A temporary farm work contract in the United States can be life-changing for a migrant worker from a developing country, but there have been so many abuses that the government has had to react. From wage theft to “commissions” in exchange for the contract, foreign workers suffer abuses that they often do not report to the authorities for fear of reprisals.
Some 2.4 million agricultural workers work on farms and ranches in the United States, the vast majority of whom are immigrants, according to the Farmworker Justice organization. Approximately 36% lack the labor status to do this type of work. In 2022, the country received 300,000 temporary workers with an H-2A visa to work, mostly in the fields, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). This visa, which is processed through private companies in the country of origin directly with employer companies in the United States, is temporary and tends to be renewed every year.
On average, a six-month contract earns a total of $12,500 over the six-month duration of the job. That’s about ten times what an average agricultural worker in Mexico would earn, says Pall Kvaran, an expert on agriculture. development and an administrator at the non-governmental organization Labor Mobility Partnerships (LaMP). “Your income increases tenfold, it’s a huge opportunity and most workers go to the same employer year after year. So when you get an H-2A contract for the first time, it’s a bit like winning the lottery,” says Kvaran. The H-2A program is one of the largest mobile labor programs in the world.
But the H-2A program, as well as a second program focused on professionals with specific skills, known as the TN visa program, have been mired in controversy and litigation, respectively, over abuses of migrant workers. This week, the nonprofit Centro de los Derechos del Migrante announced that it will represent two Mexicans in a class-action lawsuit against their employers, GFA Alabama and Hyundai Glovis, for “fraudulent and abusive working conditions they endured while working in the United States on TN visas,” according to a statement.
“Recruiters in Mexico promised them engineering jobs in the United States, jobs that would advance their professional development,” the organization says, “but once in the United States, their employers put them to back-breaking manual labor, carrying auto parts and appliances for 12 hours a day. Their responsibilities, working conditions, and pay were nowhere near what they had been promised. When they spoke out, they suffered threats and retaliation.”
This is the same problem faced by farmers, says Kim Geronimo, also a specialist at LaMP. Through nearly 9,000 anonymous surveys of migrant farm workers last year, the organization found that recruiting companies that act as intermediaries charge them “commissions” of up to $1,000 to ensure that their contract is renewed the following year, which is a violation of their rights.
“Employers are looking for intermediaries or visa processors and recruiters who are mostly private in the country of origin,” says Geronimo. “What that creates is a lot of fragmentation in the hiring process. And when you have a lot of fragmentation and intermediaries, you start to create opportunities for exploitation,” he explained.
Also last year, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar announced that his country would pay $6.5 million in “lost” wages to 13,000 H-2A workers. More recently, in April, the U.S. Department of Labor published new rules for temporary workers that allow them to organize and contact labor rights organizations to report abuses.
“You could say that with this, the Biden administration is trying to promote more accountability and try to create better grievance mechanisms for workers,” says Geronimo, “but what we’ve seen in the anonymous surveys we’ve been doing with workers is that there’s a dynamic that grievance mechanisms aren’t going to solve — the kind of low-level exploitation that continues to go unnoticed. They’re only really going to work if someone is being severely abused and exploited. But for the vast majority, that’s probably not going to be enough.”
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