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Chapter 4 Seeing no evil The H2A Guest-Worker Program and State-Mediated Labor Exploitation in Rural North Carolina Sandy Smith-Nonini In the aftermath of the 2008 economic meltdown on Wall Street, we’ve seen renewed consensus on the vital role of the state in moderating capital flows and regulation of capitalist enterprises. This shift away from the Washington consensus that enjoyed hegemony since the mid-1980s invites a reevaluation of the period of neoliberal globalization. In the 1990s, many social analysts pointed out risks of nation-states losing power and sovereignty vis-à-vis the private sector, especially in the developing world. Yet studies of neoliberalism revealed many examples in which agents of the state, rather than simply withdrawing from economic regulation, reoriented their role to facilitate the mobility of private capital, often at the expense of the public interest (e.g., Goode and Maskovsky 2001; Harvey 2003). Thus it is important to view states as key institutions within which elites and other actors play complex roles manipulating access to power and resources on behalf of private interests. In few sectors, outside of defense, has the state taken such a central role as in U.S. agriculture, where subsidies have long been vital components of farm profits. Since the 1980s, as small farms have declined, the majority of government-subsidized agriculture has become corporate in nature, with less and less accountability to communities and consumers (Roberts 2008). Labor relations are a paramount consideration in crop agriculture, a laborintensive industry that is dependent on land—a nonexportable resource. The U.S. government has long regulated the supply of foreign farm labor on behalf of agribusiness, and that role became more critical as the indus- 102 . Sandy Smith-Nonini try restructured itself in the competitive neoliberal climate since the early 1990s. The H2A program, which permits quasi-private labor brokers to import Mexican “guest workers” for seasonal work on U.S. farms, expanded after 1990 into states in the mid-South, which was also experiencing new flows of undocumented immigrants. North Carolina, with one of the fastest growing Spanish-speaking populations in this period, also emerged as the state importing the most H2A workers. This chapter draws on the case of the North Carolina Growers Association (NCGA), the state’s large (and until 2004 its only) H2A brokerage, to examine the relationship between the neoliberal state and guest workers during the 1990s, a period of rapid economic growth.1 My access to labor camps was facilitated through collaboration with nonprofit organizations working to defend farmworkers’ civil and labor rights. I visited roughly twenty-six migrant labor camps in eastern and central North Carolina and conducted over one hundred thirty interviews of farmworkers, farmers and agribusiness representatives, state employees or officials, and representatives of nonprofit groups between 1998 and 2008. I also observed scores of meetings, educational events, and state conferences on farm labor.2 This study documents routine practices of the NCGA when the program was at its height. In 2004 the association underwent reforms due in part to lawsuits and to a new contract with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), a farmworker union, which won the right to organize workers inside the guest-worker brokerage. Until then FLOC was best known for its successful 1980s campaign to organize workers on farms supplying ingredients for Campbell’s Soup in Ohio and Michigan (Barger and Reza 1994). FLOC began its campaign in 1998 targeting the Mt. Olive Pickle Company, the state’s largest cucumber processor, to demand better working conditions on farms supplying its produce. Union organizers soon learned that threequarters of the workers on these farms were provided through the NCGA. At the time, the prospects of a union victory seemed daunting given such a dispersed and itinerate workforce that lacked legal status, knowledge of English, or financial resources. In a historically antiunion state like North Carolina, it was difficult to build broad coalitions to support workers of any stripe. Much of the support for FLOC’s boycott of Mt. Olive came from urban areas and was heavily based in churches and university communities. The 2004 FLOC victory in North Carolina, discussed in more detail in the last section of this chapter, was historical in that it was the first time agricultural workers in the Southeast had gained official union recognition and was the first labor contract associated with an H2A program. Since FLOC later began monitoring recruitment of workers in Mexico, it also became the first transnational labor contract...

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