Farm Worker Injustice

While many sustainable food advocates have been concentrating in recent weeks on influencing Obama’s choices for USDA secretary and undersecretaries, significant changes in farm policy were being made in 11th hour rule making by the Bush administration in departments outside the Department of Agriculture.

Last Saturday, new laws went into effect that essentially gut the labor protections present in the existing agricultural guest worker program (referred to as H2A for the name of the visa that temporary foreign agricultural workers receive). While Obama stayed any still-pending new regulations put forth by the Bush administration during the last days of his term, the reforms to the H2A program had already gone into effect.

The H2A program is a very complex agricultural guest-worker program that was established in 1986 after passage of the most recent major immigration reform. The H2A program was not the first agricultural guest worker program—the “Bracero Program” in which thousands of Mexicans were admitted annually to work on US farms was created back in the 1940s. While H2A workers currently represent under 3% of the farm labor force, their influence is particularly felt on the east coast, where many orchards rely on Haitian and Jamaican fruit pickers. The H2A program has been highly contested in proposed immigration reforms by both growers, who find the paperwork required to apply for guest workers overly burdensome, and by farm worker and immigrant advocates who argue that guest workers are subject to exploitation, particularly since they are not allowed to change employers once in the US.

It appears that large-scale growers have had their demands met. The new regulations make it far easier for growers to hire H2A workers by reducing requirements that growers attempt to recruit domestic workers first. Additionally, while growers were formerly required to pay the local “prevailing wage,” a new formula for calculating the required wages for H2A workers will serve to dramatically lower hourly pay. Finally, and perhaps most offensively, the Department of Labor effectively eliminated government oversight of the program. Reducing law enforcement in an industry know for labor violations, in the words of the advocacy organization, Farmworker Justice, “will only make a bad program worse”. For a complete report on the Department of Labor rule changes, see Farmworker Justice’s report “Litany of Abuses: More-not fewer-labor protections Needed in the H2A guestworker program”

The history of hired farmworkers within the US agricultural system and the public policies constructed to address farmworkers is a history of ambivalence. We are a country divided about the role of farmworkers, continuing to debate their rights and their place in agriculture. What is not up for debate is that we are faced with a serious problem within the agricultural sector. As a nation we lack a coherent policy on farm labor. The agricultural sector has been treated as an exception to U.S. law since colonial times when Thomas Jefferson identified farmers as the underpinnings of a democratic nation. But the system that this agricultural exceptionalism has enabled us to create is not a just one. The farmworker poverty endemic to this system must be addressed in future public policy and programs while also ensuring adequate farm labor supply. Recent changes to the H2A program only set us back in our pursuit of a more just agricultural system. Please join me in urging congress to overturn these new regulations and support a food and farm policy that provides healthy food for all, grown under free and fair working conditions. Take action with the United Farm Workers here.