Guestworker Treatment Should Matter To Immigrants and Citizens Alike

Guestworkers, as well as Americans who do or would do farm work, lack lobbyists and talking points. But what happens in rural America to guestworkers and displaced American workers is an untold story of wrong that deserves attention.
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Agribusiness would have you believe that they need foreign workers in America's fields, but do not believe it. Unfortunately, the discussion of temporary foreign agricultural laborers (commonly called "guestworkers") is too often based on Ag Industry talking points and fails to consider the real experience of rural workers, both American and foreign. Rural workers lack talking points and lobbyists, so the only voice heard in news reports is the claims of Agribusiness that "produce will be left rotting in the fields," that a process that brings thousands of workers every season to numerous Southern states is "tangled in red tape," and that it goes without saying these are jobs "Americans just won't do." My 14 years of experience representing American and foreign workers in Georgia shows such statements are simply not true.

Court filings tell a story of Americans displaced from jobs flooded with foreign workers and of foreign workers who lose their job if they demand fair pay or better working conditions. For example, last year the EEOC sued Hamilton Growers/Southern Valley Fruit & Vegetable, Georgia's largest user of guestworkers, for discriminating against hundreds of American workers each year who sought jobs held by foreign workers. This year J & R Baker Farms, just down the road, has been sued for doing the same thing: discriminating against black and other American workers, and preferring their foreign guestworkers.

Court filings also show why many employers prefer guestworkers: you can pay them less than legally required and send them home if they complain. In Georgia, North Carolina and Florida, states with the largest numbers of agricultural guestworkers, there have been scores of cases where foreign guestworkers allege they were underpaid, often involving employers falsifying pay records to hide sub-minimum pay. And in recent years at the small legal aid office where I work we have filed a retaliation case every year as employers fired and sought to bar the return of foreign workers, seeking to silence those guestworkers who complain.

The labor shortage cries of agribusiness are oft-reported. But the "crops rotting in the fields" line does not withstand scrutiny. As John Carney from CNBC wrote last September: "One way to test if there is a labor shortage on farms would be to look at the labor cost. If farms were truly struggling to find enough workers, their labor costs would be skyrocketing. . .[but] the total costs of hired labor on farms nationwide is still below pre-[economic] crisis levels, while farm profits are well above pre-crisis levels. This implies that far from farms seeing a labor shortage, there's something of a farm labor glut going on."

The way current applicants are treated in Georgia shows employers profiting from this surplus with work rules written to discourage Americans and keep foreigners. For example, Hamilton Growers, just after being sued for racial discrimination, wrote a new job description that bars employees from wearing baggy pants, from meeting probation officers, and from wearing hats with bling. It also makes looking at a cell phone or smoking grounds for immediate termination. And after Americans pass a pre-hire drug test, the farm is drug testing them again, prior to assigning them a job picking squash. Does this sound like an employer who is working to attract and retain American workers? Or is this employer doing its best to let Americans know 'we won't accommodate you, we prefer foreigners.' These problems extended outside of agriculture to wherever guestworkers are found. For example, Peachtree Rides, which runs the Atlanta Fair, just across the highway from Turner Field, fired a group of American workers this Spring when its foreign guestworkers arrived. Thus an American who had previously lost a job to a foreign farmworker found himself again out of a job due to guestworkers. Stories like his should be better known.

Inviting foreign workers in to take jobs for which employers would otherwise hire Americans indisputably affects the bargaining power of American workers. Despite the repeated complaint about "red tape," numerous employers, including Hamilton and Baker, have been approved to hire hundreds of foreign workers, even after being sued. Even labor contractors who speak little English and operate out of pick-up trucks have been able to navigate the so-called red tape and import thousands of foreign workers each year. This flow of foreign workers empowers agricultural employers in Georgia and across the country to dismiss American workers for trivial grounds and pressure foreign workers, whose visa and thus presence in the U.S. is tied to the goodwill of their employer, to acquiesce to illegal wages. In reality, it is those illegal wages and working conditions that Americans won't stomach, not farm work itself or other demanding jobs.

Guestworkers, as well as Americans who do or would do farm work, lack lobbyists and talking points. But what happens in rural America to guestworkers and displaced American workers is an untold story of wrong that deserves attention. The thing rotting in the fields is rhetoric, not crops, and we need to cast aside claims that Americans "won't work" and that job protections are "red tape." Those will only leave more Americans pushed out of work and more foreign workers exploited.

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