I have been told by many many owners that this woukd significantly impact (in a very negative sense) the wine industry.[/quote]
We had to ask for help from Chris at Vinedresser this year. Luckily it was when they were not picking elsewhere. Our helper/manager had no one available and said that all the small owners on the mountain were in the same boat. It is getting really bad.
I think there is also something to be said for the Guadalupe Valley becoming a wine destination. Many workers don’t have to make the journey anymore and are finding excellent work there without the problems of coming to the US. Can you say $4 a head of iceberg lettuce? Who gets the blame then, the farmers?
I’ve worked with South American workers the majority of my life through kitchen work, both documented and undocumented and I can tell you as someone who has also had to hire all ‘legal’ staffs (locals from the area, no immigrants) that the laziest people in these manual labor jobs are the locals and the hardest working are the immigrants in at least 90% of the time.
The majority of the immigrants I hired had 2 jobs, worked their ass off and smiled the majority of the time, are there bad apples, sure a couple but by the vast majority I would hire an immigrant over a local.
And to finish, until you’ve been ‘in the trenches’ with someone you don’t know anything about them and I guarantee the majority on this board haven’t.
Immigrants are the backbone of America, most of them work harder, faster and care more than the privileged that grow up without suffering or hardship in this country and for those that think there are enough Americans that will do manual to make your life as easy as it is are sadly mistaken.
Uhmmm, that safety net is going to be getting smaller. Probably. So I assume that those people would rather work an honest days work learning a new skill and bettering themselves.
Joe,
You can have as many training programs as you want but unless you want to pay at least $15 -$20 an hour and have less productivity and think our GDP can handle, you will pay a lot more for all your basic needs.
And your wrong, most Americans that are in a position to take those jobs, won’t, it’s been proven time and time again.
Not sure what your poke with inner city is. It would be incredibly inefficient to bus workers out to the vineyards. There are plenty of unemployed country folk working on their cars thinking they are going to be in the next Fast and Furious. I’ve seen no evidence they can hack vineyard work. Honestly, I can’t think of one non-latino that I have seen working in the fields. Where are they? Ask any vineyard owner or manager and you’ll get a big laugh.
Evan I know you are accurate. My father and his father before him were in the priduce business. I spent hundreds, if not more, hours at farms with my my grandpa and dad. This could cripple the produce industry and including wine industry in particular.
Evan I know you are accurate. My father and his father before him were in the priduce business. I spent hundreds, if not more, hours at farms with my my grandpa and dad. This could cripple the produce industry and including wine industry in particular.[/quote]
It is a big problem. I was going to add at the end that you’ll get a big laugh before they start crying. It may spur technological advancements but not without big costs to consumers(farmers gotta pay that lease off). For years I had said to friends that they should enjoy the days of cheap California wine. They would look at me like I had just smoked some Presidential OG as the prices kept increasing. Unless we have another hideous economic crash, expect more increases.
Is the issue the physical labor or the seasonality and migrant nature of the work? I’ve known citizens who were carpenters banging nails all day. It may not be the same but I’d be surprised to hear that those guys could not hack vineyard work if they had to. What they might not do is keep moving all over to follow the work. Granted construction has some of the same issues but i think there are lots of hardworking citizens in that field. For that matter if you look at construction jobs I wonder if the difference in who staffs what is not so much willingness to do manual labor but willingness to be mobile?
A few thoughts: I do think there is a difference between construction and farm field work. Not ever having been a farm hand, maybe I’m wrong about that, but I don’t think it takes a lot of skill or training to pick fruits and vegetables (not saying it’s not hard work), while construction definitely takes skill and training. But since this thread is about labor in the wine industry, my observations are that vineyard work is very different from most other farm work in the skills required. And I would guess that most vineyard workers don’t migrate much, there is quite a lot of work to do nearly year round.
Craig, not sure how that is contrary to what I said. Maybe I wasn’t clear: vineyard workers need a lot of skill, in addition to stamina. And, as the article says, there is constant work to do in the vineyards almost year round. What those vineyard owners and mgt companies are doing is exactly what should be done. It’s just too bad there isn’t a streamlined, legal framework supporting it.
The counties are doing what they can. There is not enough skilled labor. Prices will go, and are going up.
There is a lot of skill in both construction and vineyard work, no doubt. I know, though, if you have a bad pruner or shoot thinner your harvest can be whacked before it gets started. The only problem is that you may not know till you go out and count clusters. All I can think of at this hour would be like a skill sawman cutting all the truss beams at the wrong angle but not knowing until the roof was assembled. It least with a house you can have a do-over. You only get 1 shot per year with a vineyard. Do you think you can go to the corner(particularly in an inner city)and get that kind of skill?
Evan you are correct. The speed and accuracy at which a seasoned migrant worker can prune and pick is a sight to be seen. If you remove, say 60-70% of who would be doing this work you will lose hundreds of millions dollars worth of crops including grapes. Less workers, and fill ins working with considerably less skill and speed, would be a disaster of epic proportions. I could see hundreds of wineries going out of business.
Which is why you will see a lot more mechanical pruning and harvesting in the future, my friend. It is already happening in a lot of different places, including in my area.
There are legal solutions for workers through visa programs for which many ag related fields are allowed to participate. You can also get the same workers over and over. Expense isn’t significant and multiple vineyards could probably go in on together.
and we used to use hand scythes to harvest wheat and pick corn by hand. as I recall, there are not very large immigrant populations in Australia. they do most of the harvesting/management/spraying with heavy equipment. I think many of them still make pretty decent wine…the answer is clear, if there is cheap hand labor available, there is no incentive to innovate.
In Bordeaux and Burgundy, it is not seen as “low class” to have seasonal workers turn out for harvest. Aren’t some of them college students earning a couple of extra bucks? Looking at the weight problem on some of our college campuses, perhaps a little seasonal harvest work would do their bodies (and souls) a little good.
Labor has been tightening for years and it has already affected wine in CA.
Not to get political but the border has been effectively shut for at least 5 years. In the past seasonal workers could return home in the winter but this ended around 2010 as they could no longer get back into the US. It takes enormous risks and a lot of money to try to get across the border now and for this reason CA has had negative immigration from Mexico (more leaving) over this period.
Vineyard labor costs have risen steadily and in the past season vineyards struggled to hire workers at $15/hr plus benefits. Grapegrowing was already a tough business (very low almost non-existent margins) and I expect there will be fewer vineyards planted in this labor environment.
Meanwhile, at the high end of wine quality it is not possible to automate a majority of vineyard activities. The biggest crunch comes during harvest and producers have had less and less control over their pick dates.
As far as other labor sources, they do not currently exist in the US. Europe is actually not very different as most of the laborers in Piemonte or Burgundy are Eastern European.