Stronger, Not Weaker, Protections Needed for U.S. and Foreign Agricultural Workers

WASHINGTON – During these economic times, Congress should be working on ways to ensure that the nation’s temporary agricultural guestworker program encourages the recruitment of U.S. workers and also provides sufficient protections for all agriculture workers, the Workforce Protections Subcommittee learned today. 

 

“We don’t need a race to the bottom. We need to administer the H-2A program to ensure that U.S. workers have the first chance at employment and foreign workers aren’t exploited,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), the senior Democrat on the subcommittee. “The reality is this: these workers perform grueling work, routinely putting in 15-hour days and enjoy very few workplace protections such as wage and hour and safety protections.”

 

In 2008, the Bush administration weakened some long-standing protections for workers as part of the H-2A temporary foreign agricultural guestworker program. Some of these included the requirement that growers show proof that they first tried to recruit U.S. workers and that they pay a prevailing wage rate. As a result, farmworkers’ wages fell by an average of $1 to $2 an hour last year, according to a report by Farmworkers Justice.  

 

In 2010, the Obama administration largely reversed these changes and returned guestworker protections as they had stood since the Reagan administration. 

 

“The Department takes seriously the need to ensure that job duties for agricultural occupations in 

H-2A are not presented in such a way as to inhibit the recruitment of U.S. workers,” said Jane Oates, the Assistant Secretary of Labor for the Employment and Training Administration. “The Department will continue to focus on maintaining a fair and reliable H-2A process while enforcing necessary protections for both U.S. and nonimmigrant workers. To do so is good not only for workers but also for law-abiding employers.”

 

Since agricultural workers enjoy fewer protections on the job, they have a higher chance of being exploited. 

 

“Our nation’s broken immigration system, labor laws that discriminate against farmworkers, and the labor practices of many agricultural employers have combined to create an agricultural labor system that is unsustainable and fundamentally unfair to the farmworkers who harvest our food,” said Bruce Goldstein, the president of Farmworker Justice. “Discriminatory labor laws should be reformed, enforcement of labor laws should be enhanced and employers should be encouraged to offer job terms that attract and retain productive farmworkers.”

 

Unlike U.S. workers, guest workers are not free to find a better job with better pay and conditions. If they quit, they will be deported.  In addition, farmworkers are exempted from federal labor law that gives workers the right to join a union, overtime pay and most OSHA health and safety protections.