The U.S. government is allowing farmers to fill thousands of jobs with foreign 'guestworkers.' The conditions are hardly hospitable -- but those who speak out can be sent straight back home.
www.motherjones.com
Although the process is designed to ensure American workers get first crack at any jobs, only a handful wind up being hired. According to growers, that’s because few apply. “The unemployment rate is at a 30-year low,” says Stan Eury. “It doesn’t take an analyst to show you there’s a labor shortage. Anyone who says there’s not is an absolute idiot.” Farmwork, he adds, “operates at the bottom rung of the job ladder, and in a time of strong employment, those bottom rungs are the first vacated.”
In fact, study after study of the H-2A program concludes that there’s actually a surplus of agricultural labor, not a shortage. “Unemployment and underemployment are endemic among farmworkers,” says one Labor Department report. “Even at the seasonal peak in September, one-third of farmworkers are still not working in U.S. agriculture.” In studies and congressional testimony about the program, the General Accounting Office also dismisses the idea of a labor shortage. “Agricultural employers in most of the United States have had adequate supplies of labor for many years and continue to do so,” the GAO reports.
The agency acknowledges that some regions do experience local shortages, but notes that those might be alleviated “with fairly modest wage increases.” Instead, H-2A enables farmers — from small operators to corporate giants employing more than 600 workers — to effectively circumvent the free market, paying guestworkers as little as $6.39 an hour rather than raising hourly wages to attract U.S. workers. “A lot of farmers say, ‘I advertised for 300 jobs and no one applied,'” says Thom Myers, a farmworker advocate in Raleigh, North Carolina. “But what about the guy who runs a hardware store who has the same argument? What about the guy who runs a restaurant? If this was any other industry, the government would say, ‘Hey, raise your pay until the supply and demand curves cross.'”
Rather than pay market wages, H-2A growers have instead developed a litany of schemes to ward off domestic workers. In Idaho, the Snake River Farmer’s Association urged its members to write backbreaking job descriptions to discourage Americans from applying. “Irrigators or pipe movers is a great job description because no one wants to move pipe,” explains an association handout. Farmers in other states have turned away U.S. residents for being a few minutes late for interviews, or for not knowing the fine points of federal labor law. In North Carolina, the Growers Association says it hires domestic workers after a simple five-minute phone interview — but state officials describe the process as intentionally inefficient and even hostile. “They go out of their way to discourage local workers from seeking employment,” Lee Albritton, a former job-service employee, wrote in a memo to his supervisors. In 1999, the state found jobs on non-H-2A farms for 12,700 domestic workers. By contrast, on H-2A farms, the state found jobs for only seven workers.