The Plight of the US Farmworker w/ Elaine Chukan Brown

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Do you think you could give us a brief overview of your background for those who aren't familiar with you? Yes, so I write about wine, but that has turned out to also mean I do a lot of public speaking. So key notes, wine seminars, moderating panels, and I've been lucky enough to do that all over the world. I haven't gotten to Antarctica yet, but otherwise I've probably been there. My book, The Wines of California, just came out from Academy of Deben in May. Before that, I was born and raised in Alaska. I actually grew up commercial salmon fishing in Bristol Bay, which is the largest intact wild salmon run in the world. You mentioned you just published The Wines of California. What is that about? How does it add to the literature on California and what? Well, the attempt is for it to be pretty comprehensive, and I divided it into three major sections, which do very different things, but hopefully altogether give kind of a good overview and also lots of details. So the first section is how we got here, and that's looking at the history of California wine, but instead of just kind of re-outlining the history that's really brilliantly already been covered, I decided that I was really curious about what allowed the history of California wine to happen, like why is it these things were effective then and not these other times. So the history section is actually taking the major moments of California wine history and then bringing them into a state, national, and global context to explore what the conditions were that allowed California wine to follow this history. Then the middle section is where we grow, and that is closer to what you'd expect from a wine book in terms of looking at the regions and keep producers, but the history of those places and the growing conditions. And then the last section is what we're facing, and that looks at kind of market challenges and climate change. One of the big things that we're facing today involves what we're talking about today, the the farm worker, and you've been doing a lot of interviewing and researching that as an extension of this work. What sort of drove you to pursue that research? Well, so I got started doing the work I do in wine in 2012, and I didn't really know what it was going to mean for me to do it, but I was really lucky in that people for whatever reason were interested in meeting with me, and I hadn't been trained up in wine in kind of through the traditional routes. So it turned out without my realizing the kinds of questions I was asking were not typical. And so in late summer of 2012, I spent a month in Willamette Valley, and one of the visits I was invited to do was to go to a mobile clinic day with Salud. Salud is a medical program for vineyard workers and their families. It was the first of it started in the United States. It's been more, you know, more than a couple decades that it's been happening. And a swim and Leda who started the program originally, she would just go around in her car and being vineyard workers at their work sites, but it's expanded through the sport of the wine industry over the last few decades. It have multiple mobile clinics and then also a physical clinic location. And the big thing in my mind is that's made at work is that they don't just provide care for vineyard workers, but vineyard workers families, which becomes the motivation to use the program. So anyway, Leda invited me to visit their mobile clinic day in the Dundee Hills. And I was able to go and really see the kind of care they provide, you know, so occupational health, even like thinking about your eyes as much as your blood pressure, and then also private clinic visits to deal with specific health concerns. And I was able to kind of spend that day with Leda with some of the vineyard workers that were receiving care. And then also there was the daughter of a person who was a vineyard worker and she'd grown up receiving care from salute and was then in university and devoted herself to getting an education that would allow her to become part of the care that salute provides. So I spent time interviewing her and then I ended up being lucky enough to spend time interviewing a vineyard manager and and then also some vineyard workers and listening to their personal stories. And as I said, it was it was really early. It was one of the first things I ever did in in wine and it really shaped my understanding of what wine in the wine industry is. Like I mentioned in my intro, I grew up commercial fishing for salmon. That's a seasonal harvest industry. You can't control when the fish come in or how many there are or what the quality is. And you just have to be physically and mentally prepared to go with what happens that season, whether it's a 21-hour day or a four-hour day. And so there's something about barbewter vineyard work specifically that just makes sense to me without it having to be explained. You know, it's just the seasonal cycles. Can't control how harvest goes, need enough people to do it, all of these things. And so meeting vineyard workers hearing their stories, seeing how it impacted dex generation and then also recognizing what the kind of work is just really set me up to prioritize these people that, you know, vineyard workers actually make wine possible, but we tend not to talk about them. Absolutely. And California has a long history with agriculture, both protecting and exploiting agricultural workers. Can you give us a brief history of the California farm worker and specifically vineyard labor? Yeah. So I think it's important to recognize that California is the largest producer, basically the biggest farm region in the United States. We provide a really significant portion of various food crops to the entire country. Basically, we wouldn't be able to feed the country except for California's agricultural contributions. But we also, California also exports about 40% of their agricultural production. And that makes a huge difference in the economy, but not just of the state, really, of the country. So the agricultural industry in California has a huge economic contribution. And again, not just