What if you could sit down with someone who spent more than 20 years enforcing H-2A regulations BEFORE they showed up on your farm for an audit?
Join FieldClock and special guest Warren Williams, a former U.S. Department of Labor Wage & Hour Senior Investigator and founder of WLW Consulting, for a free, actionable webinar designed to help you stay compliant, reduce risk, and build a better labor strategy for 2025.
You’ll walk away with:
This is your chance to learn from someone who knows the system from the inside—and wants to help you get ahead of it.
NICO
There we go. Have our folks come in out of the waiting room. Welcome, everyone. This is a special session that we're running here, so thank you for joining us. With everything going on with the Hua program, we thought it was definitely a good time to bring somebody from the inside. Just to give us a little insight, information into what is it that wage and hour actually looks for on a farm?
What is it that you can do on your farm as far as best practices, things to be mindful of not only before an audit, but during an audit and even afterwards. So I definitely wanted to thank our panelists here. Today. We have Ashley Reese, account executive here at field. And we've invited in Warren Williams, who was a former senior Dol wage and our investigator.
And Warren, I want to move over to this one here because in addition to providing the information today for us, you also provide what you consider a compliance assessment and action plan. And I just wanted to give you a minute to kind of run through and tell us what that's about.
WARREN
Thanks, Nico. Thanks, Ashley. I really appreciate you all allowing me to have this opportunity to speak to everybody and hopefully provide some great information that everybody can use that will help them to benefit their their farms and their operations and, and going forward. So just real quickly, I did 23 years of age, an hour. And one thing I noticed before I left was that small business, big business, there was a need for a little bit more compliance assistance in trying to make sure that everybody knew exactly what was going on with the regulations and so forth, that wage and hour in force.
And I just thought it was a lot of people don't have access to a, you know, a true HR or those departments in such a tax to their farm operations, you might be 1 or 2 deep and you're doing all the work. So at the end I retired and I said, well, you know, I'm going to start doing some consulting work.
And what I did was I came up with my, my, my signature statement. And I call this a compliance assessment action plan shortly. It's just called Cap and what we Do. I've teamed up with some people, H2, Visa Solutions and Ruth's Accounting bookkeeping. And what we do at first is like a step process. We try to get your payroll taken care of.
We get at least 2 to 3 years of payroll. Make sure your payroll is is ready, and make sure everything is in complete that you would have to present to an investigator if you need be. And that's also they can help you out with your your taxes if you need that information. Also, one thing we found, you know, from my experience, is that sometimes the wrong people get taxed when you're doing your payroll.
And that can be taxing H-2a workers, foreign H-2a workers, when they come to work on your farm. And that can be an issue for you. The next step of it is we have you do what's called an assessment review. And it's just some questions that I use. When I was a previous investigator and we made an assessment document that we want you to complete, it's going to extract some information from you.
So we can go through this particular assessment to see where there may be any kind of compliance gaps. We try to share best practices with you and provide resources to ensure that you're in compliance. That's something that I do, and it's usually be 1.5 hours, maybe two hours or so forth, and try to get that taken care of.
This is a caveat. We do this on a virtual type basis that helps folks who are I'm in Georgia, so it helps to help you out if you're not in this particular area and go from there. Now, it can be on site because there's a housing and transportation component of the assessment. And thirdly, we also work with Wendell Hall Hall Global, and that is to ensure that all the steps in one and two is prepare you to be properly defended.
If he has to defend you in a legal action that you may have with wage an hour or so altogether, we we call this.
Audit 316. So we try to make sure you're covered from all angles, all sides and everything that we try to do to help you to be compliant. And rest assured, you know. So just in case you get a knock at the door, we can educate you, we can empower you and have your attorney ready so we can reduce your risk.
So I'm glad to try to help you do that. And I'm glad to be here today. Thanks, Niko.
NICO
No, we definitely appreciate your time. And like you mentioned, you know, 90 minutes, two hours. Today we have about 30 to 40 minutes. So we're going to be covering some of the best practices. But if you do have more in-depth questions for Warren, please feel free and use the Q&A button below. We want this to be an interactive conversation, so we're here to answer live questions.
And if it goes very deep into the weeds with your specific farm, we're going to provide some contact information specifically for Warren, so you can reach out directly and get some insight information that relates directly to your business. One of the questions that we get a lot here is, are you recording this? And yes, we absolutely are. We know that farmers are busy.
So if you do need to jump off a little bit early, we are going to send a recording of this entire production. So before we get into our Q&A, I just kind of wanted to set the stage with how important the H-2a program is to farmers. And when you look at the national scale, yes, we have the top three.
You look at California, Florida, Washington, even Georgia, high concentrations of H-2a workers. But the American Immigration Council did a study looking at five years. And if you look at this chart on the right, this is a growing issue. If you see hotspots like Texas and Michigan, even to a higher degree, starting in some of the inland states, this is not going away.
In fact, it's just getting more and more intensified. And when you look at the wages that are being paid for H-2a, the a war rages. Farm Bureau did a study as well showing the increase over time. Just looking at the last two decades also not going down. We're looking at about a 6% roughly increase every year for these annual wages.
And if you're thinking, well, that's probably a large farm issue, not necessarily. If you look at over two thirds of the H-2a petitions, request fewer than ten workers. So this is very much a small farm and a large farm problem. And it's something that we want all of our clients to be mindful of. And all of the farmers out there that are not working with FieldClock yet, everybody needs to make sure that H-2a is top of mind.
And if you're going to use this program, make sure that you're using it correctly. And if you're in compliance, which most farmers are, make sure that you're able to prove that. And that's one of the things that we're going to be discussing with Warren today. It's not enough just to be in compliance. You've got to prove it because you don't know when wage and hour is going to show up knocking on your door.
