How America Enables Farm Labor Exploitation
And how Donald Trump is making it worse.
Last summer, a migrant farmworker named Pedro worked on the farm of Teachey Produce, a kale grower in Rose Hill, North Carolina. On June 24 of last year, Pedro suffered a heatstroke while working in the fields. Teachey, however, did not have workers’ compensation insurance coverage, and they refused to pay for the hospital bill. For Pedro, the cost of getting emergency medical care was equivalent to an entire season’s worth of wages on the farm.
Eventually, Pedro and three other workers — two of whom “experienced unauthorized deductions from their pay without explanation,” and Floricel Morales-Cruz, who packaged kale into boxes for a whole day before the grower “dumped the kale onto the ground, told him that it wasn’t good enough, and refused to pay him for his work” — worked with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee to try to settle their disputes.
According to the union, the farm responded by threatening to call ICE. “Later, during the mediation of the claims,” the union said in a statement, “the plaintiffs were told that they were ‘wetbacks’ and would be ‘kicked back to Mexico.’”
The workers at Teachey recently won a $60,000 settlement, as Payday Report recently reported, but what the workers allege happened at Teachey — a cycle of growers skipping out on their responsibilities to immigrant workers, and then intimidating them with immigration threats if they complain — is an all too common story that’s persisted through conservative and liberal administrations alike. And the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns just enable wanton labor violations on America’s farms even more.
The first quarter of the Trump term saw a 38.4 percent increase in ICE arrests — including fathers picking up their kids from school, domestic abuse victims, and DACA recipients — over the same period last year, adding to an ever-growing backlog of immigration cases. In addition, Trump has expanded the already inhumane 287(g) program by undoing the Obama administration’s prioritization of people who have committed crimes for deportation. And before a federal judge blocked yet another executive order, Trump tried to starve “sanctuary cities” of funding.
Growers who mistreat and steal from their workers can find a kindred spirit in Trump. A USA Today report last June found that hundreds of people who worked for Trump during his long and storied career as a rich moron alleged that he never paid them. In addition, USA Today reporter Steve Reilly noted, Trump’s business were “cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage.”
But it’s important to note that farmworker abuses have existed since long before Trump became a serious political figure. Dr. Thomas Arcury, who serves as the Director of Worker Health at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C., told me last year that the EPA’s worker protection standards are “totally inadequate,” and that most OSHA regulations have exemptions for agriculture. Under North Carolina’s Migrant Housing Act, for example, inspections only happen when a complaint is made, putting the onus on a worker — who often doesn’t speak English — to file a formal complaint.
Last year, a North Carolina state senator named Brent Jackson was sued by former farmworkers for wage theft and retaliation for filing the lawsuit; previously, his farm had been sued after Jackson’s son forced workers to drink water out of a spigot on a moving truck, and after another worker had suffered a heat stroke that rendered him in a vegetative state.
Also last year, Jackson was cited for by the Department of Labor for wage violations against twenty-one different workers. In spite of all of this — or maybe because of it — Jackson served on an agricultural advisory committee for the Trump campaign.
All of Jackson’s workers were here legally via the H-2A visa program, which brings laborers mostly from Mexico and Central America to work on America’s fields during growing season; BuzzFeed called the Reagan-era program the “New American Slavery” two years ago in an investigative series, for a glimpse of how that’s turned out. For undocumented workers, labor violations are even more rampant; as a 2011 survey of 300 farmworkers in eastern North Carolina noted, forty-five percent of undocumented workers said they had experienced wage violations.
The far right will note that this is the point, to make life hard enough for immigrant laborers that they leave and free up jobs for Americans. Farmworkers from Mexico and Central America, however, come here to do manual labor that most Americans have no interest in whatsoever. In 2011, according to the Center for Global Development and the pro-immigration group Partnership for a New American Economy, the North Carolina Growers Association spent over $100,000 to market seasonal farm labor jobs to American workers; only seven Americans actually took the jobs and finished the season. “Without foreign seasonal workers,” the report said, “whole subsectors of agriculture would not exist in North Carolina today.”
Since Trump’s rise, it appears that workers are taking the hint, as farms all over the country are facing labor shortages. “We’re seeing throughout Eastern NC and Ohio that this is causing hesitance to speak up when there is a problem or a violation for both H2A and undocumented workers,” FLOC vice president Justin Flores says. “Fear of a tightening ICE presence means speaking up is often seen as a risk of getting deported or losing access to a work visa.”
And so this is the sum of the failures of past presidential administrations and state governments in recognizing the intrinsic value of immigrant farmworkers as human beings, or even the huge contributions they make to the American economy. Because this exploitation of labor hasn’t been addressed, and now that anti-immigration hardliners now run the federal government, there’s little reason for immigrant laborers to stick around.
But as bleak as the situation currently seems, Morales-Cruz — one of the Teachey workers — had a message for other workers who fear for their livelihoods if they complain. “There are a lot of abuses against Latinos and farmworkers,” he said in a statement. “I want people to know that they shouldn’t let growers take advantage of them and that we need to be organized.”
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