Farmer raises pay 18% to lure scarce workers
The country’s biggest garlic grower will give employees a hefty raise, reflecting farmers’ desperation to attract a dwindling number of farmworkers.
Christopher Ranch, which farms 5,000 acres of garlic at Gilroy, California, announced pay for farmworkers rose from $11 an hour this year to $13 and will reach $15 in 2018. This year’s 18-percent raise comes four years before California’s mandatory minimum wage increases.
Ken Christopher, vice president at Christopher Ranch, said the farm was short 50 workers in December to help peel, package and roast garlic. Within two weeks of upping wages, the company has a waiting list of 150 people.
“I knew it would help a little bit, but I had no idea that it would solve our labor problem,” Christopher said.
Farmers across the country have reported a struggle to find farmhands since the Obama administration stepped up border enforcement and deported millions of undocumented workers.
Perhaps partly because of the crackdown, plus the financial crisis of 2008, more Mexicans returned home than migrated to the United States from 2009 to 2014, for the first time in decades, according to the Pew Research Center.
A more dynamic Mexican economy also seems to be prompting a turn away from careers in agriculture.
The total supply of farm laborers in Mexico, for which growers in the U.S. compete, declined by 150,000 workers every year between 1980 and 2010, report Diane Charlton and Edward Taylor, researchers at Montana State University and the University of California at Davis.
“Kids aren’t growing up in rural Mexico to be farmworkers the way they once were,” said Taylor. “Mexico has been successful at building rural schools and providing kids in villages with access to education.”
The shortage of workers is one reason farms have cut back production of fruits and vegetables by 9.5 percent, costing growers $3.1 billion in lost revenue, according to a 2015 report by the Partnership for a New American Economy, a nonprofit that promotes immigration reform. “It’s continuing to become more acute as fewer new workers come into the country to do agricultural work, and experienced workers here are aging out of the industry,” said Jason Resnick, vice presidentfor the Western Growers’ Association trade group.
The scarcity has prompted employers to give farmworkers a raise.
Between 2010 and 2016, weekly wages for those in crop production went up by 28 percent in California, compared with a 20 percent rise in average wages statewide , according to the Employment Development Department. Farmwork pays about $32,500 annually on average in California, the most recent data show. The pay data can include management and desk workers.
Agricultural workers have long been entitled to a minimum wage. Lawsuits over paying for breaks, training and other nonproductive time were largely resolved
in 2015 when Gov. Brown signed legislation offering growers a way to settle back-wage disputes and avoid prosecutions. That law, however, is under review by a federal court.
The governor last year also signed legislation changing the threshold for overtime for farmworkers, who now can receive such pay after eight hours of work in a day or more than 40 hours a week. Previous law set the bar at 10 hours per day and 60 hours per week.
Farm wages have risen more gradually in other parts of the U.S., still far outpacing the rise in pay for all sectors.
“The one constant is that no matter how much we pay, domestic workers are not applying for these jobs,” Resnick said. “Raising wages only serves to cannibalize from the existing workforce; it does nothing to add new laborers to the pool.”
The question is whether Christopher Ranch’s approach of offering bigger raises can be replicated elsewhere.
Christopher Ranch is a huge operation — employing around 600 workers who touch garlic and other food products every day — and so it may be better positioned to withstand a wage hike than smaller operators.
Garlic also requires a lot of human labor to harvest, package and roast, so the farm has an incentive to keep its workforce intact.
“I see this as an example of enlightened management, that realizes agriculture needs to adjust to a new world in which there will be fewer farmworkers than before,” Taylor said.