We've talked before on previous webinars about the challenges with H-2a. We're talking we just mentioned wage increases. Warren mentioned housing and travel. There's a lot of moving parts and pieces to this program. And that's just once you're in it, when you're looking at approval, giving the approval process, there's a lot of regulation, a lot of bureaucracy to jump through, not to mention the language barriers.
There's a communication breakdown often between crew bosses and employees. So how can you shore that up? We're going to be talking about that as well today. The main thing, especially when you're talking about what Fuel Clock offers, is getting your records accurate. And we put that quote on the side there about how employers must keep accurate records, not only the number of hours worked, but the number of hours offered.
And I put a few different bullet points, just high level looking at what farmers need to consider when they're paying their employees. There's a lot of different wage types, from hourly to piece rate to bonuses to break times. You look at the three quarters guarantee for hours worked, and if you're on this webinar, you're probably already apprized of what a lot of these regulations are.
But how do you actually prove those regulations? And what happens if you're not able to prove them? That's what we're really going to dive into today. And we did a webinar last month with ag replacements. And we used this slide here specifically just to show that most of the violations, 42% actually are pay related. And that goes right back to how you're keeping the records of how you're paying your employees where they were when they did a job, what specific job were they doing?
And we have a quick little blurb here. From 2018 through 2023, 39% of those investigations found that there were other violations. And it goes into exactly how many layers, wage and hours starts to peel back when they're looking at your business. So I guess let's start there with our first question. I'm going to take our slides off so everybody can see here.
Let's just go right into this. You know, where does that noncompliance tend to occur? Warren you mentioned 23 years you worked for wage and hour. Where was most of that noncompliance coming from?
WARREN
It's a mixture in the the way you do the investigations wage an hour. So we want to make a point that I want everybody to understand that when you get a notification or somebody comes to your farm to investigate, you, please understand it's not just a to a compliance investigation. It's also going to have components of the Migrant Seasonal Worker Protection Act.
It's going to have a family with Standards Act, and you're going to have OSHA also involved. So you may have hear me refer to the migrants protection that is mitzvah. And then fairly standard ciders slate. Just so we understand those those components of it. So what happened from the last slide is that you're even though you're doing H-2a, you still have to be in compliance with those other three components.
And that also includes other things as far as state and local ordinances that are applied to that. So you're not just looking at doing H-2a. So it's 4 or 5 different laws that may be that you're going to have investigation. So I know there's a lot of changes that come out all the time. You have different changes with different administrations, but most of the time the enforcement is still pretty much the same.
The, the current if you if we look at things, if it's 75% violations in such areas like your record keeping your payroll, housing, inbound outbound transportation reimbursements, looking at your vehicles, make sure you have proper US worker recruitment and your postings. Make sure you have that that poster or posters that you need to have in your particular business so you and you would want to probably try to avoid as best you can.
Anyway, not being caught in a what we call I call them the multiplier violations.
NICO
Yeah. Explain that concept a little bit.
WARREN
So when you when you do an investigation that you may have all those acts that are in play like again once again H-2a by the Protection Act for Labor Standards Act and you're going to have OSHA. You might have some other state and local ordinances that come in. And let's not forget child labor. All of those things are looked at when you're in this particular in the investigation.
So if you if you have H-2a requires you to be compliant with the other the other four child labor or fairly standard like OSHA. So you could get a violation just because you're not in compliance with those other laws under H-2a. And then you look at those violations and those particular laws cause any other violations within H-2a. So just to look at some of the multipliers, anytime you have any kind of payroll violations, those could be multipliers.
Because if steps are going to be taking to see if you if the facts line up, then you could be charged per worker or per requirement. So you have to be real aware of those. There are 45 violations. As stated in the previous webinar. The FieldClock did 45 violations with the H-2a program. And that's just H-2a, the 29 with the Seasonal Protection Act.
And then you have others with OSHA and also with the Standards Act, with minimum wage, overtime, child labor and so forth. So anything dealing with your payroll, anything dealing possible with your housing and also with your vehicles that you those could be multipliers, meaning that you could be subject to a civil penalty for numerous violations or numerous employees involved with a violation.
So you just want to be very careful in those particular situations, particularly in the way situations and recruitment and so forth.
ASHLEY
So having, you know, a complaint or a report and an inspector coming to your farm really could create this waterfall effect of violations that they can open themselves up to.
WARREN
That's correct. That's correct. So and it's and it's not a you may have something that comes up and it's a complaint. Somebody called that made a complaint. And then you're setting yourself up for a real live investigation. So it's not it's not just somebody going to call you and say, hey, you know, you didn't pay somebody $100. It's not going to happen like that.
So it's going to be a full investigation. So you have to make sure you're in compliance with all of those laws. So you don't have any multiple violations. Or as we said, multiplier violations within the H-2a.
ASHLEY
So now what would you what would what triggers the Department of Labor to investigate.
WARREN
Well, we got a couple factors that are that are looked at every year. I worked in wage an hour. We did what we called, we did AG investigation. And as H-2a has progressed, it kind of started out mostly when I first started working with the Micro System Protection Act, he didn't really hear a lot about H-2a. The nature way started to develop.
I'm gonna say really around 2010. Eight. Ten. Somewhere around that time frame, and he started seeing more and more people using H-2a program. And they all come with certain regulatory requirements that you have to take care of and make sure that you're in compliance with. We would do initiatives and initiative is basically a a planned strike force that you may send people to one particular area, or it may be spread out over a certain location.
