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“YOU CAME HERE TO SUFFER”
On August 6 of last year, Honesto Silva Ibarra died in a Seattle hospital. Silva was a guest worker-a Mexican farm worker brought to the United States under contract to pick blueberries. He worked first in Delano, California, and then in Sumas, Washington, next to the Canadian border. His death, and the political and legal firestorm it ignited, has unveiled a contract labor scheme reminiscent of the United States’ infamously exploitative mid-century Bracero Program.
Those demands, as described in the complaint, were extreme, and Silva’s coworkers believe he died as a result. Companies using the H-2A program must apply to the U.S. Department of Labor, listing the work and living conditions and the wages workers will receive. The company must provide transportation, housing, and food. Workers are given contracts for less than one year, and must leave the country when their work is done. They can only work for the company that contracts them, and if they lose that job they must leave immediately. According to the lawsuit complaint, workers were told that they had to pick two boxes of blueberries an hour or they’d be sent back to Mexico. In July and August, they were working twelve-hour shifts. The complaint says managers routinely threatened to send them home if they failed to meet the quota, and to blacklist them afterwards, preventing them from returning to the U.S. to work in subsequent years. One manager told them, “You came here to suffer, not for vacation.”
The death and firings at Sarbanand Farms highlight the explosive growth of this contract labor program. In 2006, U.S. employers were certified to recruit 59,112 workers under H-2A visas. Washington State certified only 814 H-2A positions that year. But by 2015, the numbers had mushroomed. Nationally, employers were certified to bring in 139,832 workers, including 12,081 in Washington State alone. Last year, Washington accounted for 18,535 workers out of 200,049 nationally. Workers recruited through CSI must sign a form acknowledging that their employer can fire them for inadequate performance, in which case they will have to return to Mexico. “The boss must report me to the authorities,” it warns, “which can obviously affect my ability to return to the U.S. legally in the future.”
Most growers seem optimistic about the H2-A program’s future, due in part to the election of Donald Trump as President. While Trump has railed against some guest worker programs, especially the H-1B program used extensively by the high-tech industry, he has been conspicuously silent about H-2A. In fact, Trump’s family employs H-2A workers on its Virginia vineyard. And the H-2A program is popular among some of the most powerful Republicans in Congress, including Representative Kevin McCarthy, GOP House Majority Leader. “We are very positive about the Trump Administration,” WAFLA head Dan Fazio said at a meeting of his group in early 2017. “I don’t think there is a person in this room who voted for President Trump who wouldn’t vote for him again tomorrow.” As the Trump Administration beefs up raids and enforcements, growers want to ensure a continued supply of cheap labor. “ICE does audits and raids, and then growers demand changes that will make H2-A workers even cheaper by eliminating wage requirements, or the requirement that they provide housing,” charges United Farm Workers Vice-President Armando Elenes. “Reducing the available labor and the increased use of H2-A are definitely connected. Growers don’t want to look at how they can make the workplace better and attract more workers. They just want what’s cheaper.”
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In a suit filed January in the U.S. District Court in Washington State, the state’s rural legal aid group, Columbia Legal Services charges that Silva’s employer, Sarbanand Farms, “violated federal anti-trafficking laws through a pattern of threats and intimidation that caused its H-2A workforce to believe they would suffer serious harm unless they fully submitted to Sarbanand’s labor demands.”
Laboring in the rows under the hot sun, breathing smoke in the air from wildfires, many workers complained of dizziness and headaches. Nidia Perez, a Munger supervisor, purportedly told workers that “unless they were on their death bed,” they could not miss work. Silva told a supervisor he was sick. The company, in a statement, said he had diabetes and “received the best medical care and attention possible as soon as his distress came to our attention.” But fellow worker Miguel Angel Ramirez Salazar, gave a different account: “They said if he didn’t keep working he’d be fired for ‘abandoning work,’ but after a while he couldn’t work at all.”
H-2A workers are also excluded from the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act and beholden to one employer. “Even undocumented workers can vote with their feet if they don’t like the job,” Morrison says. “If H-2A workers complain, they get fired, lose their housing, and have to leave the country.”