Across the country, workers are fighting for wage increases to keep up with inflation. Thanks to labor unions, many groups of workers like autoworkers and UPS drivers are winning. For most Americans, higher wages for hardworking people is something to celebrate. But there’s one group of workers for whom wage increases often get spun as a problem to be solved, not progress to be celebrated: farm workers.
It’s certainly not like farm workers make too much already. In 2020 – at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which farm workers were designated “essential” to America’s food supply – farm workers on average made less than 60% of what workers outside agriculture were paid. It’s a tragic fact: farm workers in Georgia and across the country make poverty wages, meaning that the very workers who feed America too often struggle to feed their own families.
And yet when the U.S. Department of Labor announced that the wage rate that must be offered to local resident farm workers before hiring a worker on an H-2A {temporary migrant worker} visa would be going up from $11.99 to $13.67 an hour in Georgia, growers immediately began trying to reverse the wage increase. One grower rep told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that “our very own federal government really slapped them [growers] in the face with a huge wage increase.”
If anything is a slap in the face, it’s the low wages that Georgia farm workers make. The wage increases for H-2A workers barely account for inflation as is. The increase in the wage rate for H-2A workers was determined, as required by law, by simply taking the average of the wages that Georgia growers self-report to the U.S Department of Agriculture’s annual survey of farm worker wages.
Credit: Courtesy
Credit: Courtesy
The wage increase is necessary to protect the wages of already poor local farm workers from being undercut by the H-2A guest worker program, as well as to fairly compensate the H-2A workers themselves, who come from Mexico, Jamaica, Guatemala and several other countries to be the critical human link in our nation’s food supply chain.
Of course, the truth is that the Georgia agricultural lobby and the Republican leadership in Congress could have spared Georgia growers the wage increase if they had really wanted to. Freezing in place the 2022 wage rate for H-2A workers was offered to agricultural employers as part of a bipartisan compromise in Congress – a painful and dramatic concession by farm workers and their organizations.
In exchange, this compromise legislation would have allowed professional farm workers already in the country the opportunity to apply for temporary legal status and ultimately the chance to earn citizenship if they continued to work in agriculture for many years into the future.
This legislation would have provided much needed relief to immigrant farm workers, including many of our neighbors here in Georgia, most of whom have lived in the United States for more than decade. Most Americans agree: if you help feed America, you have earned the right to become an American. Freezing worker wages at $11.99 would have just been the cherry on top for Georgia growers.
Yet it was a Georgia grower – Zippy Duval, now head of the American Farm Bureau Federation and previously head of the Georgia Farm Bureau – who helped sink this bipartisan compromise. The American Farm Bureau Federation lobbied against the bill, known in the House as the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, for a simple reason: they did not want to expand the already limited legal protections afforded to other farm workers under the Migrant and Seasonal Worker Protection Act to farm workers who are arriving here under the H-2A program.
The idea that the rules protecting H-2A workers are already adequately enforced would come as a surprise to the H-2A workers who were trafficked and subjected to forced labor in Georgia, as revealed by the shocking Operation Blooming Onion investigation.
That federal investigation uncovered the systematic exploitation and abuse of more than 200 H-2A workers from Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala on Georgia farms. Tragically, it is far from an isolated incident, with similar trafficking schemes abusing the H-2A visa system having been subsequently uncovered. Many agricultural employers who have long profited from this exploitative system are no doubt afraid of what would happen if the H-2A workforce started to have real labor rights.
This is why the bipartisan bill failed: powerful and connected Georgia growers helped sink a bipartisan chance at immigration reform that would have both given farm workers a pathway to citizenship and saved employers money – all because they didn’t want H-2A workers to have the same basic labor rights other farm workers have.
Now, they’re complaining about the consequences for their bottom line. As U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack put it to a group of growers in New Hampshire: “American agriculture didn’t stand up and speak loudly enough about the importance of getting that done. So you missed a golden opportunity.”
The consequences of this failure are much higher for Georgia farm workers who must continue to live in fear of deportation and denied basic rights like the right to vote or access the social safety net. For Georgia growers, the consequence is much less severe: They simply have to pay their workers a little more of what they deserve.
If Georgia growers are really bothered by that, they should stop blocking a solution and work with farm workers and their organizations on comprehensive immigration reform legislation. Truly supporting America’s agricultural industry means doing right by the farm workers who put food on all our tables.
Alejandro Chavez lives in Chamblee and is the grandson of civil rights leader Cesar Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers.
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