In his bid to become ‘the most pro-union president in American history,’ Biden appears to have forgotten about the actual worker.
In his bid to become ‘the most pro-union president in American history,’ Biden appears to have forgotten about the actual worker.
I n a new attempt to “protect” migrants, President Biden will soon allow labor unions to trespass on farmers’ property and solicit their workers to become dues-paying members. In addition to being blatantly unlawful, this new regulation puts countless agricultural jobs at risk.
The Biden administration drafted this regulation despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s recently striking down a similar policy in California after a strawberry farmer sued the state for allowing union activists to invade his worksite and scare off his employees with bullhorns. But rather than overtly giving unions a right to trespass on farmers’ private property, as the California law did, Biden’s rule attempts to rebrand the policy as a way to protect workers’ “right to receive information” from any labor group showing up uninvited.
The administration claims that labor unions need to set foot on privately owned farmland to ensure that employers aren’t undermining U.S. wages and labor conditions through their use of the H-2A visa program, which allows farmers to lawfully recruit foreign workers. But the program already offers this assurance by requiring farmers to spend two months recruiting Americans before they’re even allowed to hire H-2A workers. The program also requires farmers to pay their employees above the average wage that a U.S. farmhand makes and to cover costs for housing, meals, and transportation to the worksite.
Because of these protections, H-2A workers earn higher wages than their unauthorized counterparts and even help boost wages for their American colleagues. And because the H-2A program supplies farmers with the labor necessary to remain profitable and expand their operations, they’re able to increase their local investments by purchasing more vehicles, tools, and other goods and services. This growth also allows them to hire additional employees to work as sales managers, administrative assistants, and other positions commonly filled by U.S. citizens. For these reasons, George Mason University economist Michael Clemens estimates that for every five H-2A workers, roughly two jobs for Americans are created on net.
While the H-2A visa also has flaws, Biden’s new rule puts unions in a position to exploit them rather than actually fixing what’s wrong with the program. Currently, farmers who hire H-2A workers must abide by over 200 major regulations. Some of these rules are so vague and confusing that even different government entities sometimes provide conflicting compliance instructions to employers. And under Biden’s rule, any labor group can weaponize the program’s complexity against farmers who resist unionization by setting foot on their property and policing for broken window screens, loose trash-can lids, and other infractions that are inconsequential to a farmhand’s actual labor conditions.
The acting secretary of labor, Julie Su, recently touted the new rule as a reform that will strengthen workplace protections for employees. But making labor organizations a fixture of the H-2A process will encourage unions to further abuse the leverage they have over agricultural workers. The United Farm Workers, the flagship labor union that purports to represent migrant workers, has a reputation for intimidating and deceiving people who aren’t interested in joining. Farmhands have recently accused UFW activists of fooling them into signing union cards by insinuating that they were necessary for receiving Covid-19 relief payments. Many H-2A workers also report feeling tricked by the UFW into believing that their card-check meetings were part of the immigration process.
When farmhands voted to decertify their union representation, the UFW was known to reject the results. In one infamous case, the union abandoned employees of a California farm and then reappeared 17 years later to collect union dues and impose a contract terminating any worker unwilling to pay them. The farmhands ultimately voted to fire the UFW in a 1,098–197 landslide but had to fight the organization for five more years just to get the ballots unsealed.
With the conversion of the H-2A visa into an instrument that peddles union interests, more farmers will be forced to sell their property, shut down, or contract with growers in other countries to offshore their production. As the H-2A program becomes less accessible to U.S. agricultural employers, more migrants will be deprived of lawful employment opportunities and resort to crossing the border illegally.
In his bid to become “the most pro-union president in American history,” Biden appears to have forgotten about the actual worker.