Another case of enslavement of farmworkers in Florida has produced guilty pleas but are we learning the right lessons from it?

Some people might assume that law enforcement is working to protect farmworkers, but that assumption would be very wrong. The enslavement case is only an extreme example of a broken system that is not being fixed.

Farm labor contractors are now used by many growers to recruit, hire, transport, house and/or supervise workers.  Then the growers hide their heads in the sand about the way those workers are treated.  They know that many labor contractors rip off workers, but they claim they don't really "know" about the abuses.  They deny that they "employ" any farmworkers and therefore are not liable for minimum wage and other violations.

Of course, the farm labor contractors are stealing from the workers in part because they must compete for business by offering to provide workers to employers at very low cost.They bid low to win the contract. Then they make a profit by stealing from the workers.

In some cases, the quest to prevent the workers from leaving, going to the authorities, or filing lawsuits causes labor contractors to physically restrain the workers or threaten them with physical harm.  Other times the labor contractors withhold pay so that the workers can't afford to leave. Prosecutions in these extreme cases do not confront the more widespread systemic problems.

The US Department of Labor and state agencies have tools to reform the farm labor contracting system. The government can bring cases under labor laws that make both the grower and the labor contractor "employers" of the workers.   Unfortunately this doesn't happen often enough.

If the growers know that they will be responsible for paying the minimum wage and meeting other labor law obligations, they will be more likely either to not use labor contractors or else to insist that those contractors meet standards that comply with the law.

For the most part, these and other solutions are not being used and hundreds of thousands of workers are affected by the failure of the government to reform the farm labor contracting system.