Welcome 'guests'?: migrant labor rights in the US guestworker program
Date
2018
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Customers enjoy low prices on supermarket shelves, yet these labels conceal the
human costs found within food supply chains. While hyper-commodification and market
integration significantly influence the neoliberal world food regime’s competitive pricing,
equally important is dependence upon cheap, “low-skilled,” foreign workers to fulfill
labor-intensive food production needs. Despite being staples of agro-capitalist societies,
guestworkers are frequently exploited. The US is no exception. The legacy of plantation
economics informs the US Guestworker Program’s structural foundation, creating a
legally sanctioned underclass of disenfranchised and ghettoized H-2A and H-2B
guestworkers with little recourse against employer abuse. Since the 1986 creation of the
H-2A and H-2B visa categories, nearly 2.4 million of these temporary foreign workers
have come to the US (US Department of Labor 2016). ☐ Using a feminist conceptual framework, this research examines the labor rights
and protections of the US Guestworker Program’s H-2A and H-2B workforce through a
case study approach using policy analysis and fieldwork. In my policy research I examine
how the discourses of political actors have explicitly shaped and given meaning to the
program’s labor rights and protections. The findings of this chapter demonstrate that for
the past two decades (1995-2015), while most legislators propagated a politics of fear
regarding immigration, systematic efforts by a small group of members of Congress
focused on expanding the US Guestworker Program and decreasing “burdensome” H-2A
and H-2B labor rights, often using policy proposals submitted by agribusiness groups.
Without viable protections, both H-2A and H-2B workers are left in precarious
employment conditions. Yet through targeted efforts by Congress – and endorsed by
agribusiness – the rights of H-2B workers have been more readily marginalized than their
H-2A counterparts. ☐ My fieldwork examines H-2A and H-2B workers lived experiences, and how
stratified rights articulated within policy have translated to differences in protections on
the ground.” I conducted fieldwork at two case study locations in the Mid-Atlantic region.
I selected this region because it is both most representative of the nation’s distribution of
H-2A and H-2B guestworkers, and also frequently overlooked. Through interviews with
28 H-2A and H-2B guestworkers, 16 community stakeholders, and 10 government
employees, it was revealed that while both H-2A and H-2B workers experienced
precarious working conditions, H-2B were more likely to experience abuse. Adding
further nuance and complexity, through fieldwork, it was evident that a gendered division
of labor separates the two visa categories. Gendered stereotypes about the migrant women
pervade the US Guestworker Program, representing female guestworkers as a disposable,
cheap, weak, and slow source of labor. Despite many women applying for H-2A visas in
(relatively) higher-paying and better-monitored crop planting and harvesting jobs, they are
assigned H-2B visas in lowly regulated food processing where contract fraud, wage theft,
sexual harassment, and occupational injuries are rampant. ☐ Overall, this research argues that agribusiness influence over US Guestworker
Program legislation has diluted guestworker labor rights and protections. While both H-
2A and H-2B workers must negotiate a terrain of constrained freedoms, women within the
H-2B sector sustain the most precarious working conditions at the local level. Exploitation
goes largely unchecked thanks to agribusiness’ concentration of political power. While
there have been vocal advocates for guestworker rights in Congress, on the whole there is
a lack of political will to reverse rollbacks in protections, or to institute the safeguards that
all individuals – regardless of sex, race, class, and citizenship status – deserve.
Description
Keywords
Biological sciences, Social sciences, Agriculture, Feminism, Guestworker, Immigration