The Best American Magazine Writing 2016

by Sid Holt

  It worked, especially when, Zackery testified, Sgt. McGee threatened that they could be deported and pulled out the Taser. “That really scared the mess out of them,” Zackery said.

  Zackery also testified that, after the women filed their lawsuit, some of the officers conspired to cover up the Taser incident: If discharge tests were ever administered, they agreed that they would swap out McGee’s Taser with another one. Then they all went to Hooters for lunch. McGee is now Mamou’s police chief. He did not return calls seeking comment.

  • • •

  Ten months after the women were detained, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division opened an investigation of L.T. West.

  The probe, begun in March 2012, was supposed to audit the treatment and pay of H-2 employees at the plant dating back almost two years. Although case files show the department was aware of the women’s lawsuit, the investigator waited until June to visit the plant—by which time crawfish season had ended, and almost all the workers had returned home. The inspector did not visit any worker housing at the crawfish plant.

  As for Craig West, he told the investigator that he had not kept complete payroll records—not even a daily log of hours worked—and didn’t have home addresses for his employees.

  In the end, the Department of Labor fined L.T. West $7,200—not for underpaying or abusing its employees, but for keeping poor records.

  BuzzFeed News reviewed more than three dozen investigations by the Department of Labor, the arm of the government that is supposed to ensure employers treat guest workers in accordance with the law. In most cases, inspectors interviewed few if any workers, showed up at workplaces only with advance warning, and accepted at face value the employer’s version of events.

  The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division investigated the Arkansas-based Superior Forestry—the largest forestry contractor in the country, according to the department—at least fifteen times between 2000 and 2014. Few of those probes involved any worker interviews, records show. In one case, the inspector had not even been fully trained in applicable H-2 law.

  In a 2011 probe, investigators did interview workers, but only after setting up a formal visit far in advance with a third-party labor broker that handles Superior’s visa applications. The labor broker arranged for the interview to be conducted at a nearby motel rather than the job site, which inspectors did not visit. Still, they concluded that everything was in order, adding that the labor broker “makes sure all applicable laws are ‘followed to a T.’”

  None of the investigation reports mentioned that Superior had been sued in 2006 in Tennessee federal court by 2,200 H-2 workers who alleged the company did not pay them the promised wage or overtime or that those workers were subsequently threatened by Superior agents who said they would report the workers to immigration if they didn’t drop the lawsuit or that even after the court issued a protective order, a Superior recruiter spooked workers back home in Oaxaca, Mexico, by attending a meeting where legal information was being shared.

  “I can’t honestly say we do everything right all the time, but we try to,” said John Foley, an operations manager at the company, which has 25 full-time employees but brings in as many as 450 H-2 workers every year. “The laws are very confusing,” he added in a phone interview. “It’s telling that we have a full-time attorney.”

  The guest workers eventually won a $2.75 million settlement to resolve claims that they’d had millions in back wages stolen over a period of six years. But over the course of the Labor Department’s fifteen investigations, the agency pinned only minor violations on the company, ordering Superior to repay its workers a total of just $12,652 in back wages over a dozen years.

  For many companies, the financial incentive to underpay guest workers far outweighs the risk of getting caught, said Jacob Horwitz, an organizer for the National Guestworker Alliance in New Orleans. Stealing wages “is standard business practice,” he said.

  The Labor Department, in its statement, noted it has “finite resources” and “must be strategic” in how it deploys them for enforcement. It has sought greater powers to raise wages, prevent unlawful fees and retaliation against workers who speak out, and punish companies that break the law. However, it said, “these efforts have met with legal challenges and Congressional opposition.”

  In the case of the most egregious violations, the Department of Labor has the option of debarring a company—banning it for up to three years from bringing in guest workers. The department maintains a public list of companies under such censure; the current list has seventy-six names on it. Employers that do work for the federal government can also be debarred from future contracts.

  That’s how it works in theory. This March, however, the Government Accountability Office found that the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division failed to conclude more than half its investigations of H-2 employers within the two-year statute of limitations. And many companies that were repeatedly found to abuse workers were nevertheless granted more H-2 visas, lucrative federal contracts, and farm subsidies.

  Over the previous five years, government investigations found at least twelve firms underpaid H-2 workers by more than $100,000. Yet only one of them was debarred. Five—including an onion producer that had more than 1,400 violations and owed its Mexican workers $2.3 million in back wages—have been certified for more than 2,000 additional visas this year alone. In short, even though the U.S. government determined that these companies stiffed guest workers on a grand scale, it granted them the right to bring in more.

  Some companies the Labor Department moves to debar nonetheless continue to receive government contracts.

  Garcia Forest Service was caught multiple times stealing thousands of dollars in wages from guest workers, misleading investigators, and doctoring time sheets to cover it up. “Some of these violations were innocent mistakes,” Garcia’s attorney, Ray Perez, said in an interview. “A lot of the times the investigators have it in their mind that they’re going to nitpick you and get you.”

