Critics slam government plan to cut the wages of farmworkers

Farmworker advocates are speaking out against wage cuts for agricultural workers, both foreign-born workers in the H-2A visa program and U.S. citizens who work alongside them. This week, the United Farm Workers, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, and others condemned the changes.

Diego Iñiguez-López, government affairs director for the United Farm Workers Foundation, says U.S. workers will be paid $3.52 less per hour, and guest workers’ pay will drop by $6.52 an hour.

“This is going to make farmworkers who ensure that we have food on our tables unable to afford food themselves,” he said. “It’s horrendous, it’s callous, it’s arbitrary, capricious. It will deepen poverty within farmworker communities.”

The new rule published by the U.S. Department of Labor admits this change will transfer almost $2.5 billion a year from farmworkers to employers. The rule also allows companies to charge for housing they previously provided free of charge. The Trump administration has said it wants to speed up H2A visa approvals and lower costs for companies that own farms.

Iñiguez-López predicts the government’s position will backfire.

“It argues that this rule is needed in order to prevent a labor shortage,” he said, “despite the fact the Department of Labor acknowledged the basic economic theory holds that if there’s a labor shortage, the thing to do is to raise wages, not decrease them.”

The United Farm Workers filed suit to reverse this rule about two weeks ago. The Trump administration has until mid-January to respond. The union won a similar lawsuit during the first Trump administration that sought to freeze farmworkers’ wages.