UNEARTHED: AMERICA'S FARM WORKERS: Rights and Responsibilities
This post is Part 4, and the final post, in a month-long series on migrant farm workers in the United States, inspired by my work with a mobile physical therapy and medical clinic serving migrant agricultural workers in North Carolina. (To read the rest of the series, please click >here< or see the sidebar to your right.)
Throughout my work with the NC Farm Worker Clinic, and still now, after the season here has culminated, I have found myself juggling the many, and sometimes contradictory elements of the H-2A system. Clearly, most farmers are not raking in the money. It's a hard life. One where--to be sure--huge profits can be made, but also one where people can scrape by, often for generations. Then there's the promise of a better life that the program offers those who are willing and able to travel and work hard, a concept that is part of the United States' national soul. But as in former generations, the imbalance of knowledge and power between those holding the larger lot of the resources and those working in the fields, seems to place a large and largely uncharted population at risk for great exploitation. What are an H-2A workers rights? What are his or her responsibilities?
According to the Department of Labor wage sheets, the going rate for two of North Carolina’s major crops is right on par with minimum wage. Workers earn between $7.25 and $8 an hour for harvesting tobacco. Harvesting sweet potatoes earns a worker $0.45 per 5/8 bushel. Looking at these prices, it's easy to understand why the men we treat in the clinic are reluctant to slow down, even at the expense of pain and disability. At those wages, the only way to earn decent money is to work long hours and to work fast. Interestingly, a comparison of wages between North Carolina and New York on this site shows a difference of anywhere from $1.50 to $3.50 more per hour in New York. Whether that’s due to differences in minimum wage, cost of living, the care required to process the crops (much of New York state’s agriculture is fruit, which, I presume, must be handled more gently), the fact that New York has collective bargaining, or whether it's the some combination of all of the above, I don’t know. Looking at individual job listings for North Carolina here, however, wages offered seem higher than NC minimum wage and more on par with what my source at NC Farm Workers told me.
Taxation of H-2A workers wages is, at least in my mind, a bit confusing. There is no mandatory withholding of either Social Security or Medicare taxes from wages—which also means that workers have no future access to either of these benefits. Neither is there mandatory withholding of federal income tax. Yet according to the IRS Website, H-2A workers are likely to owe federal income tax, at least if they earn over $600 in a year. According to the Department of Labor site, employers are required to provide worker’s compensation insurance--a good thing, since farm work is often quite dangerous; this year alone three migrant workers were killed in NC in farming accidents. In addition, the employer is required to either provide workers three meals a day (at no greater than $10.12 per day cost to the worker) or free access to “convenient cooking and kitchen facilities.” Answers to many other FAQs can be found on this site.
The H-2A program does offer an Ombudsman program. However, reading the site, it’s clear that the primary purpose of the service is to help smooth the paperwork process for obtaining and maintaining the visa. The site states clearly that it does not offer legal aid. The best resource I found regarding legal issues was the Website of Georgia Legal Aid, which gives a simple but comprehensive synopsis of H-2A workers’ rights, as well as contact information. (North Carolina also has a division of Legal Aid, a non-profit that provides…you guessed it…legal aid to people in need; however, at this posting, the Website wasn’t working.) Legal Aid services are free, but one wonders: Out there under the stars and far from home, how many men know that these resources exist or how to access them, if needed?
Thumbnail image "Field of Young Corn" by Ben Shahn, accessed from New York Public Library Digital Collection.