  The Labor Department didn’t see it that way and debarred the company from receiving federal contracts for three years starting in March of last year. But so far, the ban has had little if any effect. The Rockingham, North Carolina, company appealed, and while awaiting a final ruling it has been awarded $715,082 in contracts from the U.S. Forest Service, including a $72,147 award early this month to spray herbicide on 529 acres of the Apalachicola National Forest in Florida.

  During her four years auditing companies with H-2 visas, said Kalen Fraser, the former Wage and Hour Division investigator, she saw terrible abuses. She recalled the agricultural guest workers in western Colorado who slept four to a room in a filthy old roadside motel, cooking on hot plates on the floor and unable to drink the tap water because the plumbing was defective and actually issued electric shocks. “That was really an instance of you feeling horrible because people are just living in really bad conditions,” said Fraser, who now helps employers comply with labor laws.

  She fined their employer, but did not escalate the case or refer it to law enforcement. Indeed, Fraser said, despite seeing hundreds of serious violations, she never recommended a single case to the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or her own inspector general, all of which can bring criminal actions. “We didn’t do any criminal stuff,” she said. “If you see a problem, you don’t stomp out and say something.” Instead, she said, she and other Labor Department inspectors would ask companies “to agree not to hold people’s passports, not to deduct wages, etc. And hopefully they agree to that.”

  • • •

  In January 2013, Valdez, Gonzalez, and the other women reached a final settlement in their lawsuit with L.T. West and the city of Mamou. The city paid Valdez and Gonzalez $20,000 each. L.T. West settled with all seven plaintiffs, but the amount is confidential.

  Today, Valdez doesn’t want to say where she is living. She declined to discuss the allegations in the lawsuit, or the settlement. She si
gned a confidentiality agreement. But looking back, she said that a big part of being a guest worker is feeling “vulnerable” and “like we’re not worth anything.”

  “We make lots of plans; we think this is the thing that is going to change our lives for the better. We have so many illusions about what it’s going to be like,” she said. And then when it’s not, “you get desperate. You feel like there won’t be any more opportunities. You so badly want to go home but not like this, not like a failure. It’s not just your dreams and your illusions. It’s your mom and dad, your kids: ‘Oh my mom is going to bring me this thing,’” but then “having to come back with empty hands.”

  She continued: “People have asked me whether they should go to the U.S.” on an H-2 visa. “They say they want to go and ask if I can help. But, honestly,” she said, “I just tell them I don’t know anyone who can help.”

  “All You Americans Are Fired”

  Moultrie, Georgia—“All you black American people, fuck you all…just go to the office and pick up your check,” the supervisor at Hamilton Growers told workers during a mass layoff in June 2009.

  The following season, according to a lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, about eighty workers, many of them black, were simply told: “All you Americans are fired.”

  Year after year, Hamilton Growers, which has supplied squash, cucumbers, and other produce to Wal-Mart and the Green Giant brand, hired scores of Americans, only to cast off many of them within weeks, according to the U.S. government. And time after time, the grower filled the jobs with foreign guest workers instead.

  Although Hamilton Growers eventually agreed to pay half a million dollars to settle the suit, company officials said the allegations are baseless. Mass firings never happened, they said, nor did anyone use racially inflammatory language. But workers tell a different story.

  “We want to go to work and work all day,” said Derrick Green, thirty-two, a father of six who said he was fired by Hamilton Growers in 2012 after only three weeks picking squash. “But they don’t want that.”

  Last year, thousands of American companies won permission to bring a total of more than 150,000 people into the country as legal guest workers for unskilled jobs, under a federal program that grants them temporary work permits known as H-2 visas. Officially, the guest workers were invited here to fill positions no Americans want: The program is not supposed to deprive any American of a job, and before a company wins approval for a single H-2 visa, it must attest that it has already made every effort to hire domestically. Many companies abide by the law and make good-faith efforts to employ Americans.

  Yet a BuzzFeed News investigation, based on Labor Department records, court filings, more than one hundred interviews, inspector general reports, and analyses of state and federal data, has found that many businesses go to extraordinary lengths to skirt the law, deliberately denying jobs to American workers so they can hire foreign workers on H-2 visas instead.

  A previous BuzzFeed News report found that many of those foreign workers suffer a nightmare of abuse, deprived of their fair pay, imprisoned, starved, beaten, sexually assaulted, or threatened with deportation if they dare complain.

  At the same time, companies across the country in a variety of industries have made it all but impossible for U.S. workers to learn about job openings that they are supposed to be given first crack at. When workers do find out, they are discouraged from applying. And if, against all odds, Americans actually get hired, they often are treated worse and paid less than foreign workers doing the same job, in order to drive the Americans to quit. Sometimes, as the government alleged happened at Hamilton Growers, employers comply with regulations by hiring Americans only to fire them en masse and hand over the work to foreign workers with H-2 visas.

