Who’s going to pick the grapes?
The wineries have been pinched between two forces:
Fewer migrant workers available for seasonal employment.
Competition with the marijuana industry for the diminishing labor pool.
8 thoughts on “Who’s going to pick the grapes?”
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Immigrants are going into other lines of work and getting away from agriculture.
The wineries aren’t looking to hire permanent help. They need seasonal employees. So we’re not really talking about immigrants, but about a very specific type of worker with only temporary permission to be in the USA at all, and also with temporary permission to work. The potential supply of these is virtually unlimited, but the requirements for using them make it very difficult for employers to clear them through the process.
“The program, known as the H-2A visa, has many requirements for wineries, such as placing ads in newspapers to ensure local residents know about the employment opportunities, to providing transportation from Mexico for seasonal workers, as well as temporary housing.”
I suppose the solution would be to figure the cost of all those requirements and add, let’s say, half of it back into salary increases, which would be a cheaper and tidier solution for the employers and might attract non-immigrant workers. (If the burden of the requirements adds $5.00 per hour per worker, add $2.50 to the salary and see if Americans apply for the jobs. They might get students on break, for example, if the increased wages take the job higher than other types of temporary employment like McJobs.)
Or not. I suppose they have already thought of this and dismissed it for some reason or another, but I don’t know that for a fact.
I know that Norway dealt with this issue in the 90s in the only way they could – by allowing temporary laborers to work below the minimum wages for Norwegian workers. Their problem was that berries have essentially no price elasticity at all. If the farmers raised the price of berries enough to cover the cost of Norwegian workers, they would not be able to sell the damn berries on the international market (even assuming that Norwegians would be willing to do the jobs), so necessity was the mother of invention.
It was a controversial issue, but not because the Polish workers were being paid lower wages, because those wages were far more than they could have made in Poland, and the workers went back to Poland to spend their money (where it went many times farther). So there was no human rights crisis, because the spending power of the immigrant wages was actually higher than the spending power of Norwegian workers with comparable unskilled jobs, like hotel maids. The problem was what to do with the Polish workers while they were in Norway. They were basically setting up camps in the public parks, which was a major annoyance, plus a constant and unsightly reminder of their presence. We tend to think about agricultural laborers very rarely, so it’s easy to forget about their plight when they are isolated from society, but it’s impossible to forget them when you see them hanging out their underwear and straining the capacity of every toilet near your leisure activities.
There is something called supply and demand. If a winery can’t find enough grape pickers to pick its grapes it can offer higher wages until it has enough pickers (or it can buy rained robot dinosaurs). A bottle of wine may end up costing more, but there are no jobs you can’t find people to do if you offer enough money (excepting perhaps jobs that are highly dangerous or immoral).
That should be “trained” robot dinosaurs. I don’t think a robot dinosaur would be a good picker without the right training (programming).
Hard to say. According to a number of BLS reports, the U.S is actually in many geographic locations at ‘full employment.’ So, if the wine industry raised its wages and got more workers, that would necessitate shortage of workers elsewhere. The winery owners may agree with that assessment and simply don’t want to start a bidding war.
Of course, also based on supply and demand, if a bottle of wine costs more, its sales will decline (I’d say ‘dry up’ since this is wine, but that’s not accurate.) Depending on the price elasticity of wine (or price elasticities as there is more than one wine market: cheap (plonk), expensive (high priced plonk 🙂 ) ) it might not make economic sense to raise wages in order to meet demand.
There are two things to keep in mind here:
1.If the winery raises wages to hire more workers, they likely couldn’t just raise wages for the new hires, but probably would have to raise the wages of all the grape pickers.
2.Depending on the competitiveness of the various wine markets, a shortage of wine could result in higher prices. So, the wineries can very well benefit from having a restricted supply.
In that case, the reason for news articles like this from the perspective of the winery owners, is to prepare the wine drinkers to expect higher prices so that there isn’t a ‘sticker shock.’
The supply is unlimited, but the laws of supply and demand don’t apply here. There are plenty of Mexicans and Central Americans willing to do the jobs, but the employers (theoretically) don’t have the option of lowering the salary below the minimum wage, and they don’t have the option of bringing in the workers without burdensome government regulations. If it were a matter of pure supply-and-demand, they could simply bring in temporary workers and pay them wages below the minimum, and would have no shortage of workers. If you ignore the moral issues and consider only the free market, it’s easy enough to say, “Well, if enough people will work for a buck an hour, then the market has determined the value of that labor. Go for it, employers.” But there is an additional pragmatic concern (again ignoring the moral issue). The question is whether we, as a society, really want all those temporary workers flooding into our orchards, farms and vineyards, (and possibly mingling with us when they are off work) and whether we can rely on them to return when the demand has been fulfilled.
I guess one option is to pay American workers whatever wages are necessary to motivate them to take the jobs, but the employers feel that those wages will push their prices above the level where consumers will be willing to pay them. (I don’t know whether that would really happen, but higher prices should lower sales, which means they would have to make more profit per bottle to hold their current level of gross profit. The combination of additional costs per bottle, additional gross profit per bottle, and lower sales may well be deadly.)
I’m not sure I really care. Grapes are not like steel or uranium, in the sense that if we had no grapes, the country would not be any worse off at all. If a leisure industry can’t exist by paying living wages determined by the American free market, then maybe it should not exist. Maybe those industries are the dinosaurs (non-robot variety).
I guess they’ll just have to use trained chimpanzees!! (Call back to the Disney movie)
Robot dinosaurs.