That’s the headline on a story in Wines & Vines reporting on a conference in Virginia.
The panel was all about how to bring in foreign workers, using either the H-2A program to the J-1 summer intern program.
That, of course, is one of the reasons Donald Trump is president: U.S. employers turning to foreign workers rather than hiring U.S. workers. So we thought we’d offer a few helpful alternatives.
Start with Washington, D.C. Unemployment in the nation’s capital is hiring than in the U.S. as a whole (6.6% vs. 4.1%) or in Virginia. Consider Baltimore City, Md., where the overall official jobless rate is 5.2%, but in parts of the city as high as 25%. But remember that the jobless rate is composed of people actively looking for a job. A lot of inner-city people may have given up looking for a job, so the odds are the situation isn’t as grim as it appears. Virginia vintners might also look to West Virginia.
They might consider supporting a Trump Administration proposal tieing welfare benefits to work as a way to “encourage” able-bodied people to learn a new skill in a vineyard.
Beyond that, and perhaps even more hopeful for the country as a whole, they might look to state or federal penitentiaries. Some 6,000 inmates are working for private enterprises outside prison walls through the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program, sponsored by the National Corrections Industry Association, a trade group that contracts with the government.
More than 100 companies participate in the PIE program, established in 1979, and the number of working prisoners has more than doubled in the last decade.
Companies benefit. But so, too, can the workers when the private employers pay them a market wage and some even include them in their 401k programs.
There are pluses and minuses, of course. You can read some of them here, from Forbes.com. But until growers have sought to provide employment to inner city people and prisoners, we think they should stop whining about the challenge of finding U.S. workers.