And then and you will go out and do ag work in those particular areas to see who's in compliance and go from there. That that was done pretty much every year. That's not not all offices do agriculture. But I'm in the southeast. I was in southeast and southeast does majority. I won't say all of it, but quite a bit of agricultural work is done within the southeast.
Then you would have got your complaints and somebody might complain something's happening. Anybody could complain, but worker could complain. Somebody else down the street to complain on you. Some other agency could complain. You might get a referral. Those things can can cause a complaint and cause wage an hour to come to your location. If you have a lot of violations from previous investigations, that could also be a clue is referred to as recidivism.
And that could also be a reason for ways to come out and certain areas and do do those types of investigations. Now the last one of the last two is media. And one thing I do understand is that I was I learned something from my previous experience when I was in the military, and they called it you were you were Mr. Big Ears.
So you're always listening, you're always watching. And then you might I might get a prequel across my phone that said, they had an accident in one of the cities around me. So you start looking into that information to see exactly what happened. You might hear they were five. There were 15 or 16 workers on a vehicle that flipped over on a road, and workers were hurt and so forth.
You really have to pay attention to that part of it, because one thing I know for sure is that workers are either coming from somewhere or they're going somewhere, and you have that many workers in a van or a truck or a bus, then something's going on with that particular situation, and you have to try to dig into it a little bit more.
You may call the police to share department, State Patrol and find out who was involved in the accident. And that can trigger that type of investigation because it could be a farmers bus, it could be affordable contractor bus. And that that could come to a point where you may be involved with that particular accident. Because even if you're using a contractor that does not exclude you from what could be an investigation because the workers are not.
I never met a contractor that had a farm. So the workers are either, like I said, coming from a farm or going to a farm. So my last part of that would be if you hire a contractor to kind of work on your particular property, then if that person is targeted or they have a complaint on that particular person, then your farm could easily be investigated also, because you're part of that item at that farm where the contractor is using and he's working on your farm.
So those are some of the things that can trigger you for an investigation.
ASHLEY
I'm really glad that you brought that up about the farm labor contractors. I feel like that's a common misconception. You know, I hire a farm labor contractor. They're liable. I'm not, when in fact, not only are you still liable, but let's say the farm labor contractor has a violation for another farm. Its opening the door essentially for your farm to get flagged.
But warn what happens when you get flagged as well as a farmer.
WARREN
Well, I would I would say first you also going to notify me when I was working at, hey, we got this complaint. We need somebody to look into this and we're going to sign an investigator to do that particular case. Me personally, and this is just how I did it personally. I had a lot of resources that I would look through and take advantage of before I actually came to your farm and said that the accident that I mentioned before, you know, we would have a I could go get a copy of the the police report, GSP report, sheriff's department, my interview, even the officers who were on scene.
And they're going to try to give me that information as far as what's on your farm. So it's just a lot of research that goes into doing these investigations. It's not that somebody just showing up at your farm and trying to start doing something. I did a lot of research before I came out to your farm. I checked social media for you to see if you were if you had a signature on a footprint, I would say on social media to see if so when I went to the farm, if the farmer is doing the social media video or such that I would know who I was talking to when I showed up at
the farm, because sometimes you show up and they might. The person I need to see I'm talking to might say they're not there, but it's actually a person I'm talking to. So you have that part of it. I'm going to check the the state of the state. I usually do State of Georgia corporate record and look your business up in the corporate record to see who all the offices of the business.
So maybe other folks that we need to get in contact with. Check prior history. If you if you've ever been investigated with wage and hour, you had history. The database had you full of history. And if if personally, if I had gone to your farm in the 20 years, I know you had history because I would have done an investigation on your particular establishment.
So I knew you had history there. I'm going to check if you're finding a contract. We're going to check with our sister at office in California to see if your licenses and certifications are correct. And in order to make sure that that you are in compliance when you're coming out to do those kind of things. Let's see what else I will do.
Of course, we need a prior report as far as with your history on it, to see if you had other violations or violations that you did have. If we go back to the location and you still have those same types of violations, then that could be an issue also for even a higher civil money penalty, because you didn't fix what needed to be fixed before.
One thing you have to remember is in the investigators here to find something wrong. So there's ways of trying to alleviate that. As I mentioned before, we can we can help you with that. As far as with the with with doing a mock on it with the people I work with. FieldClock has great portions of their platform that you can use is going to help you out with those kind of situation.
ASHLEY
Warren, I was really surprised throughout our conversations just how many tools the Department of Labor has at their disposal, you know, from social media and just access to to public records, you know, and thank you for for talking about field as well, because that's really where we're coming from is, you know, the the deck is stacked against farmers and they're bogged down with hours and hours worth of paperwork and compliance.
You know, and FieldClock really is here to be able to help level that playing field. And as are you and your services. You know, actually I'd love to do story time if you can. What would you say is the worst case scenario you've seen as far as, like, record storage?
WARREN
Well, I went to one place and all they had was the records in a box like you put, I would say watermelon box or any kind of large cardboard box, and they just kind of said, hey, the records are in there, take whatever records you need. And it was, I must say, 5 or 10 years worth of records just thrown into this particular box.
And that's that's not going to be a good day for the employer, because if something is missing, then you could stand a chance of being signed for not having payroll records, not having things in a proper order that you can provide to the investigator and go from there. So you really I talk a lot about the records because it's from my experience.
Your records kind of tell the story for your business. If you have good documentation, good records, things seem to be in order. I don't want to. I don't want to hear that they were in a fire or they wouldn't have said they got rained on or something like that. It just helps as far as making sure that you're organized.
If I, if, if I can come in when I was working and see that your operation looks organized, then something it probably is organized. If it looks to be a kind of disarray, a little bit sloppy, then some things might be missing. Some things might be out of out of order as far as that goes. So that's one thing to and I always reiterated as far as working with you, just make sure your records are in order all your time.
