren’t willing to do the work at any price.
“There is no basis for concluding that foreign H-2A workers could be replaced by a ready, reliable pool of legal U.S. workers if farmers only paid more money,” he said.
Even at the “artificially inflated” H-2A wages, Resnick said, growers can’t hire enough Americans.
By law, an American worker doing the same work as a guest worker must be paid the same H-2A wage rate. The pay is pegged to the average hourly rates for field and livestock workers in a region. But because visa workers must be guaranteed at least the H-2A wages, average pay effectively becomes the minimum — with identical pay for jobs ranging from bin checker to tractor driver to fruit picker.
The H-2A rates for this year are at least $10 an hour in all states. The highest rate, $13.59 an hour, is for Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota, where many jobs, like harvesting wheat, require machinery operation.
The average H-2A wages for all states is $11.30 an hour, or 1.8 percent more than in 2014.
Bruce Goldstein, president of Farmworker Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group for migrant and seasonal farmworkers, said the formula may yield a wage too low for the market — since most hired farmhands are believed to be undocumented and earning less than legal residents command, they would bring down the average.
Even low-skilled jobs such as picking apples or cherries, Goldstein said, are grueling, “backbreaking work” that justifies $12.42 an hour or more. Indeed, Goldstein said reports that lettuce pickers in Arizona and seasonal farmworkers in Pennsylvania can earn $20 an hour show that the market may warrant still higher pay.
“If you are an employer and you’re having trouble recruiting workers,” he said, “the average wage … may be the reason why.”
