GREELEY (Colorado) TRIBUNE

November 16, 2008

Farmers, business owners concerned about finding workers

By Sharon Dunn

In east Greeley, Kevin LaFleur turns away a good 50 percent of the people who want to cut meat at his light industrial business, Colorado Premium Foods, because they don’t have adequate identification.

Dewey Zabka sees fewer people wanting to work his Weld County onion and potato fields each year, and the ones who are hired don’t stay as long.

Bob Sakata feels lucky. His workers were laid off from the construction and landscaping industries, and they were able to help in the fields of his farms in Adams and Weld counties.

Although their stories are different, the men share one trait: They are on a constant vigil for available workers. There’s a pool of laborers for them in this sometimes back-breaking work, but it’s a pool that is rapidly shrinking in the wake of immigration raids and arrests in an already ailing economy. The recent large-scale identity theft investigation in Weld may compound the problem.

“With the tightening on immigration, less people are showing up,” said Zabka, who has decided he can’t fight it anymore. This year will be his last in Martin Produce’s onion business. “We find that a lot of migrant-type workers are going to other states because Colorado has gotten too rough.”

The labor pool could shrink more with the promise of continued arrests of immigrants suspected of stealing Social Security numbers to work in the United States. Weld District Attorney Ken Buck last week launched a campaign to arrest more than 1,300 immigrants suspected of identity theft after his office learned of a Greeley tax preparer helping those immigrants file tax returns with special federal tax identity numbers. That comes just two years after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided Swift & Co., rounding up 262 workers suspected of identify theft.

“It’s going to shrink the legal and illegal market pool of workers,” said Kathy Egan, owner of Express Employment Professionals, 1135 8th Ave., Greeley. “That’s certainly what we saw short-term after the more intensive (Swift) raids. We saw a decreasing availability of workers who had traditionally done” some of the low-skilled work in northern Colorado.

The effects of that raid, plus a political climate more unfavorable to the immigrant worker, has put the pressure on the labor force and employers.

That’s notwithstanding the ailing economy, which has reduced the demand for cheap labor, especially in the construction industry, said Rutilio Martinez, an economics professor at the University of Northern Colorado.

“Not only with the raids, but the economy is not growing, and if that’s not growing, demand for cheap labor goes down across all the sectors,” Martinez said. “They have no reason to come.”

While some would applaud a reduction in immigrant labor, because that could force employers to raise wages to hire legal immigrants or U.S. citizens, it isn’t always the easy answer.

“Employers are the ones who hurt,” Martinez said. “They produce less, so they sell less and make less money. They are the ones who really, probably, have to pay the most in terms of this. They are the ones who pay the price of these losses.”

Zabka feels that pressure, operating typically with 25 percent fewer people than he needs. He is required to pay at least minimum wage, but he said that’s not the issue today.

“We don’t have a local labor force willing to work,” Zabka said. “Wages don’t seem to be the problem as far as locals. They either want to work or they don’t.”

Other farmers have tried to mechanize or automate to replace labor; in many cases, they reduce the amount they farm.

Those are seasonal jobs. Dairies, another large industry in Weld that traditionally needs many blue-collar workers, will be under increasing pressure in Weld. The industry already knows it must increase its milk production when Leprino Foods, a mozzarella cheese maker, moves into Greeley in the next year.

“I think the dairy people have their own specific problems,” Sakata said, saying his seasonal operations so far have stayed steady. “With dairy operations, it’s a 12-month operation, where ours, we need hundreds of people just for a few months, and that’s where the problem lies.”

LaFleur at Colorado Premium, 2035 2nd Ave., keeps his fingers crossed for legal employees to come to his doorsteps, where he turns away 50 percent of applicants because their identifications don’t match up.

“I’m small enough still, I only have 150 employees,” LaFleur said, wondering how the recent and forthcoming arrests could affect his available pool of workers. “I would be scared to death if I had to have 1,500 employees.”

Weld has about 83,000 workers, 3,000 of whom work in the food-manufacturing industry, said UNC economics professor Christine Marston. Pulling 1,300 or more out of the labor market could be detrimental.

“I think it’s potentially really important,” Marston said. “This could significantly decrease the labor supply, and when you decrease the supply of labor, you increase wages, and many businesses cannot afford to pay higher wages.”

When wages rise, businesses, especially agriculture, could pull up stakes and move on to other countries or shut down. Shutdowns in Weld could be a house of cards: Weld leads Colorado in total value of agricultural products sold, set at $1.1 billion by the 2002 Census of Agriculture.

“We’re operating every year short of people. We’re shutting the biggest part of our operation down so we don’t have to worry about it,” said Zabka, who is one of the bigger onion and potato producers in Weld. Martin Produce has been in business for 50 years.

Most say immigration overhaul will have to be the answer to keep the cards from falling to a collective crash.

“What we need more than anything is Congress to come up with an ag job labor law where we can legally bring in foreign workers,” said Sakata, whose farms span 30 miles in Adams and Weld. “That is the ideal solution.”

Colorado legislators this last session came up with a little bit of help by creating a program through the Department of Agriculture. The program is set to begin next year and entails that state certifying various contractors to help farm and ranch operations gain access to labor from other countries. The program also helps farmers gain migrant laborers by helping wade through the maze of federal paperwork. That program, expected to operate on a pilot basis for five years, only calls for 1,000 workers in the first year. Colorado annually needs more than 10,000 migrant laborers.

Martinez said because of its unpopularity politically, a major overhaul, regionally or nationally, likely won’t happen.

“I don’t think the authorities will pass a law that would allow those employers to hire legally those immigrant workers,” Martinez said.

That heralds another problem, Martinez said. With America’s aging work force, there aren’t enough people to make up for the massive numbers who already have started to retire. Somehow, to keep the engines running, America will have to find a work force that can take over.

Egan, owner of Express Employment Professionals, said that could come in the form of employers relaxing their requirements for the jobs, taking closer looks for example, at people with criminal histories, or the refugees from overseas. Regardless, she said, the pressure on the market won’t make things easier.

“Any time there is a shock or dramatic change to a supply line, that has a ripple effect in the market,” Egan said. “Anytime there’s pressure, there’s more people trying to go under the table and abuse the system. It will create stress at a time when agriculture is already under stress.”