By Ivonne Spinoza
From working hard jobs for extremely low wages to being separated from their families for up to 10 months at a time, the sacrifices and challenges seem never-ending for temporary workers in the U.S.
In the documentary A Thousand Pines, we get a glimpse at the reality of one of the crews planting over 1.5 billion trees a year to meet the country’s wood industry demands. For guest workers’ earnings, the math sometimes doesn’t seem to be math-ing, even before we consider the myriad of physical and emotional trials and tribulations they often have to endure.
“Despite its broad scope, huge impact on the labor force, and the extensive existing legislation regarding it, the guestworker program has permitted most employers of guestworkers to eschew the regulations or find loopholes, resulting in a largely exploitative system. Abuse of workers begins in their home countries, intensifies during the period of employment, and often continues even after employment terminates. Workers frequently fail to earn enough money to cover their basic needs while in the United States or to repay the debts they incurred to travel to the United States. The U.S. guestworker program is structured in a way that promotes abuse, exploitation, and injustice.”
Guest workers tend to tolerate working for wages much lower than any local American worker would. It can take them months to make the money they make in weeks if they were in their country of origin, it seems all for nothing if cheated out of even those measly earnings.
The H-2A visa program was derived from the former Bracero Program, an agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments permitting Mexican citizens to take temporary agricultural work in the United States. Just last year, two federal investigations recovered $540,221 in wages for 268 H-2A workers from a North Carolina farm that not only failed to pay the agricultural workers appropriately but also didn’t provide adequate housing or reimburse workers’ transportation costs, as required by the Fair Labor Standards Act.
“Records from the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) showed $7.2 million in unpaid wages due to thousands of H-2A workers victimized by wage theft over the previous decade had never been returned to them. It had been sent to the U.S. Treasury instead. Officials at the DOL defended the practice, saying many transitory migrant workers are too difficult to locate. But as reporting for this story came to an end, the U.S. and Mexico announced a new joint effort to find and compensate Mexican H-2A workers, who comprise a bulk of the H-2A workforce and a majority of those owed wages.”
Even current visa rules make workers vulnerable by design because they are tied to a single employer for the whole duration of their stay in the country. While not all business owners abuse the system, plenty are willing to cut corners to get labor as cheap as possible with little regard for the workers’ well-being and needs.
As demonstrated in the documentary, a dozen or more workers often have to squeeze into a single tiny hotel room—in the areas serviced by the workers seen in A Thousand Pines, motels would cost $35-$55 a day—because their employer didn’t want to rent proper accommodation.
According to that Prism Report on H-2A wage theft, in 2018, when the guaranteed wage for an H-2A worker was $11.46 an hour, the labor contractor actually paid the workers a piece rate of $2.50 per bucket of harvested blueberries—regardless of the number of hours they worked.
As the American economy relies more and more on these workers to keep agribusinesses productive, there have been more voices calling out the loopholes and injustices present in the current law.
Labor shortages are affecting countries worldwide and they’re already costing billions in the U.S. alone, but to turn the tide, conditions will have to be improved and these workers need guarantees not present in current laws.
A research paper published by WorkRise found that:
“If inflation-adjusted farm wages remain constant, the long-term trend suggests that the labor supply from rural Mexico to U.S. farms will decrease by 6 percent over 10 years. Inflation-adjusted wages will need to rise by 10 percent over 10 years to retain a constant U.S. farm labor supply from rural Mexico. That is more than a 70 percent increase in the nominal (not inflation-adjusted) wages that farmers pay at current inflation rates.”
In addition to better wages, the U.S. will likely need to roll out and expand other benefits to guarantee the supply of workers, such as healthier work environments and legal migration paths for those with families left behind. The Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Pilot Grant Program, which began in 2023, seems a great step forward, but there is still a long way to go before guest workers are protected enough to earn an actual living wage.
Learn More
U.S. Department of Agriculture: Wages of Hired Farmworkers
NPR: “America’s farms are desperate for labor. Foreign workers bring relief and controversy”
Ivonne Spinoza is a South American trilingual Latina writer and illustrator. She writes both for TV and about it, and her work aims to contribute to better representation while advancing equality. She writes mostly genre fiction and cultural analysis, but quite often will branch out wherever curiosity takes her. Find her everywhere online as @IvonneSpinoza.
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