Help Not Wanted?

We decided to get a glimpse of the situation for ourselves. Six days before we arrived in Colquitt County, 136 U.S. workers landed jobs with a local grower called J&R Baker Farms. Many of the new hires said day after day, they’d been reporting for duty before daybreak, only to stand around for hours waiting for impossible assignments (like picking vegetables from a field that had already been harvested) and declared unqualified. They told us that the farm sent them home after an hour or two of work and their first week’s paychecks amounted to less than $50. By week two, nearly all of the American workers had either quit or been fired. Meanwhile, foreign guest workers — who were imported by the farm using a federal visa program known as the H-2A program — were out in the in fields picking away.

The H-2A agricultural guest worker program gives farmers a legal way to hire foreign workers when they can’t find enough Americans. In order to participate, farmers must comply with rules intended to protect domestic jobs and wages. Not only must they try to recruit Americans first, they must also pledge to pay their guest workers what’s called a prevailing wage, the market rate determined by the federal government.

But the labor “shortage,” worker advocates say, is often merely a fiction drummed up by farmers seeking to justify hiring guest workers, who — because their legal status in the United States is contingent upon maintaining employment — are easier to overwork and underpay.

“They’re using the guest worker program not as a temporary replacement, but as a permanent workforce,” said Dawson Morton, an attorney with Georgia Legal Services who represents farm workers foreign and domestic. “They don’t want any local workers that apply. But they’re not allowed to displace American workers for foreign workers and so that puts them in an awkward situation and they’re having to basically give the American workers the runaround until they quit or give up so that the farm can keep its foreign workforce, which it prefers.”

(Source: azspot)