By Mason Soto
From a worker’s death over the summer in Sumas to a sexual harassment case against an agribusiness manager in Lacey, farmworker activists are working to expose experiences of exploitation happening behind the scenes of the local food supply chain.
For the annual Farmworker’s Justice Day on January 24, activists and farmworkers came to Evergreen as they have in years past to lead lectures and workshops on issues that involve local agriculture, immigration, and labor rights. A panel of local folks working with the group Community to Community (C2C) gave testimonies about working conditions and immigration, and the expanding federal work visa program known as H-2A was at the forefront of the conversation.
The H-2A Temporary Workers Program allows United State’s employers “to bring foreign nationals to the United States for temporary agricultural jobs”, as the program’s federal webpage states, and this is accomplished by sending contractors out of the country to convince people to come here for a season or two. Many of the communities that these workers live in rely on remittances that the workers send back from the states, and sometimes this type of displaced work can continue through generations of a family.
Members of C2C, who focus on empowering underrepresented and exploited groups in decision making and social organization, question the limits that the H-2A program puts on the voices of local farmers as well as the lack of protections for guest workers. Although the program’s federal webpage says the employer applying for workers must prove they can not find workers locally and that the program will not adversely affect the wage market, folks say that there is not enough accountability within the government departments who oversee the applications to ensure this happens.
For farmworkers and activists, the problems of H-2A were made tragically apparent through the death of Honesto Silva Ibarra last August. A Sumas farmworker from the campus lecture alleged that Honesto was afraid to ask for treatment for an infection for fear of retaliation and deportation. The workers rely on their employers for housing, transportation, and the ability to seek medical attention, a situation that C2C says has created dangerous conditions where the aforementioned threats of replacement because of sickness or dissent are common. When Honesto was finally given medical attention, his condition was too severe to save him. In the coming weeks Sarbanand denied any wrongdoing, despite testimonies of immigrant workers being sprayed with pesticides, made to stay past their visas, and a culture of retaliation, as hundreds of farmworker activists protested outside their office in Sumas. Activists have since announced a boycott of the blueberry farm’s products along with the associated companies Munger Farms and Naturipe.
Activists are also demanding the agencies that help run the program be held accountable for the exploitation folks have testified about. Executive Director of C2C Rosalinda Guillen spoke of the problematic nature of local businesses participating in the program, sharing allegations against Dan Fazio, CEO of the Washington Farmworker Labor Association (WFLA) based in Lacey, of widespread sexual harassment and racism in the workplace. Fazio’s business facilitates local farm owners through the H-2A program, helping them prove to state agencies that they need more workers, and he participates himself in training farm management on payroll, pesticide usage, and most notably workplace sexual harassment issues.
A letter sent last June to WFLA board members outlines hundreds of allegedly ignored complaints from employees since 2015 of gross misconduct. There are accusations of sexual harassment from Fazio telling a woman to unbutton her blouse, touching a woman’s thigh to “demonstrate sexual harassment”, and rating women in the office, to name a few. There are just as many accusations of racism, with Fazio saying he was working less because he was white and that he would ban Spanish from the workplace. The latter part of the letter is dedicated to all the complaints of illegal activity involving work visa programs that were ignored or covered up by management, like lack of proper advertising for local farmwork, pushing through unfinished paperwork, and in general cutting corners and purposefully stifling the local market to increase their profits through the use of H-2A. Indeed, this past January, amidst the ongoing case against him, Fazio optimistically announced that H-2A had increased 35 percent last year and encouraged lobbyists to further strip down the requirements for employers to keep bringing in workers.
Rosalinda shared how she sees the harassment case as part of a larger system of exploitation within agribusiness in an interview with the Cooper Point Journal, saying, “It appears to me there is this ongoing consciousness about farm labor and agricultural work being slave work.” She spoke of how the legacy of slavery and plantation labor has perpetuated a reliance on and normalization of exploitation in the agricultural arena in that, “We’re expected to see a labor force that is as close to slavery as they can get it.”
She also recalled Evergreen’s own history of participation in the movement for farmworker’s justice, saying that the now shut-down Labor Center on campus “was like the main headquarters for supporting farmworkers” in the boycott over unfair conditions at Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery in Woodinville. Activists in Olympia held marches and protests downtown that stood alongside statewide actions helping to win the union terms. Guest workers can not legally organize for collective rights under federal law. Rosalinda hopes to see more attention from the media and the public about the controversy at WFLA, and says, “I would like to see that business shut down. [Fazio] has helped justify a culture of retaliation in the agricultural industry, and the state agencies were complicit in letting that happen.”
