Budgets in Washington are not necessarily complicated, but they are long. The Senate and House budgets both clock in hundreds of pages of scintillating reading. Among the entries in this year’s budgets are requests that are nearly identical in purpose: farmworker and employer outreach.

The budget requests from the Department of Labor & Industries (L&I) and the Employment Security Department budgets are different but have the same intent – to ensure farmworkers are aware of their rights and employers are aware of their responsibilities.

The Department of L&I is the natural home for these outreach services, as the enforcement agency for everything from pesticide compliance to housing checks. Furthermore, L&I is already doing on-farm outreach to farmworkers to ensure they are aware of their rights and to employers to ensure they are aware of their responsibilities to their employees. 

In fact, if agricultural employers want informational packets about how to discuss anything from COVID safety to health insurance with their employees, their first stop should be the local L&I office or the department’s online portal.

However, the current $4.5 million budget request for 15 “outreach workers” seems a little steep considering L&I was able to conduct “384 agricultural workplace safety and health inspections” before the end of 2020 with its current staff.

The near twin request from ESD is even more troubling. ESD staff admit it is not a field-check agency but, rather, a paperwork clearing house.

In 2019, ESD staff began a campaign for additional resources to administer the H-2A visa program, claiming the influx of farmworkers was more than the department could keep up with. The H-2A program is a Federal temporary visa program allowing foreign-born farmworkers to work in the United States for up to 10 months at a time. Washington state is regularly among the top five H-2A employers in the country because of the lack of local farm labor. At the end of the 2019 legislative session, the Agricultural and Seasonal Workforce Services Committee was created to assess the need for additional administrative funds at ESD.

The report issued by that committee this year, did not make a definitive recommendation regarding the outreach activities of ESD. The report did note the committee would help ESD develop ways to “examine the allocation of the funding sources for the H-2A administrative functions and identify gaps in funding and needed resources to address those gaps if they exist,” implying no need for the current $3.5 million to cover 14 FTEs budget request by ESD.

Rather than having multiple agencies duplicate work, why not assign the funding where it will be of the most use? The Department of Labor & Industries is already tasked with doing on-farm checks and should be the agency that continues to do that work. As for the expansion of L&I’s staffing to successfully conduct on-farm checks, any budget requests should be tempered with good judgement.

If L&I was able to conduct 384 enforcement visits in 2020, the year of COVID, imagine how much more effective L&I staff will be with many of those restrictions lifted this growing season. Rather than hastily adding to the staff at L&I, waiting to see how the current staff operates without the restrictions of COVID seems like a more appropriate response to gauge the department’s true effectiveness during on-farm visits.