THE RETURN OF BRACERO

The Return of Bracero

Ag Lobby in Big New Push



With the help of two Democratic senators, the agricultural lobby is poised to resurrect a version of the infamous Bracero program, and allow American companies to import cheap immigrant labor. The legislation in question was attached to the Commerce, Justice, State and Judiciary appropriations bill, which has already been approved in the Senate by a vote of 68-31 (following a mere one hour of debate). The House will take up the legislation soon, with a vote expected by the end of October.

American agriculture has long made use of foreign labor. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands of Chinese and Filipinos were granted short-term permits to work the fields. The original Bracero program was approved during World War II, and allowed companies to make up for labor shortages caused by the war by hiring Mexican farm hands. Bracero was supposed to be a temporary measure, but Congress extended it in 1945. It was finally killed in 1963, by which time some 4.6 million Mexicans had moved through the program.

Big farmers have long dreamed of reviving Bracero, and they have a great deal of clout. During the past two years, the industry has funneled about $1 million to members of Congress. The National Council of Agricultural Employers, a leading trade group, is spearheading the current drive on Bracero. The Council's federal lobbying budget for 1997 was more than $200,000. That money has paid for a number of top lobbyists. More than $60,000 went to four lobbyists at the firm of McGuiness and Williams, Tim Bartl, Jim Holt, William LaForge and Monte Lake. All learned the legislative secrets of agricultural policy from stints on Capital Hill or at the US Department of Agriculture. Bartl was the former legislative director to Rep. Steve Gunderson, the conservative Republican from Wisconsin. Before joining McGuiness and Williams, LaForge spent seven years working for Sen. Thad Cochran, the Mississippi Republican, as legislative director and chief of staff. Before that LaForge served as the staff director for the Senate Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on agriculture, one of the most powerful staff positions on the Hill.

Another experienced Washington hand hired by the Council is Anthony Podesta, the brother of White House deputy chief of staff John Podesta. "The growers and their lobbyists have been working the Hill and district offices on this issue for more than two years", says Bruce Goldstein of the Farm Workers Justice Fund. "It's a nationwide campaign that has cost millions and millions of dollars."

Over the summer, the growers prodded Democratic Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, touted as one of Congress's most liberal members, and Bob Graham of Florida into drawing up such a plan. If passed, the measure - titled, in true 1984 spirit, the Agricultural Job Opportunity Benefits and Security Act -- will greatly expand an existing "guest worker" program that now involves about 20,000 farm laborers.

Along with the agribusiness lobby, Wyden and Graham argue that their proposal is urgently needed because of labor shortages facing U.S. farmers. Furthermore, supporters of the plan say, U.S. workers simply won't perform hard labor, a fact which forces growers to employ illegal workers. "The current agricultural labor system, for workers and growers, is a mess", Wyden said when he introduced the bill last July 21. "It leaves too many workers in shoddy working conditions, and too many farmers on the brink of bankruptcy."

Wyden was flanked that day by Oregon's other senator, right-winger Gordon Smith. Smith also supports the bill, saying that while he is deeply concerned about protecting farm workers, "Let's not forget that growers have been victimized by this process too".

None of the arguments advanced by the bill's supporters can withstand even casual scrutiny. As Bill Maxwell pointed out in an article for the New America News Service - which along with Legal Times is one of the few publications to cover the story - "Americans do all sorts of tough, dirty seasonal work, laying asphalt on highways, mining coal, roofing in 100-plus-degree weather, constructing buildings. The difference is that these jobs pay much better and usually offer benefits that everyone other than farm workers takes for granted."

Furthermore, the Government Accounting Office concluded in a December 1997 report that "A widespread farm labor shortage does not appear to exist now and is unlikely in the near future. The GAO concluded that legislation such as the Wyden-Graham bill would result in the firing of tens of thousands of American workers as growers replace them with cheaper workers from abroad.

Instead of paying decent wages, the growers would prefer to cut costs by employing easily exploitable Third World workers. And keep in mind here that wages for U.S. farm workers have been falling steadily for more than a decade, with per capita pay currently amounting to a meager $6,300 per year.

The bill would further squeeze farm hands and weaken the modest protections written into the current guest worker program. Indeed, Goldstein says the bill is even worse than the original Bracero law. Its chief provisions would:

---kill a law that requires growers to provide housing and transportation to farmhands - as was required under Bracero. Instead, workers would be given a housing stipend and left to find their own quarters. That won't be easy, since the stipend is piddling - for example, $125 a month in Wyden's home state of Oregon.

---waive the minimum wage requirement for individual workers. Companies will be able to pay workers as a group, and the group must receive, on average, the minimum wage. In practice, that means that companies will almost certainly pay sub-minimum wage to some employees. Yet another loophole will allow growers to, in some cases, avoid paying unemployment insurance.

---revokes a law that forces employers to pay workers for at least 75 percent of the contract time for which he or she is hired. Since farm work is unpredictable, this means that some workers may travel from thousands of miles away and find that themselves unemployed and penniless.

---would end a requirement that growers actively recruit in the US before seeking to hire foreign workers.

While Wyden and other bill sponsors declare that they are deeply, deeply concerned about farm workers, the chief effect of the bill will be to allow American companies to hire cheap foreign labor without the need to relocate abroad. In an interview with Maxwell, a Georgia onion grower made this point absolutely clear: "If we had a bunch of American workers, we'd have to hire someone like a personnel director to deal with the problems. The people we have now, they come to work. They don't have kids to pick up from school or take to the doctor. They don't have child support issues. They don't ask to leave early for this and that. They don't call in sick. If you say to them, 'Today we need to work for 10 hours,' they don't say anything." CP