MONTROSE, Colo.—Despite high unemployment, one western Colorado farmer says he can’t find enough local workers to help pick corn.
John Harold, an Olathe Sweet corn producer, said he decided to try to hire more homegrown workers this summer because he thought more Americans needed jobs and because the cost of hiring legal, immigrant workers rose under the federal H2A visa program.
Harold told the Montrose Daily News () that he’s paying the American workers $10.48 an hour and advertised in newspapers in Colorado, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
He got plenty of applicants—but he said most didn’t stick with the job. Most worked for less than six hours. For every three workers he hired, only one stayed on.
Montrose County’s unemployment rate was 9.8 percent in July.
“The thought was that we’d have a lot of (local) workers come to work,” Harold said Thursday, with about one week left in the annual sweet corn harvest. “A lot filled out applications, a lot of people started, but a majority worked less than six hours.”
Harold typically has three crews of about 50 people picking sweet corn by hand each year. Most of his workers came from Mexico on H2A visas. Harold was required to pay for their transportation, housing, visa fees and an adverse effect wage rate set by the U.S. Department of Labor.
But this year, that wage rate increased by nearly $2.50 to $10.48 an hour. Factoring in the additional expenses and the cost would have been about $13 an hour. Harold sought fewer foreign working visas to get his crop harvested.
That was a mistake, he said. Harold was forced to recruit more local workers from his pool of applicants, but those efforts met with the same results, he said.
As of Thursday, his local crew had only 39 workers.
“You have to understand there is a work ethic of migrant laborers that is just not found with local labor,” Harold said.
Harold said he heard a number of excuses from domestic workers, including those who wanted to be paid under the table and others who complained he was not paying them enough.
“The crazy part is that minimum wage is $7 something, but foreign labor gets $10 plus,” Harold said.
Colorado’s minimum wage is $7.36 per hour, and the federal minimum wage is $7.25, according to the state Department of Labor and Employment.
After 50 percent of the harvest was done, Joseph said he was able to hire more foreign works, as allowed by law.
Harold has been keeping careful track of those figures and has documented almost every resignation by a worker who quit. He’s currently in the process of compiling those figures and sending them to Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet.
Harold recalled a conversation he had with Bennet two months ago about immigration and the worker program. He said Bennet told him that there are a lot of senators who think that with high unemployment, the U.S. doesn’t need migrant workers.
“I guarantee that without migrant labor, I will not be planting sweet corn,” Harold said.
