November 1999
Graham-Smith guest worker plan
a ‘cruel hoax’ on farm workers
United Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriguez issued the following statement from the UFW’s Keene, Calif. headquarters on newly proposed guest worker legislation introduced by U.S. Sens. Gordon H. Smith (R-Ore.) and Bob Graham (D-Fla.).
Before considering any guest worker scheme–and the Graham-Smith bills are just the latest of many in the last few years–we must first get past two crucial thresholds: Is there a proven need for a plan to import more farm workers from outside the country? And will the guarantees and protections for farm workers under the plan be enforced? The answer to both questions is an emphatic no. Like the other proposed guest worker plans, Graham-Smith amounts to a cruel hoax on farm workers.
* Can it be justified? The objective data shows that in general there are no labor shortages. State unemployment figures from California and other major farm states consistently demonstrate unemployment rates in major agricultural counties running two and sometimes three times higher than state or national averages–even during harvests. (State U.I. figures are, if anything, conservative since they don’t reflect undocumented workers who rarely file for unemployment.) After studying major agricultural counties across the country, the U.S. General Accounting Office recently concluded there are no labor shortages.
Cesar Chavez said many times that agribusiness’ No. 1 farm labor strategy over the decades was maintaining a surplus supply of labor–to depress wages and benefits, and fight unionization. That is the motivation behind enactment of a guest worker program.
Growers who believe they face a legitimate labor shortage can obtain foreign workers under the federal government’s existing H-2A program.
* Will protections be enforced? No one wants to repeat the horrors of the original guest worker program. The bracero farm labor program saw hundreds of thousands of Mexican farm workers imported to toil on U.S. farms from 1942 to 1964. We are assured proposals such as Graham-Smith won’t repeat the abuses visited on both domestic and foreign laborers under the bracero program.But the bracero program had strict protections for farm workers. They were just not enforced. That is also the case with the present H-2A guest worker program, which routinely fails to guarantee decent treatment for farm workers imported from outside the U.S.
In fact, nearly all state and federal laws designed to protect farm workers are uniformly ignored–even in California which has the toughest laws in the nation. They include laws and regulations on minimum wages and hours, field sanitation, child labor, pesticide protection and sexual harassment.
Fifty-seven years of experience with guest worker programs tells us that in the end, terms and conditions will be set by the growers–despite all the wonderful guarantees and protections advertised in any bill. That is why the UFW views bracero or guest worker programs as indentured servitude.
Immigration reform? A new wrinkle in the Graham-Smith plan is its cynical appeal for support among the growing ranks of Latino voters by promising legalization of immigration status for undocumented workers if they continue working in agriculture over a period of at least five to seven years. First, farm workers without papers would still be easy targets of exploitation if they complain about pay or mistreatment. Second, if agribusiness truly wishes to legalize the status of undocumented farm workers, they are welcome to join the United Farm Workers in asking Congress for an amnesty provision such as was enacted by Congress as part of the 1986 immigration reform law.
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