to the economy of California, but what we bring in here and how we pay people and where the wages percolate out to that influences the economy of the entire United States. But we're also actually California's agriculture is also part of the really the world food network. And so it's importantly playing a role in international food systems too. So having said that, California agriculture starts to become like really essential at the early 1900s. It of course had been happening way back from the late 1700s, but there's a way that it becomes more especially nationally relevant, but is starting to become internationally relevant in the 1900s. And so what that ends up meaning is that we need people to do the labor that it takes to do farming because it wasn't until sort of a decade or two into the 1900s that mechanization really even becomes possible. So if we keep that in mind, we need hands to do the labor, right? But what happens is we don't have enough people locally to do it. And so first, it's indigenous peoples in California that are doing the labor by 1864. There's a massive smallpox outbreak in California. And also we're we're intentionally moving indigenous people out of the area either through literal violence or by putting them on deriservations. So suddenly our indigenous population can't provide labor. So we make an agreement with China who send laborers in exchange for citizenship. But within about 10 to 15 years of that starting the United States decides they don't want to do citizenship for Chinese because it'll change the local population too much. So then we expel Chinese laborers, but now we need laborers again. So then we we make an agreement with Japan. This process of we keep finding laborers expelling them and then having to find a new labor group, right? So we go to Japan and then we're actually making agreements with India and sick laborers. And at some point sharecroppers from the south, black workers come over though it's not insignificant numbers and compared to these other groups. But once we sort of push Spain out of the Philippines and of course becomes a territory for the United States. So we have all these, you know, the first waiver we call Menong workers. And then we try to repatriate them back to the Philippines, but they refuse to go. And so we start making an agreement with Mexico and establish the Bersero Program. just after World War II. So there's this like repeating cycle of, oh wait, there's too many of these people that scary it might change our communities. So we go and find a different group and then once their numbers grow out of necessity to do because we need them to do the labor, we get concerned again and expel them. And it's been interesting though to study that history because it's a very regular cycle. Every 20 years or so we go through it again where it's like, oh shoot, we have a labor shortage. So then we petition the government to allow visas for a new group to come in. But then of course they start to become visible because they have to be here to do the work. Once they become visible we get scared. Zinephobia starts, so we start to become anti-immigration and then try to close borders again except wait, now we're in the labor shortage and it happens all over again. And we can see that happening now too. I get where they promise citizenship to them that it would be a big deal because then they could out vote the native or whatever whoever's in charge at the time population. But did they promise citizenship for all these other groups? The Japanese, Philippines, Mexicans, etc. Well so with China was kind of the main group that the original exchange was you know if laborers come will give them citizenship and that was really significant. So a lot of Chinese laborers came over you know they helped build the Transcontinental Railroad was sort of the first really still visible impact of that. And then when you know the railroad kind of landed in LA in the 1860s and it happened to be right about the same time that Indigenous workers the numbers were really significantly smaller. So people from China ended up stepping in and becoming the key laborers of California at that time. But again by I think it was 1880s we create the first major anti-immigration law in the United States, the Chinese exclusion act. So then with as after that there's sort of a lesson learned so to speak that oh citizenship is a mistake we don't want to offer that. And so the kinds of agreements that are made with Japan and with later with Mexico and other areas in between does not include citizenship. The Bersero program really emphatically was a temporary work visa and that's actually in the late 90s we sort of returned to a Bersero model but with what's called the H2A program. So the H2A program again it's emphatically temporary. It cannot be extended beyond a certain point and it also cannot be transferred to another employer. So anyone that comes in with an H2A work visa is attached to the one employer that brought them in initially. And if that ends for some reason or their visa expires they must return to Mexico. So at least in recent history California has been somewhat notorious for being a leader in worker rights or some might say anti-business. How have regulation and state policy changed the economics of farm workers and vineyards? So I think there's an important like teasing out of a slightly bigger picture that's important to do in order to understand this. So the history of farming and vineyard labor in California has repeatedly rested in this perceived need to reduce wages to improve margins for the owners, the growers, the farmers that own land and the businesses. And the truth is that if you go all the way back to the 1930s some of the biggest anti-labor protests across all industries are happening in the United States. This leads to FDR creating the first Labor Protections Act in the late 1930s, early 1940s. And the thing that's interesting about that is the only industry excluded from the Labor Protection Act that FDR enacted is agriculture as well as domestic workers. But the growers, the land owners at the time extensively lobbied the government to intentionally exclude farm workers that excluded agriculture from that