Seafood processors watching worker program closely
A potential tweak to a federal guestworker program has thrown a big scare at Middle Peninsula seafood processors who count on hiring workers from outside the United States to deliver oysters, clams, crabs and other Chesapeake Bay products to tables and grocery shelves across the country.
The H-2B program run by the federal government allows employers to hire foreign workers, many from Mexico, to temporarily come to the United States and work in nonagricultural services such as seafood processing.
Last year, a new U.S. Department of Labor rule scheduled to take effect Oct. 1 would have changed the method for determining the wages of H-2B workers. In some cases, wages would have risen as much as 83 percent, local business owners say.
Implementation of the rule has been delayed, which is fine with seafood processors such as Ron Sopko, owner of Mathews-based Sea Farms.
“The program works,” Sopko said. “Either that, or we wouldn’t be in business.”
Seafood processing employers on the Middle Peninsula, and across Hampton Roads, say paperwork to participate in the program is extensive and time-consuming — business owners have to show they couldn’t find American workers to do the work — but the results are worth it.
“Virginia would be history without it, really,” Sopko said. “The biggest industry would be history.”
Under the H-2B program, up to 115,500 guestworkers are allowed into the U.S. each year when qualified American workers aren’t available and when the employing foreign workers won’t have an effect on local wages of similarly employed U.S. workers.
Virginia seafood businesses employ 1,660 H-2B workers, accounting for about 70 percent of the workforce, according to a September 2011 Virginia Institute of Marine Science analysis. Many earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
Sopko said he brings up to 30 workers a year into Mathews County to process oysters and clams — the company’s primary products — as well as fish. He sells wholesale processed seafood to food companies across the country.
He’s tried hiring local workers.
“No one wants to work hard anymore,” Sopko said. “We’ve got so many free programs in this country that you can stay home. You don’t have to work.”
Critics of the H-2B program say it allows employers to keep wages low by hiring non-American workers. A study by the Washington D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute found that in Maryland workers that include crab pickers are underpaid by $4.82 per hour in the H-2B program.
Daniel Costa, an Immigration Policy Analyst with EPI, said the future of the H-2B is uncertain after a Pennsylvania court recently invalidated the old rules the program has been operating under and the new rules are on hold.
“We’re completely stumped,” Costa said. “We have no idea what direction this is going to go.”
Art Read, general counsel of Friends of Farmworkers and a legal specialist of the H-2B program, said the Department of Labor is expected to publish final rules on a number of aspects of the H-2B program within the next two to three weeks.
“Those changes are particularly significant to the program, including the recruitment of U.S. workers,” Read said.
The VIMS analysis estimated that Virginia would experience a $176.8 million reduction in economic activity in the seafood processing and wholesaling sector if the H-2B program were altered. The study also concluded that the loss of H-2B workers in the seafood processing section would create an estimated employment loss in the state of nearly 2,700 workers.
Employers say it’s virtually impossible to find and keep workers in the seafood processing industry. In the summers, the work that falls under seafood processing is hot, miserable, dirty and wet. It’s the similar in the winter except for frigid, bone-chilling winds.
Work may entail shucking oysters, picking crabmeat, sorting and counting clams and oysters in the shell, fishing shellfish out of muddy cages in river bottoms, crab picking, moving products in and out of coolers, washing equipment and lifting heavy boxes.
“It’s muddy, it’s dirty and it has to be done 12 months out of the year,” said John Vigliotta, owner of Mobjack Bay Seafood Co. on Ware Neck in Gloucester.
Vigliotta said he has had American workers that have been with him for years, but he’s also used the H-2B program because he’s struggled to find and retain American workers willing to endure the conditions and physically demanding nature of the work. He also loses employees in the summer months to amusement parks and landscaping work.
Vigliotta typically brings in the same people each year through the H-2B program.
“I know those people,” Vigliotta said. “I know exactly what I’m getting. All I care about is getting my job done.”
H-2B Program
What is it? The federal H-2B program allows employers to bring in workers from outside the country
New rules: Changes to the H-2B program could force employers to pay workers more
Fish & Seafood with Bill & Sheila
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