NEW YORK — Sleep is a rare commodity for Juan Cortez.
Between nights spent clearing tables at a Manhattan nightclub and days running food to customers in a Bronx restaurant, the 42-year-old Peruvian immigrant worries more about finding time for shuteye than job security.
More than 100 miles to the north in the Hudson Valley, Omar Guzman also isn’t concerned about staying employed. The 20-year-old migrant farm worker spends his summer days picking peas and cherries, and by fall will be harvesting acres of apples.
Even with the unemployment rate above 9 percent, the nation’s native-born jobless are looking at higher rungs of the labor market for their next career move. For immigrants like Cortez and Guzman, it means a degree of job security — but also more competition if they want to advance into jobs above bussers and barbacks, runners, dishwashers and crop hands.
Farmers still need help
The phenomenon of Americans shunning farm jobs is nothing new — the influx of Mexicans and other foreign-born workers to fill vacancies has fueled a long and contentious immigration debate. Those labor dynamics seem largely unchanged this year.
In one sign, farmers are still steadily applying for visas under the federal program designed to provide temporary farmworkers where there are expected domestic labor shortages. Federal immigration officials received 5,574 so-called H-2A petitions from Oct. 1 through mid-June. The numbers could exceed the previous fiscal year if applications continue at the same pace.
“Even as rural unemployment increases, U.S. workers regard farm work as beneath them,” said Jordan Wells, coordinator of the Justice for Farmworkers Campaign in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. “Why do people work at McDonald’s and not the farm? There’s something about farm work that has been stigmatized.”
Farmers like the Ron Samascott in Kinderhook, N.Y., typically advertise available jobs before bringing in workers from other countries.
“I don’t think we had any responses,” Samascott said.
Crop workers at Samascott’s farm can earn more than $2 an hour above the New York state minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
Farm work too hard
The American Farm Bureau estimates there are 11 million Americans in jobs that pay less than farm work. In a country where roughly eight out of 10 people live in urban areas, farm work is not an option for many of those low-wage workers. But the arduous work performed by more than a million people nationwide is unattractive to many job seekers.
Steve Rivera of Washingtonville, N.Y., a student at the State University of New York at Albany, has held jobs at the Gap and McDonald’s, worked construction and on a golf course, but he never really considered working at a farm.
“I work at the garden center at Wal-Mart,” said Rivera. “I’d probably get dirtier farming, so I just would not consider it.”
It’s a theme that runs throughout New York City’s massive restaurant trade as well.
At Cafe du Soleil in upper Manhattan, managing partner Cyril Tregoat hasn’t seen native-born Americans applying to work as busboys.
“They don’t want those. Nobody asked me to work as a busboy,” he said. “They want the waiter job or the bartender job.”
