If Biden or a pending court challenge block Trump’s wage freeze, Wicker said, growers will push the White House to find another way to slow pay increases.įederal law requires that labor officials protect both H-2A and U.S.-based workers from practices that push down wages unfairly. The group supplies H-2A workers to employers and manages a bargaining agreement with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, a labor union.įarmers are struggling, Wicker said, because H-2A wages have been rising too fast. H-2A workers are now 25% of North Carolina’s seasonal farm labor force and growing, according to Lee Wicker, deputy director of the North Carolina Growers Association. The recent surge has likely boosted that proportion. H-2A workers have been estimated at 10% of the U.S. But he allowed in H-2A workers because, he said, they provide “services essential to the United States food supply chain.” He said jobs and healthcare should be reserved for Americans. The H-2A program gives them no opportunity to apply to settle in the United States as legal, permanent immigrants.Įarlier this year, Trump exempted H-2A workers as he began shutting down borders because of the pandemic. employers for months at a time, but are required to leave the country when their contracts end. Since there’s no national cap on H-2A worker visas, in theory the program can keep expanding. Many H-2A employers are labor contractors-middlemen who supply workers to farms. Guest workers can fill more than one H-2A job, but do not have the freedom to quit and choose another employer once they are in the U.S. A complex web of rules requires employers seeking to hire H-2A workers to prove to their state labor officials that they first advertised for workers who live in the United States. farms this year even as the State Department was issuing visas to fill a record 275,400 H-2A jobs. He requested anonymity because he feared jeopardizing his visa. “It’s been a frightening season for me,” he said. and a longtime critic of the guest worker program.Īn H-2A worker who survived COVID-19 in North Carolina told Public Integrity that as of mid-December, he still hadn’t been paid for the three weeks he was too sick to work. They’re not machines,” said Bruce Goldstein, president of Farmworker Justice in Washington, D.C.
They’re also pushing for H-2A and other farmworkers to receive priority access to COVID-19 vaccines given their status as frontline workers, and are urging farms to adopt federal mandates to reduce crowded housing and buses, breeding grounds for virus outbreaks. Advocates want President-elect Joe Biden to undo the freeze, but the process could take months. Next year, H-2A workers will face a new challenge: a wage freeze, put in place by President Donald Trump’s Department of Labor. Public Integrity has found three H-2A worker deaths in North Carolina alone that haven’t been publicly disclosed but are under investigation. 21, accusing it of failing to provide safe conditions. Coronavirus outbreaks this year infected many H-2A workers in multiple states.Īfter investigating the COVID-19 deaths of two H-2A workers, Washington state labor officials fined a large agribusiness company more than $2 million on Dec. But advocates have long warned that the workers can be cheated out of wages and treated as expendable because they fear complaining will cost them their visas. Foreign workers, mostly from Mexico, benefit from the ability to work legally, albeit temporarily. In just five years, the number of H-2A jobs in America has jumped by 155% to more than 275,400 this year. On the other, the program can put workers in arduous, sometimes-deadly, situations: Toiling in excessive heat, living in unsafe housing and, now, exposing themselves to a highly contagious virus. On one hand, the program provides essential labor for growers and jobs for foreign workers desperate for money.
The twin tragedies, details of which were confirmed by the Center for Public Integrity through state records and interviews, lay bare the contradictions of the 34-year-old H-2A program. After both were buried in Mexico, their sons dutifully returned to North Carolina to keep working under their visas because they needed the income. In August, one of the fathers died of COVID-19.
All four men held temporary H-2A nonimmigrant visas-permits US employers use to sponsor foreign guest workers to fill seasonal labor shortages on farms. Two fathers and their sons traveled from Mexico this spring to grow and harvest North Carolina’s sweet potatoes, tobacco, Christmas trees and other crops. Check out our most recent coverage of the coronavirus crisis, and subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter. The coronavirus is a rapidly developing news story, so some of the content in this article might be out of date.
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