Viewpoint

Todd Davis

I attended my first real Halloween haunted house when I was about 8 years old.

It was at the Baptist church down the street, so I'm sure my parents thought it would be pretty tame. It started out that way – creaking doors, fake cobwebs, a bowl of grapes standing in for eyeballs.

But at some point a guy jumped from around the corner with a chainsaw (sans chain), fired it up and laid the bar across my arm. How I maintained bladder control, I'll never know.

But I haven't been able to go to a haunted house since without fear of what's around every corner.

This leads me to two points: One, the guy who thought it would be funny to do that to an 8 year old is a sick puppy and surely ended up behind bars at some point. Two, when looking at the current labor situation, you should be as scared as me walking through a haunted house.

Around every corner
Every nursery that relies on immigrant workers (and studies indicate that at least 70 percent of nursery field workers do just that) should be very concerned. It's almost as if we're in for a perfect storm.

Pundits say it's likely the federal government will pass laws requiring E-Verify to qualify all workers' documents very soon. Sounds simple enough – enter a Social Security Number into a database and make sure the number matches the name – but remember this is a government program.

Growers already using some sort of E-Verify system tell me the instruction manual is more than 80 pages.
 

H-2A and H-2B
Knowing that a mandatory E-Verify program is coming could lead more employers using H-2A and H-2B programs. H-2B is still capped around 600,000 workers, and H-2B petitions always meet the cap annually on the morning of Jan. 1. So good luck with that program.

I'm also hearing that H-2B is also tinkering with requiring employers to house and pay workers' travel expenses, which would be new to this program. And, oh yes, required H-2B wages are going up.

Of course, there's always H-2A, which is designed to recruit migrant agricultural workers. But what happens when a backlog of new H-2A users slows down an already slow system? It's a legit concern that you might not receive your spring workers until August, in which case they're about as useful as that chainsaw without the chain.

Not to be the bearer of bad news, but what I'm saying is you'd better have a labor plan for 2012. I suggest having a Plan A, Plan B, Plan C and Plan D.

Labor is the No. 1 expense at most nurseries across the country. If growers are faced with a 30-percent increase in labor costs next year as some are forecasting, then that's a game changer.

For some nurseries, it could be a stake through the heart. Spooky, huh?
 

tdavis@gie.net