By Tom Henderson • Staff Writer • 

Wineries face worker shortage

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Comments

gregtompkins

Good I hope this intoxicants and environmental destroying industry goes bankrupt and flees back to California (and take all their illegals with them.)

Rotwang

Which intoxicants, Greg?

gregtompkins

Rotewang wine and cannabis

Mike

Soon there will be hemp. Not an intoxicant. Has many uses for its fiber. The grass seed and the hazelnut farmers use as many or more poisons as the grape farmers.

tagup

Hops, barley, corn.?......I guess they all gotta go!

Oregonize

How about all those large wholesale nurseries that employ mainly undocumented workers, use huge amount of pesticides, drains our aquifer, gravel over thousands of acres of farm land and don't even produce a food product? I never seem to hear anything about that.

gregtompkins

@ Oregonize yep ! That too! Most of those huge nurseries that are doing that are also from California. I work for one in the Aurora area but they are Bellingham based and inside greenhouses and use far less chemicals because indoors pest management is easier. And we only use H2A and E Verify which I think is unusual for the industry. Farmers and nurseries seem to turn a blind eye to fraud as long as they get their cheap work, and liberal welfare state provides the fringe benefits then everyone wins, right?

tagup

“Most of those huge nurseries....are from California “.....making up facts to fit your argument now?.....That’s not even close to accurate.....by the way, many of the bigger players are using H2A as well, due to the shortage of workers.....at least try to be honest please....

gregtompkins

tagup and tech industry uses H1B and brings in foreigners from South Asia to work here. I know they too are doing the work that’s beneath the dignity of American Citizens to do, too, right?

RobsNewsRegister

>tech industry uses H1B

And that process gets abused like crazy. I remember when I worked in the PDX area during the dot-com bust the unemployment rate for electrical engineers was higher than the overall unemployment yet they didn't scale tech H1Bs back. Companies love those visas because they can keep wages down and basically own the foreign worker.

gregtompkins

RobsNewsRegister Yeah I don’t understand why companies do that? When I worked at PacifiCorp in Portland and was living directly across the street I’m those apartments on 7th - they for some reason hired many H1Bs from India. It didn’t seem efficient at all unless for a write off because all we were doing is training them not the other way around. And I remember being annoyed with how many they crammed into a single apartment and how they paced up and down the common areas on the phone to keep their own unit quiet but to the detriment of everyone else. When I was at adidas working in Annecy their offices were similarly filled with lots of workers from India. Why do they do this?

RobsNewsRegister

Greg- I went to a engineering graduate school and then worked with lot of people from India and believe the way it works is that the company basically owns the visa. Talk about leverage! You have to tow the company line or get kicked out of the country I think. A couple have since moved back to India but one I lost track of planned on becoming an American citizen. Talk about being a defender of America. I made the mistake of being critical of our country on one thing or another around him and he let me have it!

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