[Under the new visa pilot program, the administration is
prioritizing growers’ profits over farmworkers’ rights.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

BIDEN IS PAYING GROWERS TO REPLACE FARMWORKERS WITH BRACERO CONTRACT
LABOR  
[[link removed]]


 

David Bacon

Truthout
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Under the new visa pilot program, the administration is
prioritizing growers’ profits over farmworkers’ rights. _

Farmworkers brought to the U.S. in the H-2A visa program harvest
melons early in the morning in a field near Firebaugh, in
California’s San Joaquin Valley. , David Bacon

 

On September 22, 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
announced 
[[link removed]]it
would begin paying growers to use the notorious H-2A contract foreign
labor (or guestworker) program. Tapping into $65 million from the
American Rescue Act, the USDA will pay between $25,000 and $2 million
per application to defray the expenses of recruiting migrant workers
from three Central American countries — Guatemala, Honduras and El
Salvador — transporting them to the U.S., housing and feeding them
while they’re here, and even subsidizing part of their wages. Labor
contractors, who compete with each other to sell migrant farm labor to
growers at low wages, will be eligible as well as growers themselves.

The H-2A program is the modern version of the old bracero
[[link removed]] scheme,
under which growers brought Mexicans to work in U.S. fields from 1942
to 1964. Workers had to pay bribes to come, were kept separate from
the local workforce, and deported if they protested or went on
strike. Because of widespread abuse of the workers who came through
the program, and growers’ use of bracero labor to prevent
farmworkers from organizing, the program was abolished 
[[link removed]]—
one of the main achievements
[[link removed]] of
the Chicano civil rights movement. But even at its height, the U.S.
government never actually paid growers to bring in workers. Now, the
Biden administration is doing just that.

The H-2A program allows growers to recruit workers, who today mostly
come from Mexico. They can and do discriminate, 
[[link removed]]hiring
almost entirely young men and then pressuring them with production
quotas to work as fast as possible. Workers have an H-2A visa, which
allows them to stay only for the length of their contract — less
than a year — and they cannot legally work for anyone other than the
grower or labor contractor who recruits them. They can be fired for
any reason, from protesting to working too slowly, and once they are
terminated, they lose their visa and must leave the country.
Recruiters maintain blacklists of workers fired for those reasons, and
especially for striking and organizing, refusing to rehire them in
future seasons.

Although the bracero program had ended in 1965, the H-2A visa category
reestablished a contract labor program, in the Immigration Reform and
Control Act of 1986. The program remained relatively small until it
began to mushroom during the Bush and Obama administrations. The Biden
administration is now expanding it even further by subsidizing growers
who use it.

The Biden administration’s purpose for its subsidy program, called
the Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Pilot Program (FLSPPP), is
political. In announcing it, the USDA lists three goals. The first,
“addressing current labor shortages in agriculture,” means not
just giving growers a government-sponsored labor recruitment system,
but even paying them to use it. While growers complain about labor
shortages, unemployment in farmworker communities is higher than in
urban areas. Agribusiness has been intent, however, on keeping wages
extremely low. Many growers were Donald Trump supporters
[[link removed]],
and the rural areas of California and Washington State are still
littered with old Trump signs from the 2020 campaign. But hope dies
hard. The Biden campaign would welcome whatever support it can get
from agribusiness in the tight 2024 election to come.

Samantha Power, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International
Development, held a meeting with growers
[[link removed]] at
the USDA in September 2022. She thanked them for working with the
administration on “a critical priority — expanding the pool of
H-2A farmworkers from Central America, specifically from El Salvador,
Guatemala, and Honduras.” “We have got your back,” she promised
them. “We are committed to helping maintain a strong pipeline of
experienced farmworkers to support you.”

The second stated goal of the pilot program is to “reduce irregular
migration from Northern Central America through the expansion of
regular pathways.” As Republicans attack the president for being
“soft” on immigration, the Biden administration hopes to forestall
caravans arriving at the border by channeling thousands of potential
migrants into work visa programs. The FLSPPP does nothing to change
the conditions that produce migration, nor does it allow migrants to
access the asylum system and become U.S. residents. In fact, it is no
coincidence that a work visa program is being unveiled as Biden
negotiates with Republicans over measures to make the asylum process
basically unavailable to those same migrants fleeing poverty and
repression.

