The past year’s inconclusive debate in Congress over comprehensive immigration reform may have boosted ratings for talk radio, but did little or nothing to solve our nation’s immigration problem, and in particular the problem facing American agriculture, which is heavily dependent on immigrant labor. Lost in the heated rhetoric were some basic facts:
• There are about 2.5 million workers in the United States who are employed in agriculture at some point during the year. About 1.8 million work in crop agriculture; the remainder are livestock workers.
• The average hourly wage of field and livestock workers in 2007 was $9.49 per hour — barely more than half the average hourly earnings of non-agricultural workers ($17.58 in October 2007). Undocumented farm workers earn 10 to 20% less than farm workers with work authorization. On average farmworkers earn less than $13,000 per year, too little to live on.
• Today, 77% of the field workers in the United States were born outside the United States; estimates of the numbers who are not legally authorized to work in the United States range from 60 to 75%. The overwhelming majority of immigrant farm workers are from Mexico.
These facts are not going to change in the near future– the agricultural sector is not going to disappear from the American economy; some jobs will be mechanized and some production may shift abroad, but five years from now agriculture will still employ two million or more workers. Farm worker wages are not going to be increased until they are comparable with nonagricultural wages. And five years from now, the overwhelming majority of farm workers in the United States will still be Mexican immigrants. No amount of pontificating by Lou Dobbs or Congressman Tancredo will change these underlying realities or provide a real solution to the immigration problem.
The question facing our country’s politicians is whether they will act responsibly or allow the status quo of abuse, exploitation and illegality to continue.
For eight years, the UFW, together with a majority of agricultural employers, has supported a bi-partisan bill known as AgJOBS which would provide American agriculture with a legal workforce. AgJOBS would allow much of the current agricultural workforce to obtain temporary legal status — if they continued to work in agriculture for the next three to five years, they would become eligible for permanent status. AgJOBS would also provide for a flow of future workers by reforming the existing guestworker program for agriculture known as the H-2A program.
To date, AgJOBS has been blocked from moving forward either as part of comprehensive reform or as stand-alone legislation by the obstructionist tactics and demagoguery of those who equate any measure to regularize the status of the current workforce with “amnesty.” Despite these setbacks, we intend to work with our Congressional allies to keep AgJOBS on the agenda for next year, realizing that we face an uphill battle in an election year where immigration is seen as a wedge issue.
While Congress has failed to act, the Bush Administration has proposed new regulations which will remove most of the protections for US workers under the H-2A program. The new regulations will dramatically reduce the efforts employers must make to hire U.S. citizens and legal immigrants before receiving approval to hire vulnerable guestworkers. The Administration also plans to substantially lower the wage which H-2A employers must offer both U.S. workers and H-2A guest workers. The intent is to encourage the growers to bring even more foreign agricultural workers into the United States without doing anything to address the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of farmworkers, both documented and undocumented, who are already here doing this work ( workers in unauthorized status are barred under current law from participating in the H-2A program). The result will surely be to lower wages and working conditions still further for all farm workers.
The UFW will do everything in its power to stop these new regulations from going into effect. Even without these changes, the current H-2A program is rife with fraud and abuse. Federal law and U.S. Department of Labor regulations provide some basic protections to H-2A guestworkers — but they exist mainly on paper. Government enforcement of their rights is almost non-existent. A recent report of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Almost Slavery, found that H-2A guestworkers are:
• routinely cheated out of wages;
• forced to mortgage their futures to pay exorbitant fees to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs;
• held virtually captive by employers or labor brokers who seize their documents;
• forced to live in squalid conditions; and,
• denied medical benefits for on-the-job injuries.
Because these workers are tied to the employer who obtained their visa for them and are dependent on the good will of that employer for future employment under the program, H-2A workers have no bargaining power for better wages and working conditions and are powerless to complain of violation of their rights. Decades of experience have shown that the U.S. Department of Labor is either incapable of or unwilling to protect the rights of these workers.
US workers are systematically discriminated against in the hiring process because employers have to pay FICA and unemployment taxes on US workers’ wages while the wages of H-2A workers are exempt from these taxes. Moreover, the Department of Labor has completely ignored its statutory mandate to require growers to take positive steps to recruit US workers for these jobs.
For these reasons, our brothers and sisters in the AFL-CIO have called for the end of guestworker programs such as the H-2A program and the admission of future foreign workers as permanent residents with full rights at the onset. There are strong arguments for adopting such a position and it is one we respect. However, we believe that the present situation calls for one more effort to create a humane guestworker program which protects the rights of both guest workers and US workers. The reforms contained in AgJOBS are a step in the right direction, but something more is needed. We don’t believe a guest worker program can be successful without making union representation available to the guestworkers. According, we call for a guestworker program which:
• Guarantees guestworkers freedom of association and the right to join a union;
• Provides workers with an effective grievance system to expeditiously enforce the terms of their work contracts;
• Is free from retaliation and blacklisting;
• Bans the exploitive practice of middlemen charging workers “recruitment fees” either here or abroad;
• Provides the guestworkers who have worked in the US for a number of years with the opportunity to apply for permanent resident status if they so desire; and
• Protects US workers through an open and transparent recruitment process.
We realize that such reforms may not all be implemented at once, but they will be the principles by which will judge future proposals to reform or change the H-2A program. If events demonstrate that these goals cannot be achieved within the current structure of our guestworker programs, then we will join the call for the abolition of these programs.
Cesar Chavez once said “when the man who feeds the world by toiling in the fields is himself deprived of the basic rights of feeding, sheltering and caring for his own family, the whole community of man is sick.”
Our demands for justice for migrant workers must be seen in the context of a globalizing world in which more than 120,000,000 workers are working outside of their home country. It seems to make little difference whether they are employed through legal guestworker programs or as unauthorized migrants. Everywhere these workers are abused and exploited by the traffickers and international merchants of labor. Their fight is our fight. In the twentieth century, the UFW was focused on the plight of migrant farm workers within the United States; in the twenty-first century, we will join with labor activists around the globe to build a worldwide movement to bring social justice to the transnational movement of agricultural workers. We plan to start with the H-2A program.