Another black mark of Trumpism was erased yesterday as the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service issued its Agricultural Labor Survey. Last September, the Sonny Perdue USDA announced it would suspend its collection and reporting of quarterly statistics on “the number of agricultural workers, hours worked, and wage rates.” Eliminating the 100-plus-year-old Agricultural Labor Survey would have denied the Department of Labor the data it needs to set minimum wages under the H-2A agricultural guestworker program, which in turn would have opened the door for corporate farms to slash the wages they pay to their captive immigrant workforce and to the small cadre of U.S. citizens willing to do such hard work:
“Massive wage cuts for essential workers cultivating and harvesting our fruits and vegetables during this pandemic are unconscionable,” said Bruce Goldstein, President of Farmworker Justice, a co-author of the report. “The H-2A agricultural guestworker program has modest protections against depressing wage rates of U.S. farmworkers and against exploitation of foreign citizens hired as agricultural guestworkers. The USDA’s sudden cancellation of the survey of employers that sets the principal H-2A wage protection is an end-run around changing the H-2A regulations in a cruel effort to slash farmworkers’ wages,” he added [Farmworker Justice, press release, 2020.09.30].
To stop those harms, the United Farm Workers sued Secretary Perdue in mid-October, arguing that the USDA had “provided no rationale… invited no public comment” and “did not consider the detrimental impact its decision would have on farmworker wages.”
Oh, I suspect Perdue very much did consider that impact; he and his pro-corporate cronies just didn’t consider it detrimental to have the chance to pay workers less and boost corporate profits. Quite the contrary: Secretary Perdue was on record telling Big Ag he wanted to cut wages for farm workers.
The federal court quickly quashed the killing of the count, ruling that the USDA’s justification that interested parties could find the Agricultural Labor Survey’s data elsewhere was the opposite of true:
Siding with the nation’s largest farmworker union, U.S. District Judge Dale Drozd agreed the Trump administration hastily postponed the Farm Labor Survey without a clear replacement.
Drozd ruled the survey is essential to setting a fair pay rate and ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to continue with the next planned survey to prevent an avalanche of future labor lawsuits.
“Because the Farm Labor Survey ‘is the only timely and reliable source of information on the size of the farmworker population’ legal consequences would flow from an inaccurate tabulation of wage rates,” Drozd said in a ruling issued late Wednesday [Nick Cahill, “Judge Orders Trump Administration to Reinstate Farmworker Wage Survey,” Courthouse News, 2020.10.28].
The USDA complied, and yesterday the Biden USDA provided the catch-up survey. Nationwide, farms and ranches had 777,0000 hired hands in mid-July and 758,000 in mid-October. July farm employment was down 3% from July 2019; October farm employment was down 6% from the previous year.
Those three-quarter-million workers did see better wages in 2020, because even in a pandemic, people gotta eat:
Farm operators paid their hired workers an average gross wage of $15.87 per hour during the October 2020 reference week, up 6 percent from the October 2019 reference week. Field workers received an average of $15.28 per hour, up 6 percent. Livestock workers earned $14.62 per hour, up 6 percent. The field and livestock worker combined gross wage rate, at $15.10 per hour, was up 6 percent from the 2019 reference week. Hired laborers worked an average of 42.1 hours during the October 2020 reference week, down 1 percent from the hours worked during the October 2019 reference week.
Farm operators paid their hired workers an average gross wage of $15.62 per hour during the July 2020 reference week, up 5 percent from the July 2019 reference week. Field workers received an average of $14.98 per hour, up 6 percent, while livestock workers earned $14.50 per hour, up 5 percent from a year earlier. The field and livestock worker combined gross wage rate, at $14.85 per hour, was up 5 percent from the July 2019 reference week. Hired laborers worked an average of 41.4 hours during the July 2020 reference week, down 1 percent from the hours worked during the July 2019 reference week.
The 2020 all hired worker annual average gross wage rate was $15.49 per hour, up 4 percent from the 2019 annual average gross wage rate. The 2020 field worker annual average gross wage rate was $14.76 per hour, up 5 percent from the 2019 annual average. The 2020 livestock worker annual average gross wage rate was $14.35 per hour. The 2020 annual average combined gross wage for field and livestock workers was $14.62, up 5 percent from the 2019 annual average of $13.99 per hour [USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, “Farm Labor,” 2021.02.11].
While the national average weekly hours of work was 42.1, here in the Northern Plains reporting region (ND, SD, NE, KS), we worked our hired hands an average of 46 hours per week, tied for the second-highest work hours with the Mountain III region (AZ, NM) and behind only Mountain I (MT, WY, ID), where farm workers labored 50.9 hours per week. The Northern Plains offered just about a buck better hourly wages, too, $16.83 per hour in October, the fourth-highest average out of the 18 regions. Farm workers averaged $17.64/hour in California, $17.88/hour in Oregon and Washington, and $18.13/hour in nation-leading Hawaii… and got better weather.
Workers picking corn, beans, and other crops averaged 62–66 cents more per hour than the CAFO tenders milking our cows, slopping our hogs, and plucking chickens and eggs.
Meanwhile, the nationwide average hourly earnings for all private employees in October was $29.52. In South Dakota, the average hourly wage in May 2019 (the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) was $20.63… so South Dakota’s farm workers were making 18% less than they could have in non-farm jobs in South Dakota a year and a half before, and those broader South Dakota jobs were paying 20% less than the $25.72 national average hourly wage at that time.
So South Dakota’s ag barons are already getting hard-to-find labor for hard, unpleasant jobs at a discount; they don’t need any more deregulatory favors from the government.
Unions are the only way. You think Republicans are going to treat you fairly your a fool.
Just left S Dakota for Oregon. You can just feel the different attitude toward your fellow man as exhibited in Oregon. I really spend time wondering why the Dakotas are so unfriendly toward the working man and the only conclusion I’ve been able to come to is a captive workforce as people in the region don’t seem to have gotten ‘out’ much. Beyond that the attitudes astound me.