Move threatens to worsen already deplorable farmworker conditions...
The Bush administration's Department of Labor announced plans to gut regulations governing the nation's agricultural guestworker program today. The proposed changes threaten to significantly cut farmworker wages, lower the bar on farmworker housing, and diminish government oversight of what is already a troubled program.
The agricultural guestworker program has long been criticized by labor economists as an unnecessary and exploitative sop to the powerful agribusiness lobby, designed to provide farm employers with a steady supply of low-wage, docile labor. Decades of stagnant farm labor wages fly in the face of growers' perennial claims of labor shortages (the logic of labor markets dictates that shortages result in upward pressure on wages, as employers are obliged to increase wages to attract and retain workers). Yet despite the lack of any substantive evidence of labor shortages, the growers' lobby has found an opportunity in today's immigration debate to push its longstanding goal to "streamline" guestworker regulations and so expand the use of H2-A workers to harvest the country's crops.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said of the proposed changes:
"The Department of Labor will hurt both immigrant and U.S.-born workers alike if it goes ahead with its plans to strip a number of workers’ rights from the H-2A agricultural guest worker program. The Bush Administration has shown once again that it will go to any extreme to cater to the interest of corporations at the painful expense of workers, and that it is not serious about real fixes to our nation’s broken immigration system.
The Department of Labor’s proposal will strip the H-2A agricultural guest worker program of necessary wage protections, undermine other essential worker protections, weaken efforts to recruit workers from the U.S., and further erode government oversight.
In short, it is a policy the will do nothing to solve the problem at hand –the need for a fair immigration policy that protects all workers—and instead will ensure a deterioration of working conditions in the agricultural sector and make our nation’s employers even more reliant on the importation and exploitation of foreign workers."
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