The Bush Administration announced proposed changes to a little used agricultural guest worker program on February 6. The rules could lower wages and worsen living conditions for farm workers. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao emphasizes the changes could “provide farmers with an orderly and timely flow of legal workers.”

The proposed rule changes come as a result of the White House’s stated policy of tackling immigration issues through administrative fixes after Congress failed to overhaul immigration laws.

Currently, there are 1.2 million farm workers in the country. The Labor Department estimates more than half of these workers are undocumented, though labor advocates and lawmakers say the percentage is closer to 70 percent.

In 1986, Congress established the H-2A visa program, which allows farmers to hire temporary, foreign workers to harvest crops. Farmers hired only 75,000 workers under the H-2A visa system in 2007, a fraction of the total number of foreign agricultural workers employed.

The proposed changes would streamline the bureaucratic hoops employers have to jump through to hire workers.

But it would also change how wages are calculated. The Administration intends to use data from the Labor Department instead of the Department of Agriculture. This change “may raise the legally required wage rate in some areas while lowering them in others,” according to the Labor Department. The United Farm Workers, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and other labor advocates say this could significantly cut wages.

In the heart of California’s ag sector, San Luis Obispo.com reports that many growers see these changes as meaningless and favor a more ambitious guest worker program.

One of the biggest concerns in California’s San Luis Obispo County is the availability of affordable housing. The proposed changes would allow employers to offer housing vouchers for foreign workers, instead of housing itself. The local housing situation is so dire that farmers are looking into housing workers at army barracks.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, told the Los Angeles Times that, "Growers frequently cannot get labor through the H-2A program when they need it. Simply tweaking regulations can't fix that problem. . . . I'm afraid that these H-2A modifications make a bad situation worse—by lowering wage rates and undermining existing labor protections for U.S. and foreign farm workers."

These proposed changes come on the heel of news from Florida that federal authorities indicted six people on slavery charges. The Palm Beach Post wrote in an editorial dated January 28: “The six arrests represent one of the most significant slavery cases the government has made. Federal prosecutors claim that Antonia Zuniga Vargas and five members of the Navarette family - Cesar, Geovanni, Jose, Villhina and Ismael - held more than a dozen Guatemalan and Mexican workers against their will. The defendants, who collectively face charges that could imprison them for decades, are accused of making the workers pick produce and then sleep in trucks and shacks. The migrants had to pay for food and showers and were threatened with beatings if they tried to leave. The abuse allegedly goes back three years.”

It seems a better use of Labor Secretary Elaine Chao’s time would be to enforce current labor laws rather than coming up with quick administrative fixes that do little to protect vulnerable workers from exploitation.

For more information, visit Coalition of Immokalee Workers website at http://www.ciw-online.org.