Farmworkers Defend Their Rights in North Carolina

Posted: 21 March 2006

Growers must cover visa and transportation costs for migrant workers.

Migrant farmworkers in North Carolina got welcome news on March 10 when the Wake County Superior Court ruled that growers must reimburse guest workers for expenses related to visas and transportation.

According to the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), a project partner with Oxfam America since 2001, migrant guest workers from Mexico “will no longer be forced to endure illegal wage deductions or pay exorbitant transportation costs to work in the fields of North Carolina.”

The settlement sets up a $1.475 million fund that will pay 15,000 workers for earlier illegal wage deductions. FLOC estimates that as the 1,000 growers in North Carolina begin to meet their new obligations to absorb visa and transportation costs, workers will save more than $4 million over the next two years.

The settlement was the result of a 17-month lawsuit brought by FLOC against the North Carolina Growers’ Association, whose members employ migrant workers to harvest fruits and vegetables. FLOC invoked both federal minimum wage law and the North Carolina Wage and Hour Act to claim that the growers need to pay for all visa and transportation costs for temporary workers under the H-2A guest worker program.

Formerly, many growers deducted these costs from the workers’ pay, dropping wages below the federal minimum. The court also ruled that since the visa was largely benefiting the growers, they should assume its cost.

The settlement comes less than two years after FLOC and the North Carolina Growers’ Association agreed to allow farm workers to organize unions, set up a commission to hear grievances on working conditions, and created new rules on pesticide usage that would help workers avoid recently sprayed fields.

“The North Carolina guest worker program had a national reputation for being especially bad,” said Guadalupe Gamboa, Oxfam America’s program officer for the United States. Before the new union was established, workers lived in remote camps, with no access to health care or legal services, and had no opportunity for redress in cases of abuse. Growers maintained a “black list” of workers who spoke out about their rights—and were not rehired for the next season. Workers are now protected from these abuses.

“FLOC has turned a really bad, oppressive situation into one where there is respect for workers,” Gamboa said. “They took a hopeless situation and turned it around. It shows you can organize workers and protect their rights.”