Bush's Economic Stimulus for Farmworkers: The Cattle Prod

Written by Bruce Goldstein Thursday, 13 March 2008 21:29

When it comes to farmworkers, the Bush Administration’s “economic stimulus” plan looks more like electric shock treatment.

On February 13, 2008, the Department of Labor announced plans to make fundamental changes in the H-2A temporary foreign agricultural worker program. We at Farmworker Justice have been attempting to help U.S. and foreign workers under this program for our entire 27-year existence.

Under the H-2A program, employers who claim a labor shortage can apply to hire foreign workers on temporary work visas. The law requires the Department of Labor to set wages and working conditions so that employers recruit and hire U.S. workers first and don’t “adversely affect” U.S. farmworkers’ labor standards by employing vulnerable guestworkers from poor countries at low wages. H-2A employers must offer a special minimum wage to both U.S. workers and guestworkers to prevent wage depression.

Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao concluded that the modest wage rates required under the H-2A program should be lowered and that most of the labor protections in the program should be eliminated or weakened substantially. The public has been given 45 days to comment on the plans to wipe away protections that have been understood to be the minimums required for as much as 60 years. We are working with other advocacy groups to analyze the lengthy plan and submit formal comments.

While I thought that nothing our government could do under the H-2A program could shock me after 20 years of observing it, I was wrong. The Department of Labor’s explanation for the planned changes is astounding.

DOL says that if the H-2A wage rate is “set too high, “it can “result in harm to U.S. workers.” How so? DOL says that if the wage is “too high,” then “agricultural employers may hire undocumented foreign workers.”

So get this: this nation needs to set farmworkers’ wages at low levels by government fiat so that agricultural employers don’t decide to violate the immigration laws by hiring unauthorized immigrants. And, the way to “protect” U.S. workers’ wages is to lower their wages.

So what does this mean as a practical matter? The current H-2A wage requirements were written by the Reagan Administration in 1987. No friend of farmworkers, Reagan adopted a formula that lowered H-2A wage rates by an average of 20%. The current formula is simply the regional hourly average wage rate for nonsupervisory farmworkers as determined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s annual wage surveys of farmers. Now President Bush and Secretary Chao want to change the formula to go even lower.

The wage proposal is so vaguely written and complicated that it’s hard to know just how low farmworkers’ wages are likely to go. But it looks like in most places, the Labor Department’s aim is to bring the wages of fruit and vegetable workers down to the state minimum wage or the upcoming federal minimum wage (which will be $7.25 per hour in 2009).

So in California, the H-2A program employers could pay the state minimum wage of $8.00 per hour, where the current H-2A program minimum wage, which is $9.20 per hour, is supposed to head up to $9.72 this year. In North Carolina, one of the larger users of the H-2A program, the H-2A wage is supposed to increase from $9.02 in 2007 to $9.70 in 2008. It would probably drop in most places to the upcoming federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

That’s a 25% pay cut in one year. That doesn’t even include the Labor Department’s plan to end the decades-long obligations of H-2A employers of providing sanitary housing at no cost to workers, reimbursing workers for in-bound transportation costs and paying workers’ travel home upon completing the season.

If the agricultural employers in this country are correct that there is a desperate shortage of farm labor, then the government certainly should not be making farm jobs even less attractive than the already are. It’s counterproductive.

Bush’s proposal is also cruel. Farmworkers are the poorest of the working poor. Their wages already are too low. Employers have had free rein to hire hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers. Even the Administration admits, “It is no secret that foreign workers may be willing to work for wages that are lower, and often substantially lower, than wages that are typically paid to U.S. workers.” Wages are already depressed. Lowering the H-2A wage rates (which, after all, are only average wage rates) still further to benefit a traditional Republican constituency (the growers) is reprehensible.

This country has a long history of treating farm labor like beasts of burden. Guestworkers and undocumented workers toil in fear of deportation. In their desperate straits, they often work to the limits of human endurance for wages that others would not even accept if the job were easier. As DOL admits, “U.S. workers cannot fairly compete against undocumented workers, who may accept work at below-market wages;” nor can they compete against guestworkers who worry that they will not be given a visa in a future season if their employer is not kept satisfied.

The Bush Administration economic stimulus for America’s farmworkers is the cattle prod -- zapping agricultural workers with wage cuts and elimination of longstanding labor protections – keeping them in a line that leads to a depressing future.

More information about the proposal and opposition to it is available at www.farmworkerjustice.org .

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