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'MANY WORKERS WILL SUFFER': DAYS AFTER ELECTION, TRUMP QUIETLY
FREEZES WAGES OF FARM LABORERS
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Jake Johnson
November 9, 2020
Common Dreams
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_ "The Trump administration is trying to get a lot of stuff like this
out the door ASAP." _
Farm laborers from Fresh Harvest working with an H-2A visa harvest
romaine lettuce on a machine with heavy plastic dividers that separate
workers from each other on April 27, 2020 in Greenfield, California. ,
Brent Stirton/Getty Images
Just days after U.S. voters went to the polls to help deny
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President Donald Trump another four years in the White House, the
Trump administration issued a little-noticed rule freezing the wages
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farm laborers working under H-2A visas, a move that could severely
harm low-wage guest workers who have already been hit hard by the
coronavirus pandemic.
The rule
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(pdf), published in the Federal Register by the Department of Labor on
November 5, will "help corporate interests deny pay hikes to frontline
farmworkers who help maintain America's food supply," _The
Daily_ _Poster_'s Julia Rock reported
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Monday.
"The wage freeze is the Trump administration's second attempt this
fall to cut wages for H-2A visa holders," Rock explained. "On Sept.
30, Secretary of Agriculture [Sonny] Perdue published a one-page
notice announcing that the USDA was suspending the Farm Labor Survey,
a data collection tool that has been used for over a century to
calculate wages for migrant workers, known as Adverse Effect Wage
Rates (AEWRs)."
A federal judge blocked the suspension of the Farm Labor Survey,
prompting the Trump administration to come back "with a second attempt
to cut the wages of H-2A workers, enacting a rule to freeze wages for
H-2A workers," Rock explained. The new rule would freeze the wages of
H-2A workers until 2023.
"The rule that was published last week only included the wage aspects
of the rule that was initially proposed," Rock continued. "The new
rule will raise the AEWRs for a small number of H-2A workers in more
specialized or supervisory roles, but will lower the rate for the vast
majority of H-2A workers." Workers on the H-2A guest worker program
make up around 10% of the U.S. agricultural workforce.
_HuffPost_ labor reporter Dave Jamieson, who was among the first to
call attention to the rule after it was quietly published last week,
noted in a series of tweets that the wage freeze "is obviously a boon
to growers," which Perdue readily admitted in a statement
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hailing the measure as a significant victory.
Jamieson warned that the new rule is an example of the kind of damage
Trump could attempt to inflict on his way out of office.
"The Trump administration is trying to get a lot of stuff like this
out the door ASAP," Jamieson said. "Lawsuits can slow it, and some of
it can be undone by a subsequent administration, but it's a cumbersome
process through rulemaking."
In a public comment
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(pdf) on the Labor Department's rule, a coalition of dozens of
advocacy groups led by Farmworker Justice warned that "many workers
will suffer increased debt, lower wages, worse housing conditions, and
more uncertainty regarding job terms" due to the wage freeze.
"Overall," the coalition said, "the proposed changes to the
regulations would be harmful to many agricultural workers."
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
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