Wages for agricultural labor have gotten to an almost unsustainable level in some states, thanks in part to an increasingly complicated system of calculating what should be paid.
Kate Tynan, Vice President at the Northwest Horticultural Council, says whether it’s piece-rate or hourly, prevailing wage, or AEWR, surveys offer unquantifiable data.
“Some years, we’ll have a survey that comes out and sets one wage for all of the apple harvest, which is not representative of the vast majority of apple harvests. Other times, you might have a wage that tries to get down to a granular level of, let’s say, color picking a medium-density Gala orchard. Well, is the state workforce agency going to have the same interpretation as the grower on what that means? Who knows?”
Tynan says they had an interesting situation just last year.
“Where the state released a survey where they initially attempted to set a prevailing wage for pruning trees by the bin. I’d like to find anybody who can prune a tree by the bin.”
And the prevailing wage, Tynan says, has many issues.
“So, there are just a number of glaring issues that have come up as a part of this prevailing wage system that we’ve seen in Washington state, but could occur in any state across the country, and we really believe that needs to be addressed to make sure that this program is sustainable not only now, but into the future.”
Could it get more complicated? Tynan says she’d hate to say no, but it is the government after all.