Remember, your your your whole thing revolves around the time that workers are working. And you just want to make sure that you have your records taken care of. And that was probably the worst. Ashley definitely seen worse. When I say worse or others where the days and I always say stop the days of using the spiral notebook. We just flip the pages every day and keep your time and all that kind of those days are over.
If you're going to use H-2a, that's just going to get you in a bind because you got to you have to have a lot more accurate records to be ready. If somebody does come to you doing it. And it's not just wage and hour. The other agencies would also check for labor and documentation for what the workers worked at and things of such.
So it's kind of a all around thing to make sure that you're complaining.
ASHLEY
Yeah. It seems like I mean from from this example, you have an entire bin filled with records. And if we take your example of the multiplier effect, you are now going through a bin of records and who knows what's in there. You know where. From what I understand, if wage and hour comes out, you want to keep them on track and you want to only give them what they're asking for and really not open the door.
You gave an example when we were talking the other day about not keeping your eye nines with your employee files, because again, that's the multiplier effect. And it opens the door for for wage an hour to be able to see other things and investigate further. So absolutely easy access to your records is is absolutely essential.
NICO
And you mentioned earlier, Warren, you know, the investigators job is to find violations. So the minute you're on the scene you're digging and you're looking and farmers don't have a lot of time to sit there and direct you where you need to go. So if they're trying to sift through a bin of records, wouldn't it be much easier if you just had all of these things digitized?
And if they're looking for a specific date and time and employee, you can pull that up in minutes as opposed to hours, because I'm assuming you don't really give them a lot of notice before you show up. And it's not like they're going to have time to prepare these things for you. They need to have them ready on hand.
WARREN
That's correct. No, we wouldn't you don't get any notice. It's a walk in basis. And and to me, I try to be very respectful to the former community when I was doing investigation. And that is to show up at your establishment and present myself to you with identification, to let you know that I'm there to do the investigation of what I was there to do the investigation for.
Did I have to do that? Not at all. I could just go to your fields. I could just go to your housing and just start talking to people, start looking around your housing. And again, I've done that years before. Now things have progressed. Everything is a little bit different now. All your information, your footprint is on the internet, so I don't have to get my vehicle to ride around South Georgia for all day just to try to find people who are working in the fields.
Your information, particularly age to way your information, is on seasonal jobs and you can just look in there. You can put a zip code in and say, hey, I need 20 miles from the ship code, and we go and see everybody in that particular zip code. And that's just how easy it was to take care of those kind of things.
So you really, like you said, just make sure you have your record. And digitizing it is very good because that way you can also provide the records timely. You can get the information to somebody. You're not dealing with a lot of paper, and you can get the information to me. When I was working, I just, you know, send it to me and take care of that kind of situation.
Please understand that, like I said, the investigator doesn't have to come to you to start the investigation. Respectfully. They should. Anybody I work with, I try to let sure that they know. Hey, respectfully, go and see the person. Let them know you're here to do whatever. I know that's very aggravating to anybody to show up and say you're coming to check the field, and next thing you know, you see 3 or 4 investigators in your field and you just that just set somebody off and that can put, you know, change things into a bad situation.
So no, the investigator doesn't have to do that, but I prefer that I did go do that because I just want to make sure I have respect for the person who's doing that particular work.
NICO
And given your history in the field, what are some of the common mistakes that you saw when you show up?
WARREN
Mainly in the field? Is not having a proper field sanitation and not having prescribed toilets or water and and so forth in the fields with everybody, people not actually knowing what's going on with your business operation. I think if you are within the management of the business, you should have some type of knowledge of what's happening within the business.
It was I would think if if you make sure that you know exactly what's happening day to day, I'm going to be our the hour. But day to day, what's going on with your particular business. What you might be harvesting. What's going on at that particular time. Let's see problems. Like I said, water. No toilets.
The staff, not knowing who or what or what they're going to do or who's involved with certain things. I think I made a list as far as in the best practices, and we'll talk about that a little bit later, as far as who you might want to have in your team, to make sure everybody's aware of what's going on.
NICO
That one's a big one. And actually, I kind of want you to talk about what field provides when you're talking about who is showing up that particular day to work on that particular job, to get paid a specific fee. If you're looking at pen and paper to to calculate that, you're going to get into some pretty deep issues quickly if you're trying to juggle all of those balls at once.
So I guess just talk a little bit about the advantages that you see from digitization.
ASHLEY
Yeah, absolutely. Instant access to your information, whether you're on their app or if you're in field, you're able to see exactly where your employees are and what they're doing. More than that, whatever you're paying your employees, whether it's salary, straight time, piecework, we have wage programs that help you stay and remain in compliance. So it doesn't matter whether your employees are switching from an hourly job to a piecework job, their pay is going to be within compliance for their H-2a contract, state regulations, you name it.
So this way takes the thought out of it. And it's really easy to share that information to wage an hour when they come out immediately and also separate that information. So you're not oversharing. You can simply show them Ashley's information or Nico's information or everyone under that specific contract, rather than opening the door to the rest of your operation.
NICO
Absolutely. And it's taking that gut feeling out of the things that you do on your farm every day and replacing it with with hard data. I know, Warren, we spoke a couple of days ago, and you mentioned when we talk about people issuing complaints, you mentioned there was a farmer that tried to fire a couple of workers because they thought that they were doing slow production.
Talk about that process a little bit. When a farmer is making a decision because they feel a certain way, as opposed to being able to actually prove it, right?
