Nebraska is right in the heart of the country, but the controversy of foreign migrant workers hits right here at home during the summer corn detasseling season. Brace yourself - there’s so much info here that we’re going to give you a bonus Fast Fact at no extra charge!
Here are Fi...I mean SIX Fast Facts about corn detasseling in Nebraska:
- 🌽What The Heck Is Detasseling? Unless you’ve grown up around corn, you probably don’t know this. In short, it’s using manual labor to remove the tassel from field corn to control pollination and cross-breeding. This control is how we get things like disease resistance or drought tolerance.
- 💰The Tradition - This job has traditionally been a common summer job for Nebraska teens. It’s hard work, but pays well above minimum wage and is often viewed as a rite of passage here. In recent years, though, it’s been shifting hard toward foreign migrant workers. Hasn’t everything??
- 🌎Why Foreign Workers? Companies who lean on foreign workers say they are cheaper, require less oversight, and are more productive than local teens. They leverage H-2A visas, which allow ag companies to hire seasonal foreign workers if locals don’t provide enough of a labor force. The ol’ “jobs Americans won’t do” thing, you know.
- 📈The Shift - This is becoming common. From 2015 to 2021, Nebraska’s H-2A workers have grown by almost 250%. That’s a lot of unemployed teens - for the sake of their parents, this must stop!
- 😲🤯The Controversy - In 2019, the Ricketts admin found that there were hundreds of local teens willing to do the job…but detasseling went to foreign workers anyway. They tried to block this, but the Feds intervened in favor of the foreign workers. Wait, what?!
- 🤥🦹The Scandal (Maybe) - Aaaand here’s where it gets interesting. Nebraska officials found that H-2A contractors often deter local teens by posting deceptive job descriptions, inaccurate dates (like working during the school year instead of summer), incorrect age requirements, and outright deception (like detasseling hemp…which isn’t a thing). Why, oh why, might they do this? That’s a very good question…
🔥Bottom line: From the outside, we can only speculate about the motivation here, and most ag companies aren’t saying. On a completely unrelated note, using H-2A contractors allows ag companies to sidestep responsibility for workers comp, liability and unemployment insurance, housing, and even transportation and drinking water. We’re not suggesting that all ag companies are scheisters, of course. But it does seem like someone is getting shucked. Maybe both the teens and the migrant workers...?
What’s your experience with detasseling corn?
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