U.S.A. Veterans first, please!
U.S.A. Citizens face Racial Bias as Farms/Employers favor Immigrants: Legal and ILLEGAL
U.S.A. citizens are being refused work in their own country and misleading, misguiding and/or erroneous excuses are being given to support an invading force of people who DO NOT support the Constitution of the United States of America and who lack concern for the harm being down against U.S.A. citizens.
Could it be that the banks, the Department of Agriculture and Academia, as well as, the greed of business owners/shareholders are to blame for U.S.A. citizens being refused work in their own country?
The real price of food by which these people called immigrants is far higher than what is being paid for at the check out. If the actual figures are added in which taxpayers give to programs such as the Finger Lakes Migrant Health Care Program (FLMHCP) and Farm Worker Legal Aid, to name just a few, the actual cost of food is alarmingly high.
An employee of FLMHCP married a worker who was thought to of been in the U.S.A. ILLEGALLY, then shortly after the marriage, they divorced. He now works for FLMHCP.
There are a multitude of programs funded by U.S.A. taxpayers which receives millions upon millions of taxpayers funds to support and/or take care of - often far better than U.S.A. citizens - those in the U.S.A. legally and ILLEGALLY.
Via
Workers Claim Race Bias as Farms Rely on Immigrants
 |
Working for hours on end under a punishing sun, the pickers are said to
be crowded into squalid camps, driven without a break and even cheated
of wages.
Grant Blankenship for The New York Times |
Published: May 6, 2013
VIDALIA, Ga. — For years, labor unions and immigrant rights activists
have accused large-scale farmers, like those harvesting sweet Vidalia
onions here this month, of exploiting Mexican guest workers. Working for
hours on end under a punishing sun, the pickers are said to be crowded into squalid camps, driven without a break and even cheated of wages.
But as Congress weighs immigration legislation expected to expand the guest worker program,
another group is increasingly crying foul — Americans, mostly black,
who live near the farms and say they want the field work but cannot get
it because it is going to Mexicans. They contend that they are illegally
discouraged from applying for work and treated shabbily by farmers who
prefer the foreigners for their malleability.
“They like the Mexicans because they are scared and will do anything
they tell them to,” said Sherry Tomason, who worked for seven years in
the fields here, then quit. Last month she and other local residents
filed a federal lawsuit against a large grower of onions, Stanley Farms,
alleging that it mistreated them and paid them less than it paid the
Mexicans.
The suit is one of a number of legal actions containing similar
complaints against farms, including a large one in Moultrie, Ga., where
Americans said they had been fired because of their race and national
origin, given less desirable jobs and provided with fewer work
opportunities than Mexican guest workers. Under a consent decree with
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the farm, Southern Valley,
agreed to make certain changes.
With local unemployment about 10 percent and the bureaucracy for hiring
foreigners onerous — guest workers have to be imported and housed and
require extensive paperwork — it would seem natural for farmers to hire
from their own communities, which they did a generation ago.
In fact, the farmers say, they would dearly like to.
“We have tried to fill our labor locally,” said Brian Stanley, an owner
of Stanley Farms, which is being sued by Ms. Tomason and others. “But we
couldn’t get enough workers, and that was hindering our growth. So we
turned to the guest worker program.”
The vast majority of farm workers in the country are not in the guest
worker program but are simply unauthorized immigrants. The plan to place
those workers on a path to legal status would reduce the chances of
their being exploited, the bill’s sponsors say, and thereby also improve
the status of Americans who feel they cannot compete against vulnerable
foreigners.
Mr. Stanley, like other farmers, argues that Americans who say they want
the work end up quitting because it is hard, leaving the crops to rot
in the fields. But the situation is filled with cultural and racial
tensions.
Even many of the Americans who feel mistreated acknowledge that the
Mexicans who arrive on buses for a limited period are incredibly
efficient, often working into the night seven days a week to increase
their pay.
“We are not going to run all the time,” said Henry Rhymes, who was fired
— unfairly, he says — from Southern Valley after a week on the job. “We
are not Mexicans.”
Jon Schwalls, director of operations at Southern Valley, made a similar point.
“When Jose gets on the bus to come here from Mexico he is committed to
the work,” he said. “It’s like going into the military. He leaves his
family at home. The work is hard, but he’s ready. A domestic wants to
know: What’s the pay? What are the conditions? In these communities, I
am sorry to say, there are no fathers at home, no role models for hard
work. They want rewards without input.”