WARREN
Yeah. So going back to our previous conversation we had about me researching, I'm always looking at your job order. I read the entire job order to see exactly what's happening within your job order. And some everybody's job order has production standards, so there are other standards also involved with how much you can lift and so forth. So on this one, the the complaint was that the workers, the US workers were complaining that they weren't getting enough work and the H-2a workers were getting more work than them to do.
And I guess the feeling was that the.
The US workers weren't high enough in production to do such. So my partner and I, we just took some raw data, basically, thank God for Excel and interview some workers. And we're kind of beyond Excel now. That's all we got feels like. So we took the data, we interviewed the workers, and you find out what the baseline is as far as what the production is.
And they were doing piece rate type work. So you kind of find out where the the baseline is with the production. Once we put in the data for about a month, what we actually found out based on that particular information was that the H-2a workers were actually underperforming the US workers. So that can that can start a.
A ball rolling. As far as is this discrimination going on here with the American worker. And that's not something you want to be involved with as a farmer when you're discriminating against the US worker. Those those fines are extremely high. 22,000 I think it is now. So those kind of signs. So you just don't want to discriminate against the US worker.
If there's a performance issue then then you could probably do some type of remedial type action if you have something in place to increase the miners production. Maybe the person is learning how to do that. That's not the first time they've done it. They did it before, but it's just something that they have to get repetitive and try to do those kind of things.
So you just want to be very careful. And I'm sure just from knowing everybody here feels like that, you can you can track that data within the system and find out if somebody's performing below a certain standard, if you have a baseline and you can make a correction to that for that production just to make sure, because then person might just have something that might be bothering me that day.
They might have got a bad phone call. It might, you know, something. They might be a little sick. You know, just try to find out something that's going on with that.
ASHLEY
Yeah. No, I think that that's a great point. Both Warren and Nico taking the feelings out of farming, a lot of times, you know, you have a feeling about your workers performance, but you don't actually know or you have a feeling about a specific crop, but it's really hard to pull all that information together. But when you have a system in place, when you have the right tools in place to be able to actually show what their productivity is, you're able then to create a baseline or expectations.
And we all know that the cost of labor is not is is, is not going anywhere. It's the most expensive it's ever been. And as Nico mentioned earlier, it's it's increasing about 6% every year. And having a tool like FieldClock really allows you to take the feelings out and know exactly how well your crops are doing, how well your employees are performing, and it's easy.
Instant access. You don't have to wait until the end of the year when you're handling all of your paperwork. You can see it week to week. Make modifications to your employees productions. You can actually train with them, which I believe is one of the H-2a required steps before you're able to terminate someone as well. So you're able to do this easily within FieldClock
And you should be doing this because you should be making your decisions based on actual information and data rather than feelings.
NICO
Absolutely. And we've talked about it's not really a question of if, but when wage and hour shows up at your door. So we've talked about some of the consequences that you could face. We've talked a little bit about the process that you're going to undergo. Let's talk about best practices. So Warren, I bet a lot of the farmers here that are on this call today are just wondering.
All right. Well, what what can I do with whether before or during an investigation to really shore up my business?
WARREN
Sure. I made a long list, but kind of probably helps if you know the the actual process of the investigation. So somebody's going to show up. Basically, that's not including the work that I've done prior to coming to see you. So somebody is going to come to your farm, they're going to notify you that you're under investigation for compliance with H-2a mitzvah, fairly standard child labor, OSHA, right.
Then you're going to have a meeting with the management. And that's one of my points of interest here. As far as with the best practice, you you need to have what I, what I call a audit team, and you need to have some type of team in place and notify them when it's about to happen, because certain people will be brought into the meeting with the investigator.
And you have a what's called initial conference my and lasted a couple hours. So you have to be prepared to sit down with me. And because I had 7 or 8 pages of questions I want to ask you. So yes, you might get an appointment letter from the investigator and it's got questions and information. Well, I still have at least 3 or 4 more pages of those questions that that's not on that letter.
So you want to go through that. So one thing you can do is, is if you want to please conduct your own audit. That's all I mentioned earlier for our services that I do. My God help you get through that particular situation. So you're ready all the time for if somebody comes to inspect your housing, spectral housing and your vehicles and I say a minimum of twice a week, and I and I believe and feel like there's a way you can assign people duties and you can assign certain people to do those particular duties and report back to you and say, say something was found.
That way you can correct problems before the problem gets out of control and you can do those things. Let's see. See, I got develop assign roles to audit team responsibilities. Establish a notification process for staff when in the I is announced. And also have what what I have with my list is called a first call. Who are you going to call when the investigator shows up at your office?
Do you have an attorney that you use or contact your attorney so you can make sure you get legal guidance on what you need to do? That way you can have that person on call. I work with a great attorney that can do those kind of things for you, just to make sure you you're doing what you need to do.
One thing is you have to be very careful, minimize what you say, and don't say too much. If if I showed up in the field and you have a field supervisor, then that supervisor needs to be trained to know who to call when the wage and hour investigator shows up. And not sitting out there talking, talking, talking and giving up as we, as we all might say, spilling the teeth on on the business.
So you just don't want to do that kind of thing as far as that goes. One thing also very important, and it's happened to me a couple of times. I've had police called on me, Sheriff departments, all kinds of things. Please try not to be. And I know it's hard trying to be hostile to the investigator. This is like I said, respect goes both ways.
Try to go that way. Now, if the investigator is not acting appropriately and disrespectful, then contact their manager. Simple as that. You know that that's not supposed to happen. Things can move a lot easier as far as that goes. Professional as much as you can. They need to be professional. Also, introduce the investigator to the staff that you're going to be working with them on.