new law. And the again the argument was we won't be able to afford what we're doing unless we have wages that are lower than what we could pay local citizens. So FDR agrees and there are no protections in place anywhere in the nation for agricultural workers until the United Farm Workers successfully does a series of actions that in 1975 result in the first farm worker protection regulations. The reason it took so long partially at least is because the land owners and business owners of agricultural work in California actually had effectively they'd unionized with each other. So all of these major land owners formed a collaborative group called the Association of Farmers. The Association of Farmers essentially combined their capital to have more leverage. Many of the members actually became congressmen and senators within the state of California. And those that were not themselves representatives of the state be strongly befriended others. And the Association of Farmers really effectively created collaborations with law enforcement and even federal agencies. And so the persuasive power was really strongly on the side of business. Essentially how these activities and laws and policies were handled was to preserve the rights of property owners. It is true that California established the first labor protection laws and in many ways has the first the only agricultural protection laws in the country still. But it would be a stretch to then claim that's anti-business. I mean really what would have to change to balance wages with business is the system sort of above the business the egg businesses. You know so there's a sense in which the economy set up currently for this like war of income between farm owners who absolutely must preserve their profit margins in order to sustain themselves right. But right now because there really isn't substantial enough support or subsidizing from the government and it's still very expensive to grow and distribute within the United States the only place for them to kind of save their margins is through reducing wages. And so it creates this tension this war between the needs of laborers and the needs of agricultural business owners. And the only place to really resolve that tension would be through policy and market changes above the business owners so to speak. Yeah yeah we've heard from like the California Wine Grape Growers Association and others at the cost of compliance is now like of all these state regulations protecting labor is like the second highest cost outside of labor itself and that seems to be you know troublesome for them. Yeah so it's also it's not only literal cost in terms of money but also the cost of time. So most in a way the compliance requirements favor businesses becoming bigger and bigger which also of course means more and more removed from individual workers but the reason it becomes it favors bigger and bigger businesses is because essentially the requirements of compliance are so significant that you need an employee just devoted to that. But now if you're adding another wage requirement or salary requirement now the cost of your doing businesses increased even more right. And so part of why I'm trying to emphasize this point about where the tension lies and where the pressure relief would be is because I think I hear a lot of people that assume its business is exploiting laborers and it's not exactly that that's wrong but it is the case that the system essentially sets up a condition where the only means for business to say in business is to keep pushing down on wages and trying to reduce them. Yeah in recent times and especially in California we've had a rise in the minimum wage to significant levels which creates even harder dynamic for the owners to maintain their profit margins and and for the downstream product the wine itself to be competitive on the global stage. Yeah so that that's part of the problem is so minimum wages increased except we should recognize that minimum wage is still not livable wage even with the increases. Right. As in rate of inflation has not matched the rate of increase on wages so that's one thing. So again the for the business owner the the farmer to maintain any kind of proper margin is staying business after reduce wages or increase cost to consumers and we already know especially if inflation is increasing increasing cost to consumers isn't going to work it's not sustainable but also consumers are resistant to pain more and so so those two options both create significant problems. The other major change is that there was a lot of lobbying done to create overtime pay for farm laborers and there's a sense in which this seems obvious like oh of course they should be paid more for their work but if you think about how seasonal harvest work functions you realize that an overtime you know no more than eight hours a day no more than 40 hours a week model actually is coming very much from an office work perspective. If you're only ever working inside you can regulate the temperature your access to water to the bathroom of light levels the heat you know all of these things that seem that are absolutely taken for granted if you're used to working in an inside environment an office environment But seasonal farm labor, like I was talking about with commercial fishing, can't be regulated in those ways, right? If the season is hot, the produce comes in sooner, the wine grapes come in sooner. If the yields are high, you need more people to bring those yields in, right? Like there's, and you don't know if there's gonna be rain or at harvest, or even like now maybe a lightning storm, right, or a hot flash period, and you also don't know if there'll be frost in the spring when the fruit is just early, early being set. So there's a way in which regulating exactly how the hours work in relation to an outdoor seasonal industry doesn't actually make sense functionally. And I'm not saying that people shouldn't be paid for their work. I'm saying ensuring people are paid for their work through an overtime model does not actually make sense from a functional perspective in relation to any harvest industry. - 'Cause if you have rain, you may not be able to work one day and then you need to