Funny we have more illegals than ever but they can't find anyone.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13548308/

Border crackdown keeps grape workers away
Border crackdown keeps laborers away
By Adrienne Sanders
San Francisco Business Times
Updated: 5:00 p.m. PT June 25, 2006
Elias Torres will pick grapes this season for the first time in 25 years.

The vineyard manager usually sends his laborers to do the work. But in the last two months, more than half of his 60-person staff has disappeared, he said, as a result of federal immigration crackdowns. So Torres, a 57-year-old quadruple bypass survivor, will pluck and sweat alongside field workers -- and even the vineyard owners who hire him to bring them in.

"This is the worst labor shortage I've seen since I came here in 1961," said Torres, a native of Guanajuato, Mexico, who manages work teams for more than a half-dozen growers.

Sonoma and Napa county vineyard owners -- those who grow and sell grapes to wineries -- are panicking that a recent evaporation of field workers will leave them unable to pick all their grapes at harvest in mid-September. Many are already three weeks behind schedule on crucial tasks that lead up to harvesting.

"If it continues the way it is now, we're not going to have guys and there are going to be grapes left on the vine," said Gio Martorana, a vineyard owner in Healdsburg, who sells Zinfandel, Chardonnay and other grapes to Gallo, Sonoma Creek and Amphora wineries.

That means pain at the beginning of the wine chain, where growers' labor costs have leapt as much as 25 percent this season, in part, due to a shortage of workers.

Wineries selling varietals to glassy-eyed tourists and supermarket shoppers don't grow all the fruit for the wine they make. Rather, they buy tons of specially tended grapes from surrounding growers, often contracting with several each season. Nearly 1,700 wine grape-growers operated in Sonoma and Napa counties in 2004, about a third of California's total, according to a report from MKF Research in St. Helena. That's as many as 10 times the number of wineries in the state, said Woodside-based wine industry consultant Eileen Fredrikson.

Vanishing workers
As they prepare for harvest, growers are finding themselves crippled by a vanishing workforce -- most of which typically comes north from the border.

Joseph Ramazzotti, owner of Ramazzotti Vineyards & Wines in Geyserville, said nearly half of his laborers didn't return from their annual winter vacations in Mexico for the first time since they began working for him 10 to 15 years ago.

"It's those crazy Minutemen and now the National Guard," he said of increasing border patrols. Workers who made it back paid smugglers or "coyotes" roughly $3,000 to move them across the border, nearly double the amount paid to coyotes just a few months earlier.

Ramazzotti and Torres estimate that of the 40,000 agricultural workers in Sonoma Country, as many as 17,000 didn't return from Mexico to work this spring.

Stepped-up immigration enforcement -- or at least the fear of enforcement -- in San Francisco, Santa Rosa and other Bay Area cities is draining the pool of field workers as well. Torres said some Spanish-language radio stations warn listeners when border patrol agents descend on certain cities, causing some unauthorized workers to scatter, while others are fired from jobs or deported.

Jennifer Holman, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in charge of San Francisco, said her agency is focused on national security facilities like airports and power plants and apprehending criminal illegal immigrants such as gang members for arrest. But when people hear of these targeted missions, she said, they often mistake them for random workplace sweeps.

With fewer workers making it back across the border, higher paying construction jobs in the cities are becoming available to field workers eager to increase their earnings. Torres abruptly lost a crew of nine men on a single day last month, many to city construction jobs whose hourly wages begin at $20 -- far more than the $8.50 starting wage he offers. His workers returned only to fetch their last paycheck.

No one knows exactly how many agricultural workers are legal, though some insiders figure about half. Vineyard managers, like employers in other industries, require green cards and social security numbers from applicants, but don't know which are authentic or may actually belong to a worker's relative or friend. Most aren't interested in policing them to find out.

Cascading costs
In an effort to compete with construction wages, Torres has bumped starting pay up to $9.50. He passes the expense on to vineyard owners who also are being swept by a cascade of higher costs for fuel, insurance and taxes.

Falling weeks behind schedule also is now escalating expenses. Despite working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, shrunken teams are taking twice as long to finish jobs. By the time they get to a task such as snapping off low-hanging vines with their fingers, the cords have thickened and require pruning with shears. Swaths of unmowed grass and overgrown vines threaten to present costly problems with insects and disease.

To cope, some growers pay people with full-time jobs elsewhere to come in and work at night, on the sly. Torres said he has been talking to a local sheriff about arranging a field work program for jail inmates similar to highway programs already in place.

To complicate matters, wineries have been requiring ever-more labor-intensive growing methods to improve the quality, taste -- and marketing potential -- of their premium wines. Many won't buy machine-cut grapes, for instance and require that hand-snipping is performed a certain way.

"Pruning, grafting, shoot thinning and so on, it requires a real agricultural skill set that really doesn't exist in America except in immigrant farm laborers," said consultant Fredrikson.

Raises on the horizon?
Managers expect workers still clinging to the vines to demand raises just before harvest. And if Martorana is still short-handed, he will rent a machine to cut what grapes he can. But because much of his land is hilly and inaccessible for machine picking, it will only harvest a fraction of his fruit.

"There's nothing worse for any farmer to invest capital to grow their crop and not have the means to harvest it," said Karen Ross, Executive Director of the California Association of Winegrape growers. "That's their pay day."

For their part, wineries haven't increased the amount they pay growers -- nor raised prices for consumers yet -- because they're still enjoying a slight oversupply of grapes from last year's harvest and expecting the same for this year, said John Clendenen, owner of Clendenen Vineyard Management, one of Healdsburg's largest.

No wonder Ramazzotti, who manages workers for land he leases, is moving exclusively into wine selling when his lease expires. Martorana will begin selling wine under his own label at the Martorana Family Winery, to open in Healdsburg next year.

But if the shortage continues, wine prices could eventually increase. And given the political battles taking place, no one expects the labor shortage to end soon.

"We're the early hiccup," Clendenen said. "As immigration laws change, there could be ripples all through the economy."

The Numbers

Growing costs

Amount labor costs have increased for grape growers this season: 25%
Starting hourly wage for field workers in wine country: $8.50
Starting hourly wage for construction workers in the Bay Area: $20
What wineries pay growers for a ton of Chardonnay grapes: $900 to $1,200

What it cost growers to pick a ton of grapes in past harvests: $700