The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers' Lives, Labor, and Advocacy

Chapter 4: H-2A Guestworker Program: A Legacy of Importing Agricultural Labor, by Garry G. Geffert

chapter 4 H-2A Guestworker Program A Legacy of Importing Agricultural Labor Garry G. Geffert That part of the agricultural industry that depends on hand-harvest labor has never completely adjusted to the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the amendment that abolished slavery. Unlike other industries, many people who control hand harvest agriculture have not attempted to use modern labor management techniques to recruit and retain workers and have not felt it necessary to pay a living wage to their laborers. Among the industry’s strategies for retaining its version of a reliable and stable workforce in place of slaves were the contract labor laws enacted in the former Confederate states in the last half of the nineteenth century. Under those laws, a worker who failed to complete his contract was arrested and sentenced to work off his fine for his former employer and thus was held in involuntary servitude. The last of these laws in Florida was not declared unconstitutional until the 1940s (Daniel 1972). A first effort to control the newly freed slaves occurred shortly after the end of the Civil War when a group of Virginia farmers met on Turkey Island in an effort to systematize their labor management policies.They agreed to offer a uniform wage rate to the freedmen and declared ‘‘that toward all freedmen in our employ we will act justly and we will consider the following wages very liberal, and that we pledge ourselves not to exceed them’’ (Congressional Globe 1886).The agreement set uniform deductions that would be taken from workers’ pay, specified charges that would be deducted for fuel, set pay periods and rations, and declared that one month’s pay would always be ‘‘held in arrears.’’ The agreement also provided that ‘‘No hand will be employed who has been discharged for misconduct or violation of contract.’’ When General Oliver Otis Howard, the assistant commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau for the area, was informed of this agreement, he declared: 114 The Human Cost of Food The freedmen referred to in the resolutions are at liberty to enter into just such agreements or contracts as they please, and with whomsoever they please, and they will not be restrained from receiving as high wages as they can get (Congressional Globe 1886). Then, General Howard employed the occupying Union troops to assure that the Turkey Island agreement would not be enforced (Congressional Globe 1886). Though times have changed, unfortunately the U.S. government, through the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), with the full blessing of Congress, administers a farm labor program that bears striking similarities to the Turkey Island agreement. This present-day labor arrangement is known as the H-2A agricultural guestworker program. This program, which gets its name from the section of the Immigration and Naturalization Act that created it, 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(15)(H)(2A), allows the importation of foreign workers and sets wages and work terms that, while stated as minimums, in practice are maximums. However, the H-2A program does not satisfy some growers who continue to seek new programs that supply laborers over whom they have greater control and who have fewer protections. They seek programs even more repressive than the Turkey Island agreement. A Brief History of Agricultural Guestworker Programs Until 1917, immigration from Mexico to the United States was largely unrestricted. Then, as now, workers went where jobs were available. Railroads and farms near the border employed Mexican immigrants. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, wages in Mexico were lower than the wages paid in the United States. This, combined with the depressing effect of a large labor supply spurred on by the influx of Mexican immigrants, had a negative effect on wages in the United States and thus helped keep growers’ labor costs down. By the end of the nineteenth century, farmers in the Southwest had begun relying on workers from Mexico as a source of low-cost labor. But under the influence of anti-alien sentiment, Congress enacted what then were the strongest restrictions on immigration in the Immigration Act of 1917.The act cut off much of the Mexican labor force. It imposed a 115 H-2A Guestworker Program literacy requirement and increased the head tax for immigration to eight dollars, making it virtually impossible...