work twice as much the next day or whatever it is, whatever it is, no rain. - Or like, let's say your entire harvest period is the last three weeks of July, well that means you need to have the flexibility to work 10 hour days, then you might only be working four hour days earlier in the year. - Right. - So what's happened, again, from the outside, the seams reason will pay them for overtime. But what's actually happened is because margins for agricultural businesses are already so small, those businesses cannot actually afford to pay overtime rates. So employees are now being regulated to only 40 hours a week or the limit, I can't remember now, egg might actually be slightly more than 40, but you get the point that employees are regulated by businesses to only the amount of time before overtime per week. The effect of that has not been employees getting paid more. It's actually made them make less money because what's happening is, let's say they go in at 6 a.m., if there's enough work to last well into the afternoon, the workers that have come in in the morning will actually be stopped at the eight hour mark and sent home. And new workers will come in at that point and work until the work is done that afternoon. So there's multiple impacts here. Individual workers are making less money than they used to when they were paid for every hour they worked the same rate. Those workers as a result are actually getting second and third jobs to make up that difference. And as a result, any particular site, which is really, really crucially important in vineyards, is not getting the continuity of attention that did previously. So because the workers have to change to keep the margins down. So in wine, especially premium wine, fine wine, think about Napa, right? Like you and Robert talk a lot about really high end, credible wine and I know the three of us are lucky enough to drink this kind of wine. But if you're talking about $150 bottle of wine, which is minimum these days, right? Or more, the attention to detail and continuity of farming becomes crucially important to maintain the quality. So you're either gonna have to pay a lot more for that labor now or, you know, suffer the consequences of quality going down and hope people don't notice. So laborers are actually being paid less, even though of course this is a well-intentioned effort to support them. But also it's complicating businesses' ability to manage workers because now they effectively have a lot more workers. But also that there's another thing that I think people rarely realize, which is that if an individual worker is no longer making his money from their full-time job, and now having to take a second and a third job to fill in the gap, let's say one of those jobs is all day on Saturdays, for example. If they get injured on that Saturday only job, any chance of workman's comp is in relation only to the amount of money they would make from Saturdays only, except they're losing the wages from their full-time job as well. So the overall cost of the overtime regulation is actually enormous and is not benefiting workers in the way I think it was intended to. - Wow. - And it's making things more complicated for businesses. - Is there any push by labor unions and business to join together and get rid of that rule, that legislation? - I don't know much detail about that. I mean the thing about this law is it takes a very long time to put laws in place and also then to change them. And the law was passed something like eight years ago and it took a long time for it to be passed. And I mean one way to put it is that the policy makers that were considering this bill like clearly did not have enough contact with actual business owners or laborers. So in my mind that's when we're looking at policies that we think are going to protect who we believe are underrepresented communities, well we better be bringing those communities directly in to create the policies. Because otherwise we're imagining a scenario that's not relevant. And so having a negative impact without meaning to. - We don't really have the context. And needing more workers from laws like this and other things is already a problem when I believe the labor market is short of supply, especially for words. - Yeah, exactly. - Anyway, tired of COVID at least and everything else and COVID I think created even more of a labor supply. 'Cause we lost the labor, but like competition from marijuana farming and other things were already pushing vineyard labor supply down and therefore prices up. What's the supply demand balance for labor these days and how's that impacting vineyard worker pay? - Yeah, so you're totally right. The cannabis industry of course is legal in California. Interestingly though, as we know it's not legal federally. And so there is a major federal raid on the largest cannabis grower in the state. Just a few weeks ago and there is a question about why that particular grower when their compliance has regularly been in place previously. So there's a tension around okay, a federal agency came into a state, illegally legal at the state level business. And so what's the motivation there? Some people see it as a prelude to the federal government pressuring states to reduce or change the law around cannabis. So that's a bit of a side note, but the point is, I know you're interested in long term effects too, it's possible we're gonna see a significant change in how farming and farm jobs are available around the cannabis industry. That said, when cannabis businesses started to grow in California because of them being legal in the state, a lot of the agricultural workers and especially those that were skilled, for example through wine went and brought their skilled labor to this other industry because initially at least when cannabis first became legal, the promise of profit was really high. It turns out it's super expensive to meet federal regulations on a product that's essentially illegal federally. So I think the profit around cannabis has been significantly lower than expected. So the wage, the kind of wage parodies evening out there. But the big thing I think we should remember is that, again, premium vineyards or kind of high-end wine vineyards, so