If you do a tour, because I used to do tours of the housing and my due tour of the break area, the whole facility. So have somebody with the investigator because I might be taking pictures, I might be taking notes. Then somebody needs to do that. Sometimes I would go to establish and there's a big note right above the time clock.
If you don't clock in, you're not going to get paid. Click. That's not something you want to have on your time clock. That's not going to work, especially from there on a complaint where the workers say they're not getting paid. That's that's not one of those things. Let's see, schedule for interviews. So your work is not interrupted on your farm.
Never admit to any kind of violations. That's funny. I want to provide the documents that you're supposed to provide. Okay. And this is where, of course, we have field to help with that. Complete the training with the workers, make sure all your reimbursements are done properly. Oh, it's just it's just me. And it's just just suggesting that I have if you're doing, like, the inbound transportation reimbursement, some people put it on the same paycheck.
I just my suggestions to put that on a separate payroll because the worker is going to be asked, did they get their money for any kind of reimbursements that they had. And that way that person can hopefully speak to the point that they they did get a check. Any the meeting is a three pronged investigation process. I'm going to talk to you.
I'm going to interview the workers. I'm going to check your payroll records. If you got a check, check, check law three, then more than likely you're okay. If one of those checks isn't correct, then there's a problem there and that's going to set off a red flag. Make sure the workers are working in the job duties that are on the the job order.
So you don't have any kind of misclassification.
Let's see. Niko.
NICO
Well, I'm glad you brought that part up because that's a big one there. When you're talking about what you worked versus what you were offered and what you're actually showing on the pay stub. And I guess, Ashley, talk a little bit about how FieldClock addresses some of those classification issues.
ASHLEY
Absolutely. So we would consider those to be tasks that are associated can be associated to job codes as well. So what we do is we make it really easy for you to take the tasks that are listed on your contract and utilize them in the system, so that when your employees are clocking into work, they can clock into a task.
And it's just going to show consistency between the work they're actually doing and what's on the contract. And additionally, if they're moving from task to task, we're going to break down their day and show. Ashley was working for hours at this task, five hours at that task, and we'll break down their tasks. And we also provide a compliance wage, statements that will break down your employees week or two weeks, whatever frequency you're paying them, and it'll show where they were working, how many hours they work there, how many hours they were offered.
And again, the variation between tasks as well as the location, which is all part of that H-2a compliance.
NICO
Yeah, that goes back to just proactivity. If you're keeping your employees in the know about what you're going to be paying them, and it lines up with what they've been offered, then you're not going to have a red flag. And as Warren mentioned before, the minute you get that single complaint, the magnifying glass is on your business and the layers start being peeled back.
So when we're talking about best practices and things that you can do, I think transparency is probably one of the biggest proactive steps you can take with your employees, whether it's notifying them of posters, notifying them of when their break time is, and making sure that they have access to their own records as well. I know here at full clock we have the employee portal.
At any given time, an employee in the field can look on their phone in real time and see, okay, where am I at this week? It's only Wednesday. I don't get paid until Friday. Where am I at with my productivity and my pay? And if things look off, they can go to their crew boss that day and they can work it out.
It might be just a simple mistake as opposed to getting a paycheck on Friday and saying, wait, no, I this is off by X number of hours. Now the employee is upset and they want to start talking to people about it. And Warren also you mentioned minimize what you say. It's not always vocally. If you have, as you mentioned before, a watermelon size box full of records, that investigator is looking at everything under the sun when maybe they only need to look at 1 or 2 employees.
So when you have a system like FieldClock and they need to see a specific record for a specific employee, you can show them detailed reports just in that very narrow focus, as opposed to lifting up the veil of the entire business and leaving yourself open to potential issues. So I want to be mindful of our time here.
Let's get to a little bit of Q&A for folks. And while we're answering questions, I do want to put some information up here for folks. If you do have more detailed questions, I'm just going to share my screen there. Please feel free to reach out either to Ashley Ashley at Field or directly to Warren. W.L. Williams 6684 at gmail.com.
And you can absolutely get into a much more in-depth questions, but we have a pretty active panel here, or audience, I should say. I'm just going to go down the list as they came in. We'll start off with peppy. So peppy is asking, once an audit has been triggered, do they also delve into the local workforce, or can they only be specific to H-2a workers?
WARREN
Is I'm guessing a Pep is, meaning the US workers that may be employed with the contract also. So the the investigation is going to encompass the entire job order, which we're going to ask. I'd ask how many US workers do you have working on the contract and what are they doing. So we're going to look at those workers.
We're going to make sure those workers understand that each everybody's going to be interviewed. We I like to take a opportunity to interview some of the US workers and some of the H-2a workers to make sure that we are covering across the board to make sure that certain things were done prior to the worker coming. How did they get here?
Did they have their expenses? Did they get reimbursed those kind of things just to make sure that we're, I hate to say, checking the box, but to make sure that the process was followed so that the person didn't violate any laws.
NICO
Follow up question from Pepe here. He says, we have two farms in two states, Washington and Oregon, and the wages are different for peace rate in both of those states. So how do you make that clear in the H-2a contract, so that workers don't think that you're that they're in violation?
WARREN
Since it's not as no agent on here, but what we're going to do is look and see, because of course, with the help of FieldClock if they're using FieldClock you're going to be geofence. So you're going to know where you were working, in which particular state you're working in and what job you were doing. And on your wage statement.
It should show, like some of the ones I've seen here, somebody might work in Georgia, they might work in Florida. So I might say Georgia, a little small GA behind that time, a little FL for Florida. And then that person will know I worked this state for those nine hours, and I worked the other state for a certain amount of hours.
So all that information is given to the worker, and they know that they are receiving the correct pay for the state they particularly worked in.