Such generalizations lead lawyers — and residents — to say there are racist undertones to the farms’ policies.
“I am not arguing that agricultural work is a good job,” said Dawson
Morton, a lawyer who focuses on farm workers’ rights at the Georgia Legal Services Program,
a nonprofit law firm. “I am arguing that it could be a better job. If
you want experienced people, train them. Just because people are easier
to supervise, agricultural employers shouldn’t be able to import them.
It is not true that Americans don’t want the work. What the farmers are
really saying is that blacks just don’t want to work.”
To which J. Larry Stine, an Atlanta lawyer for Stanley Farms and other
big farms, replied: “The farmers are not racist or against Americans.
They have crops to be picked, and they see that domestics just don’t
have their hearts in it.”
Jim Knoepp of the Southern Poverty Law Center,
a nonprofit group that has campaigned against the guest worker program,
said that farm work, like other difficult labor, could be made
attractive to Americans at reasonable cost, and that farmers should not
be excused from doing so.
“There used to be lots of American pickers who moved around the
country,” he said. “But wages have stagnated and conditions have
deteriorated, and agriculture is unwilling to make these jobs
attractive. Think of trash collection. That’s not very appealing,
either. But if you offer a decent wage and conditions, people do it.”
Cindy Hahamovitch, an expert on guest worker programs at the College of
William and Mary in Virginia, said that in the 1970s about two-thirds of
farm workers were Americans and a third were foreign, and that a decade
later the proportion was reversed. Today, she said, the vast majority
of farm workers around the country are immigrants, although not in the
guest worker program.
Republicans in Congress, mindful of the Democrats’ desire to bring legal
status to the nation’s 11 million unauthorized immigrants, have made an
expansion of the guest worker program a key element of any deal.
Current proposals include increasing the number and category of
temporary workers to the dairy and construction industries, and
increasing their stays from a matter of months to three years so that
employers have the workers they say they need.
The guest workers who are planting cucumbers for Southern Valley and
harvesting onions for Stanley Farms are among 10,000 holders of H-2A
visas in Georgia this year and 85,000 nationally. They are generally
guaranteed a minimum wage of just over $9 an hour, but are paid per
piece and can boost those wages by increasing their productivity. Other
workers, known as H-2B and numbering around 65,000, labor in other
businesses in which there is a demand for temporary or seasonal workers,
including hotels.
Employers must show that they have tried to hire Americans through
advertising and other means and that they could not attract enough of
them before resorting to the H-2 system. In the litigation that resulted
in the consent decree with Southern Valley, the federal government
argued that the effort had not been made or had been intentionally not
serious. Excuses were used not to hire locals or to fire them — training
was minimal, and people were fired when they were less skilled than
others who had been doing the work for years.
“You’ve got some people who don’t work as fast as Mexicans, but they
don’t teach you, and it can be learned,” said Misty Johnson, who was
fired and then rehired by Southern Valley as part of the consent decree.
For the past few months, Southern Valley has been required to provide
daily bus transportation to the farm and demonstrate that it was
training and retaining Americans. But a recent inspection of those
efforts left federal officials unimpressed.
Southern Valley officials make no secret of their belief that the
consent decree — the free bus, the orientation program they now run and
the training — is a waste of their time and money. They assert that
there is no discrimination and that they would prefer to hire locals if
they could.
Lawyers for the local workers say the system is rigged to favor low-cost
foreign labor because, given the conditions and the pay, no one else
will do it.
“If you can’t find locals to do the work, why is the answer to bring in
people who have little protection and not grant them legal status?”
asked Mr. Knoepp of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “If we need them,
why not bring them in and make them legal citizens with real
protections? The answer is because then they wouldn’t keep working in
the fields given the conditions of that work. They would do something
else. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 6, 2013
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated where the Southern Poverty Law Center is based. It is in Montgomery, Ala., not Atlanta.
Correction: May 6, 2013
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated where the Southern Poverty Law Center is based. It is in Montgomery, Ala., not Atlanta.
A version of this article appeared in print on May 7, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Workers Sue As Big Farms Rely On Immigrants.
Become
AWARE
and stay
ALERT!
ALERT!
U.S.A. Veterans first, please!
The U.S.A. used to be a fine place and it will be back!
Immigrate responsibly, or please stay home!
