Open Letter to Secretary Vilsack on Farm Labor

ALBANY, N.Y. — A coalition of farmworkers, farmers, and their advocates have released an open letter to Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack urging a shift in the USDA’s policy goals related to farm labor. Members of the Agricultural Justice Project, Community to Community Development, HEAL Food Alliance, the Farm Worker Association of Florida, Community-Campus Partnership for Health, Family Farm Defenders, Comite de Apoyo a Los Trabajadores Agricolas/Farmworker Support Committee (CATA/FSC), and others call on the Biden administration to abandon its efforts to expand the H-2A seasonal guestworker program. In place of H-2A expansion, they call for a national campaign to both improve the wages and working conditions of farm work and honor the essential contributions of immigrant workers to the economy and sustenance of the US.

The letter specifically criticizes the USDA for its $65 million Farm Labor Stabilization Pilot Program, which offers significant subsidies to farm employers of guestworkers, including farm labor contractors, who can qualify for up to $2 million, to raise wages, improve housing, and generally agree to follow regulations that are standard for legal employers in other sectors. The authors note that the USDA has yet to allocate any significant funding to assist farms in hiring, retaining, or improving the wages and working conditions of domestically based farmworkers nor the many undocumented workers who make up over half of the farm labor workforce.

The letter more generally condemns recent efforts by the US Department of Labor and the USDA to increase and reward participation by farmers in the H-2A program. The letter’s authors acknowledge that some participating farmers may maintain basic ethical standards, but they decry “numerous on-going cases of employers and labor contractors cheating H-2A workers and using them to replace local workers during labor disputes.” The authors also cite concerns over already low levels of enforcement capacity, as the US Department of Labor has only 810 Wage and Hour investigators responsible for all 165 million workers in the US economy. Contradicting common employer claims of an agricultural labor shortage which the guestworker program could supposedly relieve, the letter’s authors draw attention to the Department of Labor’s own recent assessment, that

“the dangers and physical hardships inherent in agricultural employment, combined with the lack of protections for worker organizing and bargaining power, have together contributed to worsening working conditions in agricultural employment—a lowering baseline— leading to a decreasing number of domestic workers willing to accept such work.”

The letter builds on this assessment to call for improving working conditions and protections for all farm workers, including those permanently settled in the US, as a way to ensure a reliable farm workforce into the future. Their recommendations include familiar demands by worker and immigrant advocates:

Replacing the H-2A program with “a long-term commitment to building a domestic workforce for farms, elevating farmwork to the high level it deserves in status, rights, protections, and compensation”;
Living wages for farmworkers, and extending to farmworkers all the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act and National Labor Relations Act (including overtime wages over 40 hours/week, freedom of association, and collective bargaining rights); employers should also “cease from opposing worker-driven social responsibility programs and the unionization of farmworkers”;
“An immediate path to permanent legal status for all undocumented farmworkers (including H-2A workers if they so choose) and their families without fees, penalties, waiting periods, or criminal barriers, thereby eliminating one of the major structural mechanisms that facilitates exploitation, abuse, and inhumane working and living conditions for farmworkers”;
Farm workplaces that offer “a safe, healthy work environment for employees” with “access to medical treatment and protection from excessive heat, cold, and poor air quality”;
On-farm opportunities for “training in workers’ rights” and “auditing, monitoring, and enforcement by qualified community organizations”;
A right to return and free movement for H-2A workers;
“Hazard pay” for farmworkers in extreme weather and other hazardous conditions;
“Funding [for] the Department of Labor to hire an adequate number of Wage and Hour inspectors”;
Political representation for farmworkers “in discussions of public policy that affects their lives”; and more.

“To make farmwork attractive to US residents,” Elizabeth Henderson of the Agricultural Justice Project suggests, “will require listening to the experience of farmers and farmworkers, increasing farmers’ share of the food dollar, creative policymaking, and the political will to transform farms into workplaces that honor the humanity of their employees where people would choose to work.” The letter’s authors suggest that by establishing the Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Pilot Program the USDA has “failed miserably” to engage in such a process of broad based public engagement, and they urge the USDA to cancel the program and replace it with their proposed “campaign to rebuild the domestic farm labor force.”

Click here to read the full letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

–Elizabeth Henderson, Agricultural Justice Project Board