Adrienne Dervartanian

Judy Cooper hired temporary foreign workers to help out at her Flat Top Mountain fruit and vegetable farm for three years, and this year she received a break on their wages because of a regulation from the closing days of the Bus hadministration.

But starting today the U.S. Department of Labor will suspend the regulation for nine months so officials can re-examine the federal H-2A program, which allows U.S. agricultural employers to hire foreign workers.

The Bush regulation, which went into effect Jan. 17, reduced the required hourly wage paid to foreign workers.

Mrs. Cooper said she paid guest workers $9.13 an hour last year. This year, she is paying $7.35 an hour. She employs six workers under the H-2A program and has four U.S. workers.

The struggling economy is hurting growers, she noted, and paying higher wages will hurt even more.

"I could see paying $8, but $9.13 is a lot of money," said the co-owner of Maw Hughes Farm & Nursery.

"If you have to pay more money to get (your crop) gathered, you have to raise your prices, too, but the people over here, because their money is tight because of the economy, are they going to be able to afford it?" said Mrs. Cooper. "Labor is only one part of the pie."

The H-2A program is a federal program for hiring seasonal agricultural workers when U.S. labor is in short supply. In 2007 there were almost 77,000 workers certified under the program -- 6,781 workers certified in Georgia and 2,550 in Tennessee.

Department of Labor spokesman Michael Volpe said the department can't comment on its decision to waive the Bush regulation because of pending litigation against the suspension. However, in the Federal Register the department stated its concerns with confusion created by the new regulation as well as the significant reduction of wage rates for farm workers, which it said hurt foreign and U.S. workers.

There also are two pending lawsuits opposing the Bush regulation.

Before the Bush regulation, employers paid workers the higher of three wages -- the adverse effect wage, which is set each year by the Department of Labor, the applicable prevailing wage or the statutory minimum wage -- which acted as an incentive to get U.S. workers to take the jobs, said Douglas Stevick, an attorney with Southern Migrant Legal Services.

In Georgia, the minimum wage growers had to pay last year was $8.53, compared with $7.25 under the Bush regulation.

While the Bush regulation streamlined the H2A application process, critics argued growers had less obligation to recruit U.S. workers.

Local growers say that despite the current economy they can't find U.S. workers.

"It would be great if we could hire Americans to do the work, but right now the local people are not hungry enough to work in the field," Mrs. Cooper said.

Dawson Morton, senior staff attorney for the farm workers rights division of Georgia Legal Services, said there have been a lot of applications from U.S. workers seeking agricultural employment.

"I think that with the economy the way it is there's an increase of American workers looking for any type of employment, including agricultural employment," he said. "And in rural Georgia, a lot of U.S. workers have agricultural experience."