FRESNO, Calif.—The United Farm Workers and their allies will march on the federal courthouse in Fresno, California, on March 18 to protest new Trump administration rules they say will cut their already low pay.
The rules governing how many workers can be admitted under H2-A visas, and how much to cut their minimum pay, will be the subject of a challenge in federal court that day.
The Farm Workers argue, reasonably, that owners, especially agribusinesses, will use the pay cut and the visa expansion to cut every farmworker’s minimum pay, regardless of whether the worker is documented or undocumented, holds an H-2A visa or not, or is a citizen or not.
And that double whammy will benefit the agricultural businesses, including corporate growers.
Statistics show there was a shortage of farm workers—with and without visas—even before President Donald Trump turned his Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents loose to carry out raids. ICE agents have also caught dozens of U.S. citizens in their indiscriminate sweeps, while killing two in Minneapolis.
The raids, which many federal judges have slammed as illegal and unconstitutional in their tactics, have only made the shortage worse.
Trump’s solution, which his Labor Department proposed in August but delayed implementing until this March because of notice-and-comment requirements, is to expand the number of H-2A visas and cut the minimum pay owners can shell out by anywhere from a dollar an hour to seven dollars an hour, UFW says. USDA sets the pay rates, but the Labor Department enforces the H-2A visa program.
The wage cuts vary depending on the crop involved and the state in which the workers toil. Most of the farmworker H-2A visas go to workers in the three West Coast states of Oregon, Washington, and California. Hence, the lawsuit was filed in Fresno, where the march on the courthouse will be.
Both the pay cuts and the visa expansion benefit the owners by expanding their worker pool at lower pay. The owners, including those of so-called “factory farms,” say they operate on a small margin.
“We filed suit to stop these cuts,” the United Farm Workers, joined by the Service Employees, said in an e-mail seeking support for the marchers. “Unfortunately, the cuts have taken effect.”
The union cited as an example a farm worker named “Isabel,” one of several whose names are atop the lawsuit to show the workers and the union both have “standing”—the right to sue.
UFW says Isabel, who is a citizen, will share “experiences or fears that their wages in the upcoming season will be cut.”
“Last year, Isabel worked for a strawberry grower alongside H-2A workers and made approximately $19.35/hour. Last month, when she came back, with the new H-2A rates in effect, she was only offered the state minimum wage of $16.90/hour.”
Even Trump Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, in a statement in the New York Times, admitted there’s a shortage of farm workers—and that by cutting off an inflow of undocumented people coming over the U.S.-Mexico border, it’ll become worse.
“By lowering wage rates, we estimate that over 350,000 H-2A farmworkers could see their annual wages cut by a total of $2 billion or more—between 26% to 32% of their wages,” Daniel Costa and Ben Zipperer of the Economic Policy Institute calculated in November, within days of the UFW’s filing its lawsuit.
“These significant wage cuts for H-2A workers will put downward pressure on the wages of U.S. farmworkers, reducing their total annual wages by about $3 billion—up to 9% of their total wages.
Total losses in pay for all farmworkers will range from $4.4 to $5.4 billion, roughly 10% to 12% of their total wages.”
“The farmworkers who toil in the fields do not deserve a pay cut. They deserve a raise. Instead of cutting wages, the Trump administration should restore the previous standards that required employers to pay H-2A workers no less than the average wage for field and livestock workers according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”
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