The third goal, “improving the working conditions for all
farmworkers,” is political theater. Applicants for subsidies under
the pilot program are required to provide H-2A workers with living
wages, overtime pay, workers’ rights training, health and safety
protections, and no retaliation if they try to organize a union. These
protections and benefits — in many cases, simply the base legal
requirement — don’t even exist on paper for almost all farmworkers
who are already living in the U.S. And because, according to
the National Agricultural Workers Survey
[[link removed]],
about 44 percent of all farmworkers are undocumented, it’s difficult
for them to use what legal protections exist. However, instead of
pushing for immigration reform that would provide them with legal
status, the Biden administration is helping growers bring in H-2A
workers to replace them.

With weak enforcement on the ground, it’s unlikely that H-2A workers
would get these benefits either. Violations of the rights and minimum
standards for both H-2A and resident farmworkers are endemic in U.S.
agriculture. The program contains no funding for even a minimal
increase in Department of Labor (DoL) investigations of existing
violations, much less those to come.

The proposal shocked many farmworker advocates and organizers. A
number of them sent a letter of protest
[[link removed]] to
the Biden administration, which I also signed as a fellow of the
Oakland Institute. “As farmers, farmworkers, and their advocates, we
are writing to express our indignation that USDA is committing $65
million of public money to pay farm employers, including Farm Labor
Contractors, to raise wages, improve housing or other adjustments for
H-2A workers before making any significant changes in the conditions
of the millions of farmworkers already in this country,” the letter
read.

Documentation of worker abuse in the H-2A program goes back decades,
and many farmworker advocates and unions doubt it can be reformed.
“Because of its record of abuse of both H-2A workers and local
farmworkers,” the protest letter stated, “we have called for the
abolition of the H-2A program for many years.” Sarait Martinez,
director of the Binational Center for Oaxacan Indigenous Development,
which organizes farmworkers against wage theft and other abuse,
told _Truthout_, “This program pits resident farmworkers against
contract workers recruited by growers, and makes it impossible to end
the poverty in farmworker communities, treating it as normal and
unalterable.”

At the same time that USDA is handing out subsidies, the enforcement
system that should protect farmworkers from wage theft, illegal wages,
and other violations of workplace standards and rights is in freefall.
A 2023 study
[[link removed]] by
the Economic Policy Institute found that investigations by the
Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) have plummeted by
over 60 percent — from a high of 2,431 in 2000 to only 879 in 2022.
The department has only 810 investigators for the nation’s 164.3
million workers, or one inspector per 202,824 workers. As a result,
the DoL only investigates fewer than 1 out of every 100 agricultural
employers each year, although, notes the study, “when WHD does
investigate an agricultural employer, 70 percent of the time, WHD
detects wage and hour violations.”

From 2000 to 2022, violations of the H-2A visa program accounted for
roughly half of the few cases in which employers were forced to pay
back wages and civil penalties, rising to nearly three-fourths during
the Biden administration. Because enforcement is weak, cases of
employers and labor contractors using H-2A workers to replace local
workers, and cheating those H-2A workers, are multiplying.

One example of cheating occurred with notorious labor violator Sierra
del Tigre Farms in Santa Maria, California. In September 2023, more
than 100 workers were terminated before their work contracts had ended
and told to go back to Mexico. The company then refused to pay them
the legally required wages they would have earned. Its alter
ego, Savino Farms, h
[[link removed]]ad
already been fined for the same violation four years earlier, an
indication that the profits of labor violations outweigh the small
penalties.

One worker, Felipe Ramos, was owed more than $2,600. “It was very
hard,” he remembers. “I have a wife and baby girl, and they
survive because I send money home every week. Everyone else was like
that too. The company had problems finding buyers, and too many
workers.” In fall 2023, Rancho Nuevo Harvesting, Inc., another labor
contractor, was forced by the Department of Labor to pay $1 million in
penalties and back wages to workers it had cheated in a similar case.
The frequency and seriousness of these cases in one relatively small
valley alone indicate that the problems with the program are
fundamental, structural and widespread.

