Between 30 and 35 farm workers have filed a class-action lawsuit against Golden Eagle Farms in Washington State for failing to pay them for their work planting blueberry bushes last year.
The complaint alleged that Golden Eagle “hired an unlicensed, unbonded labor contractor who failed to pay workers wages they were owed in 2014 or follow labor laws, such as keeping employment records,” the Herald of Everett first reported. According to the complaint, Alfredo Garcia Jr, owner of the contracting company Father Like Son Farm Labor Supply, did not have a Washington state farm labor contractor license and did not have a surety bond to act as a farm labor contractor.
The Herald of Everett reported that Golden Eagle’s attorney, Adam Belzberg, “wasn’t sure if the farm checked the contractor’s credentials” before using the services of Father Like Son to recruit and hire farmworkers to plant blueberry bushes. But now the contractor can’t be located and the farmworkers are still owed back pay.
The workers’ attorney at Columbia Legal Services charge that Golden Eagle is liable for the back pay because it failed “to check the contractor’s credentials before the workers were hired,” the Herald of Everett indicated. Each person in the lawsuit is owed about $650, Columbia Legal Services attorney Joe Morrison told the publication.
The complaint stated that the contractor verbally offered them $12 per hour with pay days being the 5th and 20th of the month. For September 2014 wages, workers alleged that they were paid many days later and handed cash stuffed in envelopes. They also alleged that they weren’t paid for hours worked in October 2014.
Morrison stated that the immigration status for the workers are irrelevant, but that the legal status also shouldn’t have bearing on whether the workers should be paid. He pointed out, “Anyone is entitled to these protections under the law.”
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (MSPA) provide minimum labor protections for vulnerable workers, including undocumented immigrants. For farmworkers, the FLSA requires employers to pay a minimum wage for each hour worked and to comply with recordkeeping requirements (such as maintaining the payroll records for employees). For workers paid on a piecework basis rather than on an hourly wage, “their average earnings should be sufficient to yield an average hourly wage at least equivalent to the minimum wage,” the nonprofit organization Farmworker Justice explains. The Department of Labor stated that the MSPA “requires employers and farm labor contractors to pay the wages owed to migrant or seasonal agricultural workers when the payments are due.”
Roughly 26 percent of farmworkers and about half of seasonal workers are undocumented, a recent Pew Research Center study found. That study also found that about four out of ten farmworkers in Washington, Nevada, and Idaho are undocumented.
Farmworkers, regardless of immigration status, are susceptible to exploitation and negligence. Last year, 20 farmworkers in Washington were exposed to pesticide drift from a neighboring field. Anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 farmworkers are diagnosed with pesticide poisonings each year, an Environmental Protection Agency press release stated.
Farm employers can sponsor immigrants through the federal H-2A visa program, which allows guest migrant workers to legally do agricultural work for a year. Because of the time and cost involved, only about ten percent of farm jobs are estimated to be filled through this program, a Brookings Institute report found.
The Department of Labor requires H-2 visa sponsors to cover the cost of housing, transportation, travel, visas, and any associated costs of transportation from the housing site to the job site. But because workers are beholden to their employers for visa sponsorship, some employers may be negligent or exploit workers with the promises of adequate housing and good pay. For instance, three recent lawsuits alleged that legal Mexican migrant workers working in Kentucky tobacco field were housed in squalid conditions, paid less than the guaranteed wage, and threatened with deportation.