By Dr. Lorin Harvey
Every harvest season, I get some version of the same question:
“Why don’t farmers hire Americans workers to harvest the sweet potatoes in Mississippi?”
The difficult reality is that, in many rural communities, a sufficiently large and dependable domestic seasonal workforce simply does not exist.
Why? Consider the job.
Agricultural harvest work can be physically demanding, outdoors and highly seasonal. A farm may need 100 or 150 additional employees during a relatively short harvest window but cannot necessarily provide those same jobs 12 months of the year. It’s a temporary job.
Hard physical work plus seasonal employment is a difficult combination for building a large permanent local workforce.
That does not mean farmers are allowed to skip American workers and immediately hire workers from another country. In fact, quite the opposite.
Before receiving H-2A certification, an employer must recruit U.S. workers. The Department of Labor requires employers to document those recruitment efforts, record U.S. applicants and, generally, hire qualified and eligible U.S. workers who apply. U.S. workers must also be offered wages and working conditions that are no less favorable than those offered to H-2A workers.
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