to speak, cannot be mechanized. We have to have that continuity of hand labor of personal attention that allows us to recognize the state of an individual vine. So the wine that can be mechanized is sort of to put it too broadly, it's kind of like $18 and lower. You know, of course that number's not exact, but you get my point that it's lower and wines that can be mechanized. There are a few cases where there's a $35, $40 bottle of wine that's very good and comes from a mechanized vineyard, but that's really unusual. And then if we move to food crops, tomatoes, cucumbers, anything in a greenhouse, a hot house cannot be mechanized. Strawberries, row crops of that sort cannot be mechanized. So there's actually three, you like, peaches, a lot of tree fruits actually can't be either. Peaches are going to bruise if you shake them and they drop, right? Are you specifically talking about harvesting in terms of mechanization? Yeah, harvesting. So with vineyards, there's also different types of mechanization through the growing season. So you can do mechanized leaf pulling, mechanized shoot thinning, not really mechanized pruning during the winter. But yeah, when we're talking in terms of harvest, so there's no aspect of mechanization that can happen in something like strawberries or peaches. But also with like apples or pears, again, if you imagine like the way mechanization on tree crops works is they shake the tree so the produce falls. So this is going to be acceptable for olives. This is going to be acceptable for nuts, right? So you could mechanize aspects of hazelnut growing, for example. But any of the kind of softer touch produce-- so again, premium grapes, strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, a lot of food crops are not-- you have to have the people. So you have to have the numbers of people to do the labor. In the current context of an oversupply of grapes, yet vineyard land is somewhat constant, although there's a lot of mothballing and pulling of vines happening now. Is that impacting the wages that vineyard workers are getting? Well, so it's this weird tension where it could go either way, right? if we have an oversupply. apply of produce, so grapes, then the demand, the cost, like what consumers are willing to pay is going to go down, right? Supply and demand, this is classic. But on the other side, we're in this situation where we've basically created our own labor shortage while also making it far more difficult for outside laborers to come into the country. And in some people's view, they would say it's also more dangerous to come into the country. But the point being, we've made it more challenging for people to do this kind of labor. And so from that perspective, you would expect wages to go up. But so we're in this sort of high tension cycle and how it's going to be resolved is a little bit unclear. But the point being that if we end up in a situation where we don't have enough laborers to perform the harvest, and like you're saying, if yields are up, if we have an oversupply of grapes, that means we need more people to harvest them, right? But we're also saying there's labor shortage. There's not enough people here. And so if we're in that situation and there really end up being not enough people to do the harvest work, then that means that fruit that was farmed through the year. And so the cost of farming was already there through the year. So fruit that's already been paid for effectively will stay on the vine and not be harvested. Or by lowering the profits for the farmer even more. Or a lot of long hang time dessert wines. Yeah, there's actually, I think it'd be curious to see. Some people actually did go harvest like this to make distilled the grapes, which I mean, it is, you know, use what you have. But there's unfortunately like several years ago, there was an earlier version of the grape glut and a lot of vines. You could drive around the state and there were vineyards that you could see last year's grapes were still on the fruit in the spring of the following year. Yeah. You were mentioning raids happening and these are, I think, immigration raids, ice, right, raiding and theoretically deporting undocumented workers. How has that impacted the market for vineyard labor? Yeah. So unfortunately, what's happened is this kind of raid in order to find undocumented workers. Like the state and federal government have been doing that forever. Like that's not new. What is new is that the way the raids are happening this year is including visa holders, including those that were granted amnesty to be in the country, including actual citizens. And the impact of that is essentially telling workers of any sort that they're not safe from detention or deportation because anyone is being gathered up so to speak. So what's happening is even if they have citizenship and they have a passport or whatever their proof of citizenship is, they're getting detained and deported. Yeah. So there's a lot of cases and even some going to lawsuits where green card holders, DACA recipients, actual citizens have their documentation on them. So them when Ice or border patrol contacts them and they're being detained anyway. And then one of the big issues this year too, which is now gone into multiple lawsuits, is that the pretty consistently people being detained have reported after the fact that they were not allowed any contact with legal counsel, which of course, allowing a phone call out and contact with legal counsel is constitutional for anyone, right? You don't just have to be a citizen to have that right. And so everyone has that right. So the combination has brought a lot of examination to how these deportation practices are happening because it's one thing people argue whether or not we should allow so-called undocumented workers. That's one question, right? But let's set that aside just because it complicates the conversation. However you feel about whether we should allow undocumented workers or not, what's happening literally to this year is that people, again, with green cards, DACA status or citizenship are also being included in detention and actually in multiple cases also being deported. So the goal of these actions doesn't seem to