NICO
Gotcha. Yeah. And I think that all goes back again to transparency. If you have everything laid out and itemized on a sheet to actually mention that we do have a gross wage statement that we attach to each pay stub, they'll see exactly where they were, at what time, at which rate they were being paid.
WARREN
Right. And the question and you get a question like that from a worker, that might be kind of a red flag for a wage investigator, because that information should be spelled out in the job order as far as that go. So if you ask the person, did you get a copy of the job order, and did you see that information in there?
Let the way that out, depending on what the person's answer is to that particular question. So that could also be one of those things you want to make sure in your notification or your contract that's given out to the worker.
NICO
Yeah.
Carly is asking a good question here. So they're saying, can you inform us of timetables for correction for different violations? How is that established and what are the timetables for some of the other agencies. So I guess how long do they give you to correct some of these timetables or correct some of these violations.
WARREN
Well, if you mainly looking at housing we can start with housing first. Sometimes there's a what we would call a ten day grace period for you to get all your corrections done. If something was excuse me, something was noted to you that was wrong with the housing that you need to get corrected. That's the vehicles also that could also be with your payroll, because you have to make a good faith effort to try to comply with the law.
So you do have time housing for sure. I know it's ten days. Sometimes your payroll, some of that stuff can be corrected in a day or a couple of days or something like that. If you get a penalty for those violations, then in your rebuttal to the to the fine, you want to show how you corrected the the problem that was assigned to violation.
And I can that can help you as far as hopefully reducing your penalty in that particular violation and so forth. So ten days for the housing. Does that mean you're not going to be written up for the housing? No, it doesn't, but that that still means that you put a faith, you put a good faith effort into come into compliance.
NICO
And we had a kind of a follow up question in chat. If the violation can be remedied right there on the spot, will the investigator allow for that immediate correction?
WARREN
In my position as a senior, I could, but that doesn't mean you're not going to be written up for it. That was my that was my decision. That was my decision. And at the time, at that particular place, to have that kind of situation be taken care of and give it really quick. And I know we kind of slow with the time.
I had a guy that had a bus, the bus was in bad shape. I told him, look, by the time I get back here tomorrow, I need that bus fixed. I need the tires fixed, I need the windows. I never taken care of. Before I left that day. They were already taking care of some of that kind of things on the vehicle.
So I have a choice. I can write them up and get the bus fixed, or I can get that bus fixed and I can move on to the next thing. That was my position. I was able to make that kind of decision where I was working, being a senior so-called investigator to do that, because the long run, we're looking at safety and health of the worker.
I don't want to I don't want to say, oh, your tires about in three months later you find out about it, and that bus is going back and forth on the road. That doesn't do me any good, especially if that bus gets on the accident and I've been on that farm, so-called reviewing those kind of violations.
NICO
Absolutely. And again, it goes back to transparency, transparency, transparency. People need to know exactly what it is that they're doing at all times. And you need to be able to prove what they're doing at all times. There was a couple there was one question here about food safety. I don't think we're going to get into that one. I highly encourage you to reach out to Warren on that one.
Let's see also from Pepe here. So he's saying in the scenario where our H-2a workforce is already there on site, if they're mandated to offer employment to US workers, are they still obligated to hire them, even though the H-2a workers are still at the farm?
WARREN
So that's going to run into your job hiring obligation, your recruitment requirements for American workers up to the mark of the job order. So you got options there. You can, if the person is able, willing, able and ready to work, qualified to work, that employee should be hired for the U.S. worker should be hired. Now, does that mean you have to get rid of your H-2a worker?
It doesn't. You got a option to either send that person home, keep both people, and move forward. You do have an option that nobody's saying. You have to get rid of your your H-2a worker. And that's at the 50% mark. After the 50% mark, there is no requirement. But other than the law right now, as it stands at 60%, if you're within that time frame, say this is what July, your contract started in June.
Now you're in July. You still have to make every effort to try to hire American workers that apply for the job. And real quick, Nico, I say on that, please, please, please, if you if the number one category on a violation sheet for H-2a is US worker violations. So you have to make sure you do everything you can within your power as far as positive recruitment.
And please also check your referrals. If it's a walk up person you might have emails. You may get stuff from the swamp. Please make sure that somebody is checking those referrals. So make sure you're covering your cell phone that you don't want to be in a situation where we had workers that were qualified, but the employer never reached out to these these individuals.
NICO
Mike actually had a good question. It could be a long winded one, but he's asking what documentation absolutely needs to be kept on file and for how long.
WARREN
Our records should be canceled. Three years I've been in some meetings. Some people might say, keep them ten years. It just depends. That's coming from attorneys that I hear talking as far as lawsuits and people going back further. As far as that goes, three years for most of your records for examination. And like I said, in the service that we are, we try to make sure those records are compliant for you within that particular timeframe.
And which documents mainly your payroll part. Yeah, that's the long winded part as far as your payroll. That's why digitization is so great, is that you can keep more stuff on a record than you. Then you have to keep in a file box. As far as papers go. So three years is a good place to start if you want to keep them longer than that, that's fine, but I think you can store a lot more digital now than you could if you just want to have boxes and boxes, and we don't want a situation like we had with the ten years of papers in the in the watermelon box, that's not good.
We don't want to do that. So just organize them, keep them year or year and try to have it that way.
NICO
And actually just just feel like delete records after a certain amount of time. Or are they just always there?
ASHLEY
No. They're there.
NICO
Everything is on hand. Ready to go. A final question here. What is and this is also maybe subjective here. Mike's asking what's the ideal timeline for preparing for an audit. Not that you're going to get noticed though, Mike.
