July 11, 2024
‘There is tremendous fear.’ As Massachusetts farm workers toil under brutal conditions, some push for legislative change.
BY Boston Globe
Throughout the summer, Patricia, a single mom who moved to the United States from El Salvador when she was 18, works 11-hour days, seven days a week on a western Massachusetts farm, picking broccoli, beets, and carrots with no access to shade, water, or toilets in the field.
Farmworkers go to the bathroom “in the mountains, under a tree, behind it — wherever we see a space and have an opportunity to relieve ourselves,” she told a reporter in Spanish. Patricia, who asked that her last name and legal status not be published to protect her privacy, carries water bottles from home and wears her own rain boots and sun gear. She is not entitled to overtime under state law, unlike the workers who wash, sort, and package the vegetables she picks.
The conditions under which Patricia and other farmworkers toil in Massachusetts and around the country at times violate basic rights under federal labor law. Yet few farms face consequences for such violations, in part, advocates say, because many workers feel they have little power, struggle to communicate in English, or do not have legal status to work in the US and fear deportation or firing if they voice complaints.
“There is tremendous fear in the farmworker community about speaking out,” said Tom Clarke, principal consultant of Workers First, a labor organization advocating for New York farmworkers.
Some Massachusetts lawmakers are fighting to change that, pushing legislation that gives farmworkers pay and protections already afforded to most Massachusetts workers.
Known as the “Fairness for Farmworkers” bill, the legislation would mandate farmers pay overtime to farmworkers, who, like Patricia, work in “primary agriculture” — growing and harvesting crops — as well as increase the state agricultural subminimum wage, currently $8 per hour, to the state minimum wage, and give farmworkers two paid breaks per day.
State Representative Lindsay Sabadosa, a co-sponsor of the bill, said “there’s an absolute invisibility” for Massachusetts farmworkers.
“The enormous amount of work they have to do,” Sabadosa said, “is kind of shocking to me.”
The fate of the legislation, however, remains in limbo as the state Legislature hurtles toward the end of its two-year formal session. Lawmakers and advocates are attempting to add the legislation to a larger economic development bill that the state Senate is slated to vote on Thursday, betting that attaching it to a big, must-pass piece of legislation would give the farmworker bill its best chance of reaching Governor Maura Healey’s desk.
Claudia Quintero, staff attorney for Central West Justice Center, an organization providing legal aid to farmworkers, and a leader of a coalition pushing the legislation, said while the farmworker legislation will not eliminate fear among farmworkers or automatically enforce existing labor laws, communicating new pay and protections would create an opportunity to inform workers on how to report violations.
“Employers capitalize off of employees not knowing their rights,” she said.
All workers in Massachusetts are protected by state labor and employment laws, regardless of legal status.
Under OSHA rules, farmers with 11 or more employees “engaged on any given day in hand-labor operations in the field” must provide farmworkers with accessible drinking water, as well as toilet and handwashing facilities.
Quintero said the lack of access to bathrooms and water is a common experience among the farmworker clients she represents, in addition to minimal shade in the field.
OSHA has recently reported fining farms in states such as North Carolina and Florida for “heat-related” farmworker fatalities.
Still, Quintero said, “workers will not report these things because they are scared.”
At least 44 percent of farmworkers nationwide are undocumented, according to the National Agricultural Workers Survey, and just two percent are members of a union per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Patricia is one of 14,000-plus farmworkers in Massachusetts who often work long hours throughout the summer without overtime in difficult conditions. Organizations such as the Connecticut River Valley Farmworker Health Program deliver water and protective equipment to workers in the field, but for years, legislation in Massachusetts addressing pay and conditions has languished on Beacon Hill.
“It’s really challenging to get legislators to pay attention if it’s not something that’s happening right in their own backyard,” Sabadosa said.
Harris Freeman, professor of legal research and writing at Western New England University, said there is a “long-standing, nationwide custom, in practice and law, of treating farmworkers as second-class workers.”
“It’s like you’re structuring the economy to guarantee that you have a group of people who are living in poverty,” he said.
This fits with Patricia’s experience. The 39-year old said the produce she picks ends up at supermarkets such as Stop & Shop, which she said are too expensive for her family.
A 2020 report from Jeannette Wicks-Lim, research professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Political Economy Research Institute, found farmworker families in the state live in poverty at over twice the rate of other families.
One root of this inequity, Clarke of Workers First said, is how southern politicians in the 1930s successfully lobbied to exclude predominantly Black farm and domestic workforces from the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act. State laws followed suit.
Nearly 100 years later, the National Labor Relations Act still excludes farmworkers, who, according to the Department of Labor, are now predominantly Latino immigrants. The Fair Labor Standards Act excludes farmworkers from overtime.
“We trace farmworker conditions to Jim Crow attitudes,” said Clarke.
Although Massachusetts farmers can legally pay farmworkers below the state minimum wage, Quintero of Central West Justice Center said, few do. Patricia said she makes $16 per hour.
Karen Schwalbe, executive director of the Massachusetts Farm Bureau Federation, a lobbying organization representing farmers, said many of its members support raising the agricultural minimum wage.
But farmers fear the proposed overtime pay would lead to higher labor costs, as well as reductions in staffing and agricultural production, Schwalbe said.
“Farmers, including farmers who employ farm labor, are also being squeezed,” Freeman said. “They are not without serious problems in the way the economy is structured.”
With record flooding last year, Plainville Farm, which grows hard squash, asparagus, and other seasonal vegetables in Hadley, Massachusetts, turned a profit of just over $24,000.
Wally Czajkowski, Plainville’s co-owner, said the state’s classification of primary and secondary agriculture, which dictates whether or not a farmworker is entitled to overtime, is “a nightmare.”
“It just got more complicated and more complicated,” he said. “Is it fair to make some people stay in the field all day while other people stay in the barn?”
Last summer, Patricia, working in primary agriculture, said she tried to calculate how much she and her 7-year-old son would need for rent and food each month until work commenced the following spring. Her savings fell short, and in the winter, she had to pick up side work shoveling snow.
Each Friday, she fought through “the hurt that comes after putting that much force and that much effort” into her work, she said, then “receiving a paycheck and realizing that it’s unlivable.”
She said she repeated a mantra each morning.
“I need to do this for my family,” she said. “I need to do this for my kid. I need to do this to move forward.”
Interviews with Patricia were translated live, from Spanish to English, by Darincka Vargas, a graduate student at Boston University.