Farmworkers

Despite their low wages, long hours, and risk of injury on the job, agricultural workers are excluded from the protection of the National Labor Relations Act and from overtime pay under federal law.

Demographics. Approximately 1.6 million workers labor on farms in the United States every year.  The Department of Labor's National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), last conducted in 2001-2002, provides an ongoing portrait of crop workers in the United States. Approximately 78 percent were born outside the United States. More than half of these workers are undocumented. More than half of agricultural jobs are in California, Florida, Texas, North Carolina and Washington.

Wages and Hours. The weekly income of a full-time farmworker averages 59 percent of the national median income. The poverty rate for these workers is more than double that of all wage earners. Farmworkers were paid an average of $7.25 per hour in fiscal years 2001-2002, compared with $5.52 in 1993-1994. Farmworkers' wages track closely with the minimum wage: They are higher in the states with a higher minimum wage and lower in those states with a minimum wage at the federal level. Farmworkers also generally work more than 40 hours per week, according to the NAWS.

Benefits. In the NAWS, between 8 percent and 12 percent of crop workers indicated that health insurance was an employment benefit they received. In the nearly 10 intervening years, this proportion is likely to have gone declined.

Health and Safety. Farmwork generally ranks in the top three industries nationally in terms of workplace injuries and accidents. An estimated 300,000 workers suffer pesticide poisoning each year. Preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2008 show an 18 percent increase in fatalities in 2007 in crop production. Children constitute about 9 percent of farmworkers in the United States. But child farmworkers account for 40 percent of all work-related fatalities among minors in this country.

Forms of Work. The share of workers subcontracted from a primary agricultural firm and employed by a farm-labor contractor increased by 50 percent between 1993-1994 and 2001-2002. As noted in a recent report by Farmworker Justice and Oxfam America, many abuses can be traced to this contracting system and to the failure of the United States Department of Labor (USDOL) to hold employers accountable for contracting abuses.

Compliance with Labor Laws. A 1999 USDOL investigative survey of labor practices involving the harvest of lettuce, tomatoes and onions found that employer compliance with FLSA and a specialized agricultural law called the Agricultural Worker Protect Act was between 50 percent and 65 percent. Similarly, 70 percent of forestry work is out of compliance with worker protection laws, according to the USDOL report.

Legal Context. In addition to exclusions from the right to bargain collectively and to receive overtime pay, and despite that agriculture is one of the most dangerous jobs in America, agricultural38 employers are not obligated to provide workers' compensation to farmworkers in 16 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.

Projected Growth. Among crop workers, employment in agriculture is expected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to decline slightly, by 20,000 jobs, between 2006 and 2016.

Slavery, Forced Labor and Involuntary Servitude. The US State Department estimates that some 15,000 to 20,000 workers in the United States are subject to labor abuse severe enough to merit the term "human trafficking." For example, in September 2010, federal authorities in Honolulu, Hawaii indicted six labor contractors from Los Angeles-based Global Horizons, Inc. on charges that they imposed forced labor on some 400 Thai farmworkers; justice officials called it the biggest human-trafficking case ever brought by federal authorities.41 And in December 2008, federal prosecutors from the Department of Justice wrapped up a case the Chief Assistant US Attorney called one of Southwest Florida's "biggest and ugliest" slavery cases ever.

No one can calculate with any precision the exact number of slavery and slavery-like cases that exist in agriculture in the United States. In Florida, where the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has been especially active in bringing these cases to justice. US attorneys have filed nine slavery and forced labor cases in the past 15 years, affecting workers in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. A Palm Beach Post series on modern-day slavery recounted the details of five slavery prosecutions, three of which occurred in agriculture.

Maria's Story 

I came to the United States 10 years ago from my family's home in Oaxaca [Mexico]. There were no jobs there. We planted corn and beans just to have something to eat. I told my mother I was going to America so that I could have a little money to buy food and clothes.

When I first came to Immokalee, the grower I worked for said I would earn almost a dollar for every [32-pound] bucket of tomatoes I picked. [In fact, the piece rate was 45 cents for each bucket.] I picked 70 buckets, but then he didn't pay me at all. I spent a week trying to get paid, but he told me there was no money. Finally I met someone from the Coalition [of Immokalee Workers (CIW)], who said they could help me. I went to their office and they made a phone call to the grower. After that, I got paid.

Now I go to the CIW office every Sunday for the women's group meeting. We talk about our lives and our jobs, and learn a little English.

I got married after I came to the United States. My husband Francisco also works in the fields. We have three children. I send my mother $100 a month during the high season, but in the summertime I can't [send her anything] because there is no work and no money. When my father died two years ago, I could not even go home to Oaxaca for his funeral because I couldn't afford it. I am thinking of going north this summer to pick more crops and earn some money.

The heat in the fields is terrible. At times I ache all over, as if I have the flu. I almost fainted this week. Tomatoes are the worst crop because they put so many chemicals on them. Some people can't tolerate it. This season, several workers had to go to the hospital because of pesticide exposure. I'm not that sensitive, but the pesticides give me a rash and a cough. The field bosses abuse people while we work, even though we're not doing anything to deserve maltreatment. It is so hard working in the fields, sometimes I feel like crying. But if we don't work, how will we support our children? I want my children to study, so that when they are grown, they won't have to suffer like me.

The grower I work for now sells tomatoes to Publix. Publix has not joined the CIW agreement, so I haven't received the extra penny a pound. In April, we went on a three-day march over that issue. Because the march was against Publix, I knew that I had to go.