Margaret Hennessey, staff member of the Legal Aid Justice Center and director of its farmworker project, stares at the glossy cover of the magazine put out by the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. The issue covers the amazing progress made with swine and cattle treatment, highlighting farmers who put animal health and care front and center.
But, Hennessey asks, who are the workers tending to the animals, picking our fruit and our vegetables, and manning the fields? How are the living and working conditions for those who pick and pack our food? In the entire publication there was no mention of the actual workers.
Thousands of these farmworkers are H-2A migrants working 50 to 60 hours a week in the heat, exposed to pesticides and toxins, living in crowded and inadequate camps with limited bathing facilities, barely fluent in English, and all part of an industry that isn’t looking out for their best interests.
“The fact that this country allows an enormous segment of the working population, a segment that literally puts food on our tables, to be treated like second-class citizens should be an embarrassment to all of us,” Hennessey says.
On May 1, "Dolores," a 2017 PBS documentary, will screen at The Valentine from 6 to 8:30 p.m. A panel featuring Hennessey, Pedro Baez of the Legal Aid Justice Center of Charlottesville and Phil Story of the Legal Aid Justice Center of Richmond will follow. The panelists will give an overview of farmworker communities in Virginia, and a farmworker is expected to speak about his or her experience.
In Virginia, H-2A farmworkers who tend to agricultural crops make up roughly 50 percent of the farm workforce, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The H-2A program, enacted in 1986, allows U.S. employers to bring in foreign nationals from over 30 countries, the majority from Mexico, to fill temporary agricultural jobs.
In 2015 approximately 140,000 temporary agricultural workers were part of the H-2A visa program.
These H-2A migrant workers do not qualify for overtime hours under the Fair Labor Standards Act. If they work at small farms, they are exempt from minimum-wage requirements under the FLSA. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t strictly enforce standards. Lack of budgeting to enforce the laws comes from lack of funding. The minimum age to work is 14 years old.
Laborers exempt from Virginia's Minimum Wage Act include farm laborers, domestic service workers in private homes, shoeshine boys, ushers, doormen and more.
“I am certain that most people are unaware of the issues facing farmworkers, which is evident in some of the currently proposed legislation in Congress that would decrease protections for farmworkers, and they continue to be exempted from many protective labor laws,” Hennessey says.
A person who did fight for those labor laws is the documentary's namesake, Dolores Huerta. Born in 1930 in the small farming town of Stockton, California, Huerta saw her father work the fields during the day, and her mother offer shelter at her hotel for the overworked farmers at night. Huerta envisioned a better life for all of them.
“Dolores Huerta spent her life fighting on behalf of farmworkers,” says Hennessey. “She and Cesar Chavez turned the tables on employers who for too long had treated their workers like chattel. They gave workers a voice.”
Huerta’s accomplishments included securing Aid for Dependent Families (AFDC) in 1963, which provided disability insurance for farm workers in California; the Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, aimed at providing a peaceful process for the resolution of labor disputes; and co-founding in 1962 the United Farm Workers, a labor union working for the rights of farmers.
“No one thinks of immigrant farm workers here in Virginia,” says Wanda Hernandez, Latino Project Coordinator at The Valentine. “It’s something we think about on the West Coast."
The Legal Aid Justice Center is trying to help local farmworkers by visiting their labor camps, mobile homes or motels; providing information on legal rights; and collaborating with churches, health clinics, educators, and private attorneys to maximize services.
But it’s still not easy, says Hennessey. “We, as outreach workers to farm labor camps, still experience resistance from employers when we visit and provide workers information about their legal rights.”
When farmworkers arrive, their H-2A visa ties them to one employer. If they are treated poorly by that employer, simply seeking other work is not an option. If they quit or are fired, they may be deported, forced to leave their family and life behind. It is not uncommon for farmworkers to continually return to the U.S. on working visas for years. However, they have no right to apply for green cards, which would allow them them to live and work in the U.S. permanently.
“Workers are terrified of the immigration consequences of losing their jobs,” says Hennessey. “These workers and those who work without legal documentation live in constant fear. The worst employees exploit that fear in order to maximize control over their workforce.”
The H2-A visas were intended to assist employers in filling short-term seasonal jobs, yet the number of those visas granted nationally has doubled in the past five years. According to the American Farm Bureau. workers employed by H2-A visas make up 10 percent of the nation’s farm labor; 80 percent of farm laborers are noncitizens, and nearly half are undocumented.
Although Huerta paved the road for change, farmworkers have many hurdles to overcome, especially here in Virginia.
"I hope that [community members] see that Latinos have been integrated into history since the beginning of the nation, even beforehand, and how issues people have fought back then are still impacting us today locally," says Hernandez.
“There is no justification for exempting [farmworkers] from protective statutes," Hennessey says, "other than the fact that the jobs were historically filled by freed slaves, who now have been mostly replaced by immigrant workers.”