  What’s more, companies often do this with the complicity of government officials, records show. State and federal authorities have allowed companies to violate the spirit—and often the letter—of the law with bogus recruitment efforts that are clearly designed to keep Americans off the payroll. And when regulators are alerted to potential problems, the response is often ineffectual.

  Officials at the U.S. Department of Labor, which is charged with protecting workers and vetting employers seeking visas, said in a statement: “We acknowledge that the laws that authorize these programs are inadequate.” But the department also said that despite limited resources, it “actively pursues measures to strengthen protections for foreign and U.S. workers.”

  The H-2 visa was created to address shortages in the American workforce. Although labor is indeed tight in some areas—such as North Dakota, where an oil boom has driven unemployment below 3 percent—there is little evidence of labor shortages in many industries that use the visas. In some cases, there is even a glut of available workers.

  Landscaping companies, for example, were approved for more than 30,000 H-2 visas in the 2014 fiscal year. Yet Daniel Costa, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, which receives some funding from unions, found that over the same period, unemployment in landscaping was more than twice as high as the national average.

  “The problem with the system is that the H-2 workers who are coming in are not tied to actual, demonstrated labor shortages,” Costa said.

  Companies that have difficulty finding American workers could attract more applicants by offering higher wages. But instead of encouraging or even subsidizing that, the government’s H-2 program effectively subsidizes the opposite effort—helping companies find pliant foreign labor, often at the expense of American workers.

  In the last five years, the number of H-2 visas issued by the State Department, which administers the program along with the Department of Homeland Security and the Labor Department, has surged by more than 50 percent.

  Bills in Congress to expand the guest-worker program have won support from both Democrats and Republicans in recent years. Business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce have lobbied for as many as 400,000 additional H-2 visas per year. But the issue has been overshadowed by larger debates over the legal status of millions of undocumented immigrants.

  Around the country, lawyers and labor brokers actively promote the H-2 program as a way to boost profit margins. Usafarmlabor, a labor broker serving the agricultural industry, until this month bluntly stated on its site: “Our workers actually save you money each month in a comparison with U.S. workers.”

  Employers who use the H-2 program note that it entails numerous added costs, including visa fees and transportation, as well as compliance with complex rules. It requires that most workers be paid above minimum wage, sometimes substantially so.

  But the guest-worker program also offers numerous financial incentives. Agricultural employers are exempt from payroll and unemployment taxes on H-2 workers, for example; nonagricultural employers do not have to provide housing, but if they do they are allowed to charge their workers rent, which is sometimes extortionate.

  Foreign laborers usually live at the job site, available to work at any time. They typically come alone, without families or other distractions that could cause them to miss work. The terms of their visas prohibit them from taking other jobs, so they have almost no leverage when it comes to wages or working conditions. And since they often come from abject poverty in their home countries, many visa holders put up with difficult or even backbreaking conditions without complaint to ensure they are invited to return the next year.

  The visa program can be even more advantageous to the many employers that exploit their guest workers, making them work long hours without overtime pay, charging them illegal fees, or flat-out cheating them of their wages—all of which are against the law, regardless of whether workers are American or foreign.

  Hamilton Growers has been cited, repeatedly, for its treatment of its mostly Mexican workforce. Even as the farm was accused of casting off American workers, government investigators found that it failed to pay foreign employees all they were owed and that it housed
them in often deplorable conditions. Hamilton Growers vigorously denies that it mistreated workers.

  Americans are far less isolated than foreigners on H-2 visas, many of whom cannot speak a word of English. U.S. workers often know at least some of their rights and how to complain about abuses. They frequently have family nearby whom they can turn to for support. And, perhaps most importantly, they can’t be threatened with deportation. But the guest-worker program can still have a devastating impact on their jobs, their families, and their entire communities.

  In house after house in Moultrie, American workers said they have been shut out of agriculture jobs that have been available in their community for generations. Older workers talked of becoming impoverished; younger ones said their chances of financial stability have been strangled, leaving them, in some cases, with little choice but to leave town.

  “They got rid of us,” said Mary Jo Fuller, referring to black workers. A field-worker on and off for most of her life, she said she was abruptly terminated from J&R Baker Farms, near Moultrie, as part of a mass firing in 2010. Unable to find other employment, the fifty-nine-year-old said she wound up homeless for more than a year. “We don’t really have jobs no more.”

  Moultrie is “nowhere, really, for a young person trying to make it,” added Green. “It just makes you angry, very angry,” he said. “We right here in America, and you don’t want us to work. You’d rather get foreigners.”

  For several years, Abrorkhodja Askarkhodjaev ran a temp firm based in Kansas City that relied on H-2 guest workers from the Philippines, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic and that serviced large hotels and other businesses around the country.

  “Foreign people will clean two rooms in one hour. The American will not even finish in one hour one room,” he said speaking from the federal prison where he is serving a twelve-year term for crimes related to visa fraud.