strictly be about documentation or not. And the effect is that workers, because it's not clear who could or could not be vulnerable to this, workers are simply not showing up to work. And some regions have reported as much as a 70% drop in the number of workers going into work. Here in the North Coast, there's more, what I've seen more is that like people are not going into work for farms along main roads. Okay. So more visible locations, people are not going into work. Then a couple of months ago in May, I think it was that the early reports of ice likely coming into Northern California came out and there is an immediate drop in employees not going to agricultural jobs for even weeks at a time. And so there's a lot of community response of having to figure out how to get these people food, you know, right? If you're not leaving the house. I was going to say, what do these people do? How do they then therefore make money and survive? Yeah, exactly. So what's happened is a lot of people that are afraid to go to work and or maybe haven't gone to work end up having like not having an income, obviously. And so then families will kind of like choose one family member to take the risk and go out to work. So some kind of incomes coming in. But there are a number of businesses that you could talk to that have said that in the last 20 years that there's been a big shift from seasonal only laborers to year round family established working families. And again, many of them with green cards or citizenship or permanent resident status. So there's been an increase as a because of there's been an increase in agricultural families doing the work for farms and vineyards. There's also been an increase in married couples, both working in agriculture and even oftentimes for the same business. And what those businesses are reporting is that they've lost half of that couple because people want to have to make a plan to ensure their kids are taken care of. So even if their citizens, couples are sending only one of the two to work so that the other one is definitely there to take care of the kids. So there's like multiple factors that just keep reducing both the number of people that can do labor and also the income for the people doing the labor. And does that translate to a change in the price of labor? If all these people aren't showing up, all the work still needs to get done, you would think and do businesses have to pay more to try to get more people in? Well, historically they have. But if you look back at multiple points in history when the same dynamic has happened here in California, once it gets to a certain point where the question of safety is large enough, it has turned out that the attempt to increase wages to bring workers back in hasn't been effective. So there's a point at which attempts to deport so-called undocumented workers have been so effective that now other laborers are not coming into work even if they're being offered more pay. So the solution, effectively what this is all pointed to is people are lobbying now to increase how the H2A, the number of people that can come in as an H2A contract worker and also lobbying to kind of increase how long they could stay. So as an example, if a person comes in on an H2A visa and ends up being really essential to the employer, the employer wants the ability to extend their stay past a year to two years maybe, something like that. So far those changes haven't happened, but H2A labor does solve the worry about our communities changing in the sense that these people cannot stay beyond their visa for any reason and they cannot transfer their visa to another employer. So effectively they must return to where they can't, you know, the country that they're from. But there's another worry which is that the person that comes in on H2A visa again can only work for that one employer and that employer is now in charge is by law required to provide all transportation, housing, food and any kind of need for the employee and that sounds really perfect, right? Like it's a regulation to try to ensure the safety of the H2A workers. But as government jobs have been reduced, the ability to inspect and enforce those regulations has almost disappeared. And so actually just as an employer is according to regulation obligated to provide everything the employee needs, the employee is now entirely dependent on that employer for anything they need and they effectively can't leave the job because they can't transfer the visa to somewhere else. And if the employer is required to provide the transportation, if they want to leave how are they going to get anywhere. So now with the reduction of enforcement, there's a lot of obvious questions that come up but we'll have to keep watching how does it actually develop. And are the H2A workers not targeted by ICE for deportation? They have been as well actually. So again what's different about this year is that your visa status hasn't mattered in terms of initial detention. There are some cases though where a person will be held again without contact or legal council for several days and then released. because they have Abisa. But the president about a month ago made the comment that he wanted to find a way for the business owner, the farmer to be in control, to be able to vouch for employees and retain them. The same day, the Department of Homeland Security said there would be no exemptions for any agricultural workers. But there's this idea brewing, basically as I already said, people are lobbying to increase H2A, which could ostensibly increase access to laborers. But again, create a situation where, okay, if we are worried about immigration and number of people coming into the country, it's going to control that, but also change the way we can consider the regulations for ensuring employee safety. It also on the business side though, does significantly increase costs, right? 