Agricultural Guestworkers
The labor historian Cindy Hahamovitch on the already terrible agricultural guestworker program that agricultural interests want to deregulate even more in a new immigration bill.
The guestworker program continued but in recent years abuses have gotten nastier. When growers demanded a bigger and less regulated program in 1986, the Labor Department waived Wirtz-era rules restricting the program. Now agricultural guestworkers work all over the United States and come from as far away as Peru and Thailand, though most are Mexicans.
Growers have turned to for-profit recruiting agencies to handle the paperwork, which has led to some of the ugliest human trafficking cases in post-emancipation U.S. history: workers never paid, fraudulently charged thousands of dollars for low-wage, temporary jobs, housed in storage sheds or in flooded post-Katrina hotels.
Most shocking of all: The regulatory system that agricultural employers complain so bitterly about did not function at all (until the current administration). Despite gross violations of H-2A rules in the 1990s, for example, the Labor Department cited only one company (for failing to pay minimum and overtime wages), and did not deny that company’s requests for more guestworkers. Indeed, the GAO reported in 1997 that “the Department of Labor had never failed to approve an application to import H-2A workers because an employer had violated the legal rights of workers.”
Farm labor is something we rarely think about. If we do, it’s usually in context of the United Farm Workers with the assumption that things are somehow better now for farmworkers than 40 years ago. That’s not by and large true. Abuses are rampant, regulation is lax. Particularly as many of our big farming zones are in places we don’t usually see (naturally enough since they are thinly settled regions far from cities. Though is can also be true, say, in the Willamette Valley 30 miles south of Portland), the conditions of agricultural labor remain far from our consciousness. It’s not that a guestworker program theoretically couldn’t work. But given our underfunded regulatory agencies that are usually captured by corporate interests, there just isn’t much precedent that such programs can protect worker rights.
We have a program like this in Canada. One of the absurd features is that the federal government insists that the guest workers pay into the federal unemployment insurance plan which by law they are not allowed to collect benefits from.
Agricultural labor has one of the highest occupational death and injury rates in the country and workers are routinely exposed to toxic chemicals without safeguards. The industry is largely unregulated and fights tooth and nail to keep it that way.
And it has done so forever, given that it was able to wrest concessions not only to the National Labor Relations Act but even to the Immigration Act of 1924.
Couldn’t even get child labor provisions in because it would hurt “family farms” — even though it did nothing of the kind of course.
I grew up in Salinas and I can tell you that conditions for farm workers there have improved hardly at all since Steinbeck’s day. The whole town is run by Big Ag — basically, the same big landowners who’ve been running the place since 1900 — and they do everything they can to keep any other kind of employers out. One of the greatest thrills of my life was waiting on Dolores Huerta when I was working as a bank teller there.
Oh, and there is no possibility of this going wrong either:
http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/other/287859-nursing-homes-want-guest-worker-program-in-immigration-bill
It always strikes me as disingenuous to hear about ‘guest worker’ programs for agribusiness. I must have missed the part where first the companies started paying a living wage and decent benefits and making these year-round positions. Of course I must have missed that. Because it’s ridiculous that we’d be talking about a labor shortage before doing that, right?
A reminder in case anyone has forgotten:
There are no such thing as jobs Americans won’t do. There are jobs that Americans won’t do if it means working brutal hours in terrible conditions in a dangerous environment for $8/hr and no benefits on a short term basis.
That…means that there are jobs that Americans won’t do,
[...] guestworker programs doing anything other than providing a structure to exploit vulnerable workers. The history of guestworker programs is basically terrible and the present isn’t much better. The Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO came to a deal last [...]