Edgar Franks
Farmworkers on H-2A visas in Quincy, Washington, negotiated an agreement with their employer after organizing a successful strike.
In the thick of Donald Trump’s first year as President, the U.S. labor movement scored an improbable victory.
The workers are mostly indigenous Mixtec and Triqui immigrants from Mexico, living in predominantly white, conservative rural counties famous as historic breeding grounds for the Ku Klux Klan. Their jobs are physically demanding and often dangerous. They have little formal power because, even though they are in the country legally, they cannot vote. And they can be deported at any moment.
Despite all this, the migrant farmworkers I work with in Washington State won union recognition. The only independent farmworker union in Washington State, Familias Unidas por la Justica, signed its first contract on June 16, 2017. The agreement, a product of years of strikes and boycott, won critical protections and bargaining power for the workers, at Sakuma Brothers berry farms in Burlington, Washington.
Victories for migrant farmworkers offer larger lessons.
The agreement guarantees a $15 hourly wage, sets up a process to calculate a fair piece-rate wage for berry pickers, establishes a grievance process, protects against arbitrary termination, and otherwise protects basic worker rights.
The truth is, these workers have been living in a Trumpian America for years. As one of the organizers of this hard-fought campaign, I know their struggles and can appreciate the enormity of this win, which offers critical lessons for other resistance movements and to a labor movement whose legal protections have been beaten to historic lows.
Now, as Congress prepares to create a permanent underclass of workers by advancing a massive expansion of the country’s migrant guest worker program, their model offers profound hope.
The contract victory in June was a product of years of organizing, but Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ) has not stopped there. It continues to expand its organizing, participating in local issue campaigns like the local People’s Climate March, worker-immigrant opposition to Trump’s Muslim ban, the #NoDAPL movement’s Wells Fargo boycott, and efforts to fill food deserts.
Recently, the union has focused on a class of workers often thought too tough to organize: H-2A seasonal agricultural guest workers brought from Mexico to pick fruit.
The H-2A visa program, created in 1986, connects farms that cannot find enough willing domestic labor with temporary “nonimmigrant” workers willing to travel for work, typically from Mexico. Visas last for at most one year, at which time workers are transported back to their home country. Unlike the similar H-2B program, H-2A applies only to farm work. Use of the program has increased from 11,000 H-2A visas in 1996 to 134,000 in 2016.
In Washington State, the use of this program has been on the rise in Whatcom and Skagit Counties for several years. But now that Trump’s immigration crackdown has exacerbated a labor shortage, the program has exploded. After the Department of Homeland Security lifted the cap on the program this year, the national use of H-2A workers spiked 43 percent for berry workers and 30 percent on apple farms in 2017, compared to 2016. And the trend shows no signs of slowing.
In August, when an H-2A worker died on the job at a farm in Whatcom County, FUJ and Community to Community Development, an organization I work for in Bellingham, Washington, sprang into action. We organized a strike of more than 100 H-2A workers at the farm. The farm managers retaliated by threatening to revoke the workers’ permits and send them back to Mexico. In the end, the managers softened their stance (thanks to public attention to the strike), but still ended up firing workers for “insubordination.”
But news of the strike made headlines in Mexico and across the nation. Since then, we’ve used the attention to pressure Washington Governor JayInslee to create a task force to investigate use of the H-2A program; he has not yet agreed.
Edgar Franks
H-2A workers in Sumas, Washington, show their Mexican passports. Their work permits had expired and their employer had not given them new ones. They went on strike after one of their coworkers fell ill and did not receive proper medical attention. He did not survive.
Thanks to the media coverage, H-2A workers across the United States started reaching out to us, and a few weeks later, FUJ was contacted by seventeen H-2A apple pickers in Quincy, Washington. After visiting the workers and discussing their grievances, we supported their decision to go on strike.
That led to a unique agreement wherein farmworkers negotiated directly with their employer, without a union. The employer agreed to rehire three terminated workers, allowed workers to form a committee, covered unpaid housing expenses, and fired an abusive supervisor. Those workers are now members of FUJ.
Through this work, I’ve seen how life circumstances force people to organize in different ways. For us, conventional labor organizing strategies didn’t do the job, and new ones needed to be embraced.
As part of our organizing efforts, we have linked the cause of migrant workers to other issues, including climate change, immigration reform, and racial justice. Adopting this strategy has made us stronger, and proved essential to our success.
