June 2009

H-2A workers eager to return year after year

By Kathy Dixon

Antonio Dominguez-Gomez is several months into his ninth year of employment at Saunders Brothers Inc. in Nelson County. He took last year off to “rest” for a year and work construction in his native Mexico.

However, the pay wasn’t very good, and Gomez decided to come back to Saunders Brothers this year as an H-2A worker.

In Mexico, he earned about $20 a day. Under the H-2A program, Gomez earns the program’s Adverse Effect Wage Rate of $8.85 per hour.

Saunders Brothers hires its H-2A workers to work from mid-February through mid-November. If Gomez works an eight-hour day, six days a week, for about 40 weeks during that time, he’ll have grossed close to $17,000 by the time he returns to his country.

By contrast, after working for a full year in Mexico at $20 a day, six days a week, Gomez earned only $6,240.

“It’s better to work here,” he said of the nursery and orchard operation. He plans to come back again next year.

“But I want your house,” he joked with personnel manager Jim Saunders.

Another H-2A worker, Jose Dominguez-Custodio, has worked for the Saunders nursery eight years. He said he needs to work in the United States because the economy in Tizapan, Mexico, is poor and the pay rate is not good.

“What I make here in one day would take one week there,” Custodio said.

H-2A can create a win-win situation for both agricultural producers and the H-2A workers.
“We depend on them as much as they depend on us,” said Dana Boyle, whose Westmoreland County family farm hires four H-2A workers each year. “We don’t ask them to do anything we wouldn’t do ourselves.”

Boyle said she and her husband have worked side by side in the fields with their workers. “They’re like family to us now,” she added.

That relationship extends beyond the growing season. During the past seven years, Boyle and her husband, Bernard, have visited their H-2A workers in Mexico three times, sometimes with other family members. When they visit, they stay in a hotel or resort somewhere nearby and then travel to their employees’ town and spend several days with them, living in their homes.

“We just love going down there,” Boyle said. “Their little girls call us their aunts.”

And while the workers are in Westmoreland County, Boyle said, they are invited to all of her family’s gatherings. During her visits to Mexico, “their family treats us like we treat them here.”