HANFORD (California) SENTINEL

February 18, 2009

Jobs dry up for Valley farm laborers

By Seth Nidever

When construction was booming three years ago, Lemoore farm labor contractor Juan Ayala couldn't find enough field workers. Now, with construction depressed and drought issues drying up available farm jobs, the phone is ringing 500 to 600 times day from people desperate for work.

"The farmers don't want to plant. You know the water situation," said Ayala, who employs 300 to 400 people in counties up and down the San Joaquin Valley.

Hard numbers for local ag unemployment aren't readily available, according to John Lehn, Kings County Job Training Office president.

But one look at the unemployment line at training office's downtown Hanford office tells the story of a slumping agricultural economy, particularly on the western side of the Valley, where Kings and Fresno county growers in the huge Westlands Water District are expecting no surface water deliveries.

"I can say that this is the highest concentration of Hispanic, and often mono-lingual people, who have come through the (JTO) ever. There are a significant number of people who have earned their living through farm labor that are out of work," Lehn said.

Tulare County is in a similar situation, according to Lehn.

Growers are seeing the same thing.

People are coming by the office of Excelsior Farming "all the time" looking for work, said general manager John Warmerdam.

"It's just that construction has slowed down significantly. That's probably the primary reason that there's so much labor available right now," Warmerdam said. Riverdale and Fresno-based labor contractor Piedad Ayala knows that only too well.

Ayala hired 6,000 workers last year to do field work up and down California -- some of it in Kings County. Normally, there would be 8,000 to 12,000 employees, he said.

Now it's a question of whether he can keep the employees he has, some of who've been with him for 20 years.

"I don't know how long I can keep doing that. I don't want to lay anybody off," he said.

People are coming from dairies and the slumping construction industry looking for field work, he said.

California's jobless rate rose to 9.3 percent in December, and construction was one of the hardest industries hit, according to a Los Angeles Times story.

Construction jobs fell 10.8 percent, or almost 93,000 jobs, from December 2007. During the same period, agriculture unemployment rose by 2,000 jobs, or 0.5 percent.

Workers laid off from restaurants are also looking for farm jobs, the story stated.

Ayala lamented the drought and criticized U.S. Circuit Court Judge Oliver Wanger's 2007 decision to cut pumping from the Sacramento Delta to protected the endangered Delta Smelt fish.

"We don't know where the end of the rope is at," Ayala said.