Thursday, December 20, 2012

Farm workers unite

Farmworkers in America are exempt from some of the nation’s most basic labor laws, like minimum wage and overtime pay, and work in one of the most hazardous occupations in the country. They face risks from strenuous physical labor, often for long hours in extremely hot climates; pesticide exposure; and their work often involves dangerous equipment, often without proper training or safety measures.

Most farmworkers are undocumented — estimates range from about 50 percent to more than 80 percent in the U.S. — or in some cases employed through a guest worker program that doesn’t get much government oversight, they are doubly vulnerable. Without immigration status, they have little or no leverage to speak out or fight against inhumane working conditions, and often lack any avenue for doing so.

Yet America faces a labor shortage in agriculture. In a recent California Farm Bureau survey, Sixty-one percent of the nearly 800 growers surveyed said they were shorthanded by a little or a lot this year. “One thing that I’ve been told consistently by growers this year was that if you needed 30 people, you had 25. If you needed five crews, you had four,” said Bryan Little of the California Farm Bureau Federation. Are wages going up to attract more workers according to the theory of supply and demand? No. Farmers are instead choosing to grow crops based upon the use of less labor.

The government solution is to reform the current regulation on immigrant guest working - temporary work visas.

“We vigorously oppose those kinds of guest worker programs,”
said Bruce Goldstein, president of the advocacy group Farmworker Justice.

“The biggest issue with employer-based programs is that workers don’t have guaranteed rights,”
says Lalo Zavala, chief executive officer of MAFO, a partnership of farmworker organizations nationwide. Zavala points to the fact that many workers are bussed to remote locations, where they become completely reliant on their employers for basic needs like food, water, and housing, and an internal economy that uses tokens rather than dollars. Reality has shown that under an ag card-type program, it’s very possible that workers would be vulnerable to neglect, price gauging, and unsanitary conditions.

 Opponents of improving basic contracts for agricultural workers argue that raising wages and providing overtime or workers’ compensation to farmworkers will be costly. But, Goldstein points out, “In most of the states where there’s a lot of farmworkers, like California and Washington state, there is workers’ compensation coverage and they are very successful agribusiness states. There’s no excuse for other states to deprive farmworkers of wages and medical care when they are injured on the job.” 

 Farmworker Justice and other groups want to see is, as Goldstein put it, “modernization of labor relations in agriculture and an end to the discrimination of labor laws against farmworkers based on their occupation.”

From here

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