I haven't been following the story, but apparently the Federal government is about to impose a rule, maybe this week, which would redefine certain things about the "guest workers" which sheep ranchers rely upon. Specifically, it would have the impact of increasing their wages several fold. The industry is opposed to it.
Now, I like sheep and I like sheep ranching, although my direct exposure to it is fairly low. So this may sound surprising, but I don't really buy off on the industries argument here.
The industry is really opposed to this change as they view it as economically devastating. I don't buy it.
What I do think is the case is that we've seen a real evolution in sheep ranching since World War Two. Up until the Second World War, and indeed for some time there after, we saw a lot of immigrant labor in sheep ranching to be sure, but we saw a lot of family labor too. Almost anyone who had sheep in that period, and well into the 1980s, can tell you about spending plenty of time on sheep trails and in sheep trailers. My wife, for example, can relate those stories. Ranches had hired herders if they had enough sheep, but family members also spent a lot of time doing the same thing. The herders themselves included a lot of Europeans, quite frankly, including Basque and Irish herders. I can well recall Basque herders from my youth and at one time I sort of naively assumed that all sheep herders were Basque.
An interesting thing about this is that it was sort of commonly assumed that the European herders were born into this line of work, but that was never true. The Basque in particular tended to have no experience in sheep tending until they got to the US. Rather, for cultural reasons it was easy for them to take the sheep herding jobs and for many years this was a step into sheep ranching. In later years it wasn't, as acquiring a ranch became too expensive, but it was a step into some other line of work. The same is true of the Irish tenders, who typically were working for somebody they were related to in the US.
Now, there are no more Basque and Irish sheepherders. Economic conditions have changed in Europe and with that the desire, probably, to move to a foreign country and herd sheep had gone. Most of the herders now are foreign, and they're mostly from South America. Some are from Mexico, but I'd guess that right now there are more Peruvian herders than Mexican ones (and it's worth noting that economic conditions in Mexico have so improved over the last 20 years that the same story with Irish and Basque herders is likely playing itself out with Mexican herders).
Anyhow, the story always is that the ranchers rely on these guest workers and implicitly, they have to be paid very low wages in order to make this work out. The extended argument is that Americans won't do this work.
Well, I doubt much of that is fully accurate.
For one thing, I've tended to notice in recent years that sheep ranchers leave a lot of sheep untended. They never would have done that in the past. As I see family members heavily involved in cattle ranching, I wonder what's going on with sheep ranching. I'm sure that most family members on a sheep ranch don't want to live out their existence in a trailer, but as plenty have and do on cattle trails, I'd bet that they would for a time on sheep ranches too.
And I'm skeptical that no Americans will take these jobs. Indeed, I've seen the phenomenon of young idealist college grads taking low paying agricultural jobs just to be part of it. And I've also noted that there are quite a few young, and even old, men who take ag jobs as it suits them, even with the wages in the basement. So, by paying really really low wages, the effect I think is to actually exclude Americans who would take the jobs if they could.
Of course, that would mean some changes to the industry to be sure, but part of that change might men more, but smaller, bands of sheep, on more family places. That might very well be how the economics of that would work out. And that would be okay.
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