'Cause now we already said how standard business so to speak in agriculture has so many regulations that just compliance alone demands a single employee to just to work on that, right? Well, imagine how H2A, every employer has to go through a massive licensing process just to get started, then they are in charge of recruiting and then they are in charge of getting the visas and then also creating the facilities to manage transport housing food and anything else that's needed. So just like, if you just think your way into the logistics of that, the literal cost and the literal time are going to massively increase for any business managing this. So again, it's the situation where what's happening is individual farm owners or small vineyard owners are not able to utilize H2A. If they're going to rely on something like that, they would have to contract with a vineyard management company or an H2A management company. So again, this is a case where the regulation changes are essentially pushing agriculture into big business model. Right. Well, and you mentioned that before there's more agricultural families and people sort of working in the vineyards year round, how have all these both regulations and fear of deportation and all these other things? How's that changing working in a vineyard as a potential career path for people? Yeah, I mean, well, so to be blunt, it's never been a career path for people except for this exclusive group of highly skilled vineyard workers and farm workers. We tend to treat conversations at least around any type of farm labor as unskilled and replaceable, but actually, any of these crops that require handwork like strawberries to made as cucumbers wine, like we've been saying, they actually demand a kind of skill and increased acuity over time. So there's these early studies that have been done and observations that have been made by like medical doctors and sports coaches basically that when they go out and observe the work being done by farm workers and vineyard workers, they're also kind of track the physiological function of these people. They're actually operating at a level comparable to Olympic level athletes. So, you know, people often make the comment, "Oh, well, locals don't want these jobs." Well, it's because you can't just step in, have all the skills to do it at quality, but also the physical stamina. It's stamina that's built over time, just like it's skilled, it's built over time. So the career path in this regard has only been for a certain number of people that are willing to work physically at that level. But the more that we move to something like an H2A model, there's a way in which the career isn't there anymore, 'cause you're not, you can't know that you'll be able to come in again. There's a certain limit in terms of the number of times you come in on H2A. There's currently, there's a kind of gap period that you have to have between H2A stints, you know, and so what that means is there's not clear long-term path for farm laborers under that model. Interesting. And we've talked about how, you know, the great market today is oversupplied in the US, but this is really true globally, partly through increase in supply, but also reduction of demand. And you pair that with subsidization of vineyards and wine, particularly in the EU, but in other places as well. And US wine tends to be viewed as too expensive and sort of disadvantaged on the global scene. And as we talked about, vineyard labor is sort of stuck in that middle, and with the rising minimum wage, increasing compliance costs and all that. How do you think this macro situation, the wine industry in will impact the industry of vineyard workers in the next few years? - I think we're just finding that out because we're still in this tipping point question where we don't know for sure how significantly, like the wine industry or vineyard farming will be reduced. We do know that globally vineyards are being pulled, right? 'Cause there's been an oversupply challenge for almost 10 years now. And then COVID really exacerbated that problem because sales got constricted, right? Import expert got constricted. And so finally in the last two years or so, there's been even enforced vineyard pulling in different parts of the world. And so the literal planted acreage is going down. We're expecting in California that it'll go down significantly more just even this year and next year. And other countries are mandating that as well. So if that's true, then we're gonna have less supply which might increase how much wine's cost but we're still unclear, right? If people are still willing to spend money on wine then that's not gonna matter. But also if it does increase cost of wine, labor has become even more valuable. So possibly wages increase, but I really believe we're in a tipping point where we don't know there's some indications that wine sales are increasing again. A lot of people are saying they're not, I think we still don't know what is actually gonna happen in the next 10 years with the wine industry and thereby can't know what's gonna happen with farm labor either. - Yeah, and with the Trump administration tariffs are a big thing and the trade wars that he's imposing on the world, how do you think these US tariffs will probably be higher for other people bringing wine in where they didn't have any tariffs before? How do you think that will change the dynamic for the domestic wine industry? - Well, so what we saw during COVID was that, we had tariffs under the first Trump administration as well, at least with some wine regions. And what we saw in that case was of course the price for consumers went up on imported goods but also the new flow, so to speak, but like new ventages of wines from these affected countries went down, which isn't surprising 'cause again, the cost is going up for importers as well. But what happened was the, as a cost, as the purchasing went down, ventages already brought into the country, were also still sold with care of increase. And so those ventages actually, the sales of them slowed, they had been purchased based on previous sales standards, right? And so now we have an excess of imported wine. And you might think, oh, this is okay because people that buy wine and importers will just shift to a domestic market. They'll just start buying local wine. But if you think about how business works, if you already have as an importer or as a distributor or as a wine shop, you already have a lot of inventory that you bought in anticipation of sales trends continuing. Now you