Laws: July, 2003 - Number #07

Florida has 4,000 registered farm labor contractors, and they have developed a variety of relationships with other entities that make it hard to assign liability when something goes wrong. For example, a woman who died on a North Carolina farm in 2002 was employed by Agricultural Employment Services of Fort Myers, leased to Naples farm labor contractor John Miller Harvesting, and worked in North Carolina. A bill in the Florida Legislature would allow migrant workers the right to sue growers in state court when the contractor fails to pay the workers at least the minimum wage. The Department of Business and Professional Regulation checked farms in southwestern Florida in July 2003, interviewing farm workers and verifying the registration of farm labor contractors- a few minor violations were found. Under Florida law, FLCs cannot charge for housing that they provide to their employees. Global Horizons Manpower Inc (www.globalmanpower.org/) has a Los Angeles-based subsidiary, Global Agri-Labor (http://agrilabor.org/), that told Florida farmers that it could provide them with Thai H-2A workers- its slogan is "Let us know your agricultural requirements and we will do the rest." In FY02, some 1,426 H-2A workers were certified to work in Florida. In February 2002, Pero Family Farms, Florida's fifth-largest vegetable grower, stopped using Farm Labor Contractors to hire workers; it now hires 700 workers directly to harvest peppers, eggplants and cucumbers in Palm Beach, St. Lucie and Hendry counties. As part of a proposed settlement with workers who charged that the FLC who brought them to Pero did not pay them the minimum wage, Pero created a $225,000 fund to compensate workers cheated by FLCs between 1997 and 2002, and contributed $70,000 to the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project. One worker reported being paid the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour in some jobs, and a piece rate of $0.50 a bucket for picking bell peppers, with worker productivity ranging from 80 to 200 buckets in a 10-hour day. In South Texas, 19 of 100 migrants died of heat stroke in a trailer truck near Victoria, Texas in May 2003 as they were driven north. The driver, from New York State, was arrested; he said he was promised $2,500 to take the migrants to Houston, and said it would prosecute the driver and the other smugglers "to the fullest extent of the law." Migrant advocate Rogelio Nunez of Proyecto Libertad said "This incident and others like it have come about because harsher US policies toward the border has made it more difficult for people to come across, increasing the risks they're willing to take." Interviews with the families of the dead migrants in Mexico suggested little deterrence. One worker said that the deaths were a tragedy, but that he was saving as much of his $12 a day in wages as he could to get the $2,000 he needed to pay a smuggler to get him to the US. A week later, 18 migrants were found in another sweltering tractor-trailer in southern Texas. Jay Taylor of Fulton and Taylor Farms in Palmetto, Florida, where some of the migrants were headed to pick tomatoes, estimated that 60 percent of his pickers were unauthorized. The Houston Chronicle reported that, of 167,000 convictions secured by the federal government in the past decade for immigration violations, only 364 were against employers who hired unauthorized workers. Texas. Imperial Sugar closed its historic 10-story refinery in the 65,000-resident city of Sugar Land, Texas, a suburb of Houston, and moved its operations to Louisiana. Kim Cobb, "For migrants, jobs come with a price," Houston Chronicle, June 7, 2003. Susan Salisbury, "Far East Farmworkers Might Be Headed Here," Palm Beach Post, May 29, 2003. Prashant Gopal, "Grower adopts labor changes," Sun-Sentinel, May 11, 2003.