WARREN
No, you won't be. But but like I said, it's always and I think we talked about this the other day is like somebody told me I'd rather have something and not need that, need something to not have it. And having it is having a a transparency, having a way to perform audits in within your business. So you're always prepared.
The old Boy Scout saying, you know, be prepared. Just make sure you have your things in place so you can be ready for somebody to walk in the door. Like I said, nobody wants to go to sleep at night thinking that wage and hour the boogeyman is coming to get you. So please, please, please just try to make sure that you if you reach out to us, we can help you with that.
And just to give you peace of mind that you have your documentation and everything is taken care of for you. I'm not, I'm I am.
I was told when I started doing consulting that I had switched to the dark side. So it's just here to help. But I know farmers need help and I know the small farmer really, really, really needs help. You might be wearing 10 or 15 hats, so. And you have other agencies coming to see you. I know you have other types of inspections of people coming, so you don't just just let us help you out as we can.
NICO
Love it. I think that's a perfect statement to end on. And you don't know when these audits are. Investigations are going to come. But as we mentioned before, they can come from anywhere at any time. One final question here from it says anonymous. So they didn't want to give their name. They're asking Warren what would you consider a production standard violation.
Would one worker working slower than other workers on a crew with the same experience be a good measure, or are there production standards that wage an hour is looking for? I guess is a better way to put it.
WARREN
I see them in the job orders and if that worker is working slower, let's try to take a little time to find out what's going on with that worker. Like I said, they might have had a bad day. They might have got a bad phone call, they might be sick, they could be injured. But if it's consistency, if it's consistent going like that, then we want to check and see what's going on with that worker.
And they might have a production issue, as I said before, and I and I try to be quick with it. Is that you when I look at the production standard, just because somebody said they work in agriculture does not mean that they work in a particular type of agriculture that you have on your farm. They might have drove a tractor and say, that's agriculture experience.
Yes, that's correct. But now you have them doing some type of hand harvesting work. But we did find it's not everybody knows how to pick apples like somebody who's used to picking apples. So just because you did some other type of work may not be your production standard to meet, and that person might need extra training to get them up to the standard and see exactly what's going on.
ASHLEY
Yeah, and what I like.
I love that you asked this question because FieldClock makes it really easy for you to if you don't have standards, established a establish them. So taking and creating a baseline and from there holding your employees accountable to those standards. And you're going to not only be able to pay them appropriately. So regardless of their speed, we make making those minimum wage adjustments really easy.
But you'll also be able to see quickly visually their cadence of of picking. And then if they're moving slow, you'll be able to see is this a systemic issue? Is this something maybe they've had an off day. Let's say they've injured themselves. Great. Using our app you can take a picture. You can document that. If it's more than that, you can also train them, document their training to show that you're trying to mediate the situation.
So again all of these things are really good standards and really good practices especially you know, like I was saying earlier, is your cost of labor is really high. You want to make sure that you're maximizing your existing workforce. And if that means you know that maybe I ask Nico to come back next year, and I don't ask Ashley to come back next year.
You're able to do that, and to do that with all of the data backing and supporting your decision.
WARREN
Yeah. Real quick, Nico, as far as the follow up, what actually was saying when you're when you're checking that person's production and so forth. If that individual winds up getting terminated, you still want to have some type of documentation showing why you terminate that person. You just don't want to say, oh, I just got rid of them because they were not up to speed.
As far as that goes, you just want to have some type of documentation to show what steps you took to try to try to keep the person. Basically, if it's at a point where you just can't do anything about it, then you know you have to handle that situation as need be. Now, what I would caution you as far as that is just doing something like that, but also reach out to some legal counsel and find out how you know, what's the best practice as far as trying to do that.
But I would always say have some type of training program or something to make sure that you're covered and it's not looked at as a you just terminated somebody and got rid of them because that's not it could show something different and it could go a different way.
NICO
Yeah. And going back to Ashley's example, within a system like FieldClock you're also able to provide notes on each of the specific jobs, including visuals like photos as well. So if you have a worker that might be really fast, but the fruit is damaged consistently, you can make note of that, and you can make note of anything over a series of time.
And when it comes time to either reprimand or terminate, you have this body of evidence in front of you. It's not. Again, it's not a gut feeling. This is hard evidence that you're presenting either to them or to the investigator.
Well, I want to be mindful of everyone's time. We did go a little bit over. I appreciate everyone staying on and engaging with questions as well. Again, I'm going to share my screen.
Sure, I've got the right one just so that the contact information is up. And if you do have a more in-depth question for Warren or for Ashley, please reach out. I'm also going to send out a copy of this recording, and I'll include their contact information as well. And honestly, I think, Warren, we could probably spend another hour, if not more, diving into some of these specifics.
I'd love to have you back on again. And folks, please feel free to reach out to us if there's a topic that you feel we could cover in In Depth in a future session, reach out to us and we're happy to do so. But I want to take the time to to thank Ashley Reece for joining us today.
And special thank you to Warren Williams and to everyone that showed up with your engaged questions. We like to put sessions like this together to just keep people in the know. These are topics that are very impactful to every organization that we work with, and we want to make sure that the ad community has as many resources as possible.
As Ashley mentioned earlier, Wage and Hour has the entire government behind them, with resources staffed and budgeted to make sure that they find violations. So we want to make sure that you, the farmers, have just as many resources in your belt to make sure that you can prove exactly what it is that you're doing. We know a lot of farmers out there are doing the right thing, and we want to make sure that you can prove it and that you can prove it quickly.
And that's really what we're here to provide. So thank you to everyone for joining in. We look forward to seeing you on the next one.
ASHLEY
Thank you so much.
WARREN
Thank you everybody.