As the USDA “pilot” subsidy program is being rolled out, the U.S.
Department of Labor has proposed a set of reforms
[[link removed]] it
says may reduce the long-documented abuse of H-2A farmworkers. Yet
even in the published text 
[[link removed]]of
the proposed reforms, the DoL staff who drafted it summarize the
structural reasons that make the impact of reforms so doubtful:

Over the past decade, use of the H-2A program has grown dramatically
while overall agricultural employment in the United States has
remained stable, meaning that fewer domestic workers are employed as
farmworkers. … Some of the characteristics of the H-2A program,
including the temporary nature of the work, frequent geographic
isolation of the workers, and dependency on a single employer, create
a vulnerable population of workers for whom it is uniquely difficult
to advocate or organize to seek better working conditions. … This
lack of sufficient protections adversely affects the ability of
domestic workers to advocate for acceptable working conditions,
leading to reduced worker bargaining power and, ultimately,
deterioration of working conditions in agricultural employment.

The existing local farmworker workforce suffers from the conditions
the Department of Labor describes. In another wage theft claim in July
2023, a group of resident workers charged that high-end winery J. Lohr
conspired with a group of labor contractors to pay less than the
minimum wage, while hiding records of the violation. The Binational
Center for Indigenous Community Development, which brought the suit,
has fought five similar cases in the last year.

About 2 million workers labor in U.S. fields. Last year, the
Department of Labor gave growers permission to bring 371,619 H-2A
workers
[[link removed]] —
or about a sixth of the entire U.S. farm labor workforce — an
increase from 98,813 in 2012
[[link removed]].
Employing such a large quantity of H-2A labor cannot be done, as the
DoL admits, without displacing domestic workers, who continue to
endure extensive wage theft and an average family income of $20,000
per year.

Employers who hire local workers are ineligible for the pilot program
subsidies unless they recruit H-2A workers — essentially bribing
them to use H-2A workers to replace residents. There is no requirement
from the USDA that employers of local workers implement any of the
pilot program’s conditions, and no additional resources are destined
for defending the existing farmworker workforce. This will directly
hit farmworker families and communities across the country.

The Biden administration’s political calculations could prove
disastrous as well. By doubling down on the program, it is essentially
telling farmworkers and their advocates, in an election year, that the
administration is solely concerned with the welfare of growers. Yet
almost all farmworker unions and communities campaigned heavily
against Trump in 2020. They were often Biden’s main support in rural
areas where growers were solidly in the Republican camp.

“By implementing this pilot program, the Department of Agriculture
has failed miserably to engage with us or hear our arguments,” the
protest letter concluded. “We call upon USDA to cancel it and
redirect the $65 million to a campaign to rebuild the domestic farm
labor force.”

A MESSAGE FROM TRUTHOUT’S EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

For 22 years, Truthout has been a platform for new and daring ideas,
uplifting voices and producing trailblazing, award-winning journalism.
The stories we’ve published over the last two decades have been read
by tens of millions of people and inspired the conversations and
actions that are necessary for social change.

But to continue publishing meaningful, powerful, inspiring journalism,
we still need to raise $82,000 before December 31st — and for a
limited time, any donation you make will be matched, dollar for
dollar.
 

This fundraiser is our most important drive, and the perfect time to
make your end-of-year donation. Your support is both vitally needed,
and deeply appreciated, so if you’re in a position to give, please
make your tax-deductible gift today.
 

_—Ziggy West Jeffery_

DAVID BACON [[link removed]]

David Bacon is a writer and photographer, and former union organizer.
He is the author of several books on labor, migration and the global
economy, including _In the Fields of the North / En los campos del
norte_
[[link removed]], _The
Children of NAFTA
[[link removed]]_, _Communities
Without Borders
[[link removed]]_, _Illegal
People [[link removed]]_ and _The
Right to Stay Home
[[link removed]]_. His
photographs and stories can be found at here
[[link removed]] and here
[[link removed]].

* Farm Workers
[[link removed]]
* farm labor
[[link removed]]
* Bracero
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]