As part of our organizing efforts, we have linked the cause of migrant workers to other issues, including climate change, immigration reform, and racial justice.
Take the role of race. Historically, many settlers came to the Oregon Territory (now Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming) with the intention of setting up some sort of white utopia. Their racism was codified in the laws that forced nonwhites out of town at sunset. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan held a rally of more than 10,000 people in Bellingham, where I live. But although the Northwest remains very much a white space (and breeding ground for white supremacist ideology), people of color and indigenous peoples exist here—and we are organizing for dignity in the workplace and political power.
Likewise, we have no choice but to grapple politically with climate change. Inconsistent harvest seasons caused by drought and rising temperatures have made farm work more precarious. We have seen firsthand how big farms suck up all the water and spray the land with chemicals. We know how dependent the farming and food system is on fossil fuels.
In 2015, the Olympic National Forest—a temperate rainforest usually showered with an annual 150 inches of precipitation—caught fire for the first time in recorded history. We’ve just emerged from an intense wildfire season. Our warming waters threaten native salmon and shellfish species. There’s a massive warm water “blob” off our coast. We experienced an unprecedented drought that we still haven’t recovered from. All this is the new normal. We can only expect things to get worse unless we act and begin to put forth bold ideas and action.
And so we insist on the right to address these issues, even as others do not see us as credible “experts.” Our ideas and intellect are not respected. This is one way white supremacy manifests. And this superiority complex is even present in so-called progressive spaces, among people who call themselves allies.
In 2014, we were invited to be part of a statewide coalition to discuss and plan a climate policy here in Washington. Our experience organizing with farmworkers on the national and local scale to challenge corporations and the extractive nature of industrialized farms, we thought, could be creatively used in the climate work. We were riding momentum from ongoing boycotts and strikes, a historic legal victory—and ready to connect the dots to lead on climate.
Edgar Franks
Signs used at an antiracism action in Bellingham, Washington. For the past couple of years, there has been an increase in hate-group organizing throughout the area.
But when it came time to make decisions, our input was ignored. A group of academics and liberal middle-class folks launched their own separate climate policy, a proposed “carbon tax” that was put to a statewide ballot initiative. We knew this tax would not effectively address climate change.
The carbon tax, like cap and trade, is a false solution—a market mechanism for green capitalism. It would not have addressed the needs of communities to transition into a new economy. It would not have addressed systemic inequalities affecting poor people and their neighborhoods. And so we opposed it, as did a majority of Washington State voters.
Washington State is ready for climate action. We have the “greenest governor” and a liberal, environmentally conscious population. But the opportunity was lost, in large part because the working poor, the local indigenous peoples, and people of color were left out of the conversation. Rather than campaign for the carbon tax, we went to our rural communities and spoke to workers to brainstorm solutions to the climate crises. We found that people want to engage in meaningful dialogue and participate in creating democratically controlled, renewable energy.
It feels like we are entering a new era, where people of color and indigenous folks take the lead in proposing solutions. If we want a clean and healthy environment, then we must also have a fair economy, one that does not exploit the workers and the planet. It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s a winning strategy.
Yet, if we’re not careful, the types of working conditions that have made the H-2A akin to slavery in some parts of America could soon be spreading. There is serious momentum behind a proposal to expand the H-2A program into other industries like food processing, fish farming, and forestry.
It feels like we are entering a new era, where people of color and indigenous folks take the lead in proposing solutions.
The proposal, which passed the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on October 25, would scrap the H-2A guest worker program and create a radically expanded “H-2C” program that critics in Congress say could essentially legalize indentured servitude. It would gut what few protections the H-2A program now offers workers and scrap a mandate that employers pay for housing, health insurance, transportation, and tools.
If employers continued providing these, they could deduct them from worker wages. Employers would also be able to deduct a flat 10 percent of wages, which workers could redeem only after they returned to their home country.
The proposal would also open the program to “unauthorized” noncitizens already in the country. Think about that. The reform could present people with the option of being detained and deported, or being forced to work for a particular employer.
To prepare for possible new realities, we must embrace and elevate new forms of organizing. That requires tearing down old ways of thinking. Farmworkers have revitalized the labor movement in Washington because we know it takes a movement to make history. Join us.
Edgar Franks is an organizer with Community to Community Development. This article was produced in partnership with Read the Dirt and its Ear to the Ground newsletter, an information service that mines stories from local newspapers and state legislatures across the country.