just have a lot of stuff you're storing because the turnover is so much slower. What that means is if you have too much inventory, you're not gonna buy the new stuff. So not only did importers reduce what they brought in from other countries, distributors lost sales from those things. Retailers were not buying as much of those things. The cost of them was more expensive, so consumers were also not buying things. And again, it could seem like, oh, good, well, they'll just buy more US wine. But what actually happened was access to anyone decreased, even though people were drinking more during COVID, access decreased because distribution slowed because this backlog of previous vintage international wine was basically just stuck in warehouse as being stored. And that lesson, the income for these businesses, thereby they couldn't just buy more domestic wine to make up for it. - Sounds like a vicious stalwart cycle. - Yeah, I mean, it's possible that, you know, if terrorists continued, then domestic sales would increase, but that would take maybe even decades to happen. - Right. So in terms of vineyard labor, what are the two or three trends you're keeping an eye on over the next few years? - Well, like I said, I'm really curious how the H2A thing is gonna continue to develop. I also think there are early indications that things might be changing with how cannabis is regulated. And if that's true, then that will significantly change how many people in labor have what jobs, right? They, if they don't have cannabis jobs anymore, or there are fewer cannabis jobs, they're gonna move into a different agricultural industry and maybe they'd come back to wine. But also, I don't think it would be for a long time that something like the overtime law would be changed again, but I do think it's interesting to keep an eye on that. We're in the really early days as far as that goes though, because it's only been the last year or two that the full effect of the law has come into play. or now businesses must stick strictly to the business hours week or pay overtime. And so it's kind of the first year to that businesses are having to stay strictly to that model and increase employees of other sorts. So those are kind of-- but these are like really long-term things to keep an eye on. But I think there's sort of major potential change for the industry. Got it. A lot of potential changes in the works. So we like to wrap up each episode on a personal note. And so we want to know what's the most cherished wine in your cellar and when do you plan on drinking? I love this switch of this question. We've been very curious for 45 minutes or a hell of a long-- it's been. And now, what do I love? So there are a couple of bottles that I've hand-carried in from visits to other countries that don't come into the States. And of course, those are really-- many of those are really special. If I did the work to bring them in, I must have loved them. And I can't get the bottles again. So I'm going to be really choosy about when I open them. So a couple of examples. This viator is a sparkling wine from Penadaz, Catalonia, area of Spain. And his wines are incredible. They're absolutely incredible. He only changed to using his family name viator in the last couple of years. And I happened to spend time with him there in Spain. The final vintage that he was bottling under the previous name Miscandia. So I brought back a six pack of older vintage Miscandia sparkling wine. And I have two bottles left. And I'm like, oh, yeah. So that's an example of a really cherished wine. But a totally different kind of example is I spent a lot of time with farming families out in Lodi, especially. And was really trying to understand how does this work over multiple generations. And so I spent time with this family that is now fourth and fifth generation grape growers in Lodi. But I was able to spend time with the third generation, the father and uncle of this man, Phil Alva. Because Dad Louis, I really believe, was the longest tenured home wine maker in California. He actually-- he made home wine for 7475 or 76 years, even. Because he learned when he was eight years old from his father and his grandparents started helping them make home wine when he was eight and then continued making it every year from their own family vineyard. These specific Zinfandel vines that everyone knew you don't touch, because those are Louis' home wine vines. And one of the visits that I spent a day with the Abba family and his brother, Joey. Louis' brother, Joey as well. And at some point, they decided they liked me. And so they said, "Lui said, 'Oh, do you want to drink my wine?' And Phil, his son, went down into the cellar and grabbed an unmarked bottle." And he said, "I think this is from two years ago. So we opened this unmarked bottle of home wine and drank it together. And it was impressively good. It was such a-- well, it delicious wine, but also just a really dear moment. And then when I left, they also gave me a bottle to take home. And so I've saved that. And now it's even more precious because Louis died earlier this year. And so it's one of those bottles where there have to be a really good reason to open that. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Sounds like some special wines. Well, Elaine, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing your insights on the California farm worker with us. And I think if people enjoy the level of depth and insight you bring to our conversation, they'll probably definitely enjoy reading the wines of California. Thank you so much, Peter. It's really nice to have this time with you. Hey, listeners. If you love the show, support it by buying a show notes book. They not only compile two years of episodes, but also organizes them into themes for better learning. They can be an inspiration to listen to or relist into an episode or provide a quick reference of the key learnings from a show. Go to xchatto.com and click on the store page for easy links to buy. Thanks for listening. Thanks for joining us. If you loved this episode of xchatto, we'd love for you to subscribe, rate, and give a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. Until next time, cheers. [MUSIC PLAYING]