Black Farmworkers Say They Lost Jobs to Foreigners Who Were Paid More

INDIANOLA, miss. – For more than a quarter of a century, Richard Strong worked the fertile farmlands of the Mississippi Delta, just like his father and grandfather, a family line of punitive work and meager income that stretched back to his enslaved ancestors from Africa.

He tilled the soil, fertilized crops and irrigated the fields, and annually fed cotton, soybeans and corn for a prominent farming family. “I’ve been farming all my life,” said Mr. Strong. “That’s all we knew.”

Black families with deep connections to the Delta have conducted field research in the past. That began to change about a decade ago when the first of dozens of young white workers on a special guest worker visa flew in from South Africa. Mr. Strong and his colleagues trained the men who were lured around the world last year with wages in excess of $ 11 an hour, compared to the $ 7.25 an hour paid by Mr. Strong and other black local workers became.

Growers brought more South Africans into the country each year, and they are now employed on more than 100 farms across the delta. Mr Strong, 50, and several other long-time workers said they had been told their services were no longer needed.

“I never thought they’d get to the point where they’d hire foreigners instead of people like me,” said Mr. Strong.

From wheat farms in the Midwest to citrus groves in California’s Central Valley, growers are increasingly turning to foreign labor as aging farm workers leave the fields and low-skilled workers opt for construction, hospitality and warehouse jobs that require higher wages offer year-round work and sometimes benefits.

The agricultural guest worker program, known by the abbreviation H-2A, was once shunned by farmers here and elsewhere as expensive and bureaucratic. But the ongoing shortage of agricultural workers across the country has increased the number of H-2A visas to 213,394 in fiscal 2020, from 55,384 in 2011.

“Our choice is between importing our food or importing the labor necessary to produce it domestically,” said Craig Regelbrugge, a veteran agribusiness lawyer and expert on the program. “That has never been as true as it is today. Virtually all new workers entering agriculture these days are H-2A workers. “

In the Mississippi Delta, a region of high unemployment and profound poverty, the labor mobility that expands the field workforce is having a devastating impact on local workers, who are often ill-equipped to compete with the new hires, who are often younger and ready are working longer.

The new competition turns the way of life of many people in the rich farmlands of Mississippi on their head. “It’s like being robbed of your inheritance,” said Mr. Strong.

In Mississippi, where the legacy of slavery and racism has long permeated work in the cotton fields, a federal lawsuit by Mr. Strong and five other displaced black farm workers alleges that the new foreign workers were illegally paid at higher rates than local black workers. who allegedly had years of racist abuse and other degrading treatment from a white supervisor.

Two other plaintiffs are preparing to join the lawsuit alleging that farmers violated civil rights law by hiring only white workers from South Africa, a country with its own history of racial injustice.

“Black workers have been doing this job for generations,” said Ty Pinkins, an attorney at the Mississippi Center for Justice who represents black farm workers in the lawsuit. “They know the country, they know the seasons, they know the equipment.”

A region full of poverty

The Mississippi Delta is a vast flood plain and has some of the richest soils in the country. It is also the poorest bag in the poorest state. In Indianola, a town of nearly 10,000 people about 95 miles north of Jackson, the median household income is $ 28,941.

Indianola, the hometown of blues legend BB King, is the seat of Sunflower County, where empty storefronts line abandoned city centers and children play in front of dilapidated huts.

The region, which is more than 70 percent black, remains strictly demarcated. Black children attend underfunded public schools, while white students attend private academies. Black and white families bury their dead in different cemeteries.

The delta is just one of many places South Africans have been hired to do agricultural work in recent years. While last year the largest proportion of H-2A visas went to Mexicans (197,908), the second largest number (5,508) went to South Africans. Their number increased by 441 percent between 2011 and 2020.

Garold Dungy, who until two years ago ran an agency that recruited foreign farm workers, including for Pitt Farms, the company that employed Mr. Strong and the other plaintiffs, said South Africa made up most of its business. They are “the preferred group” because of their strong work ethic and fluency in English, he said.

The program allows farmers to hire foreign workers for up to 10 months. You must pay them an hourly wage, which is set by the Department of Labor and varies from state to state, as well as transportation and housing.

Farmers must also show that they tried to find Americans to do the work and that they failed, and they must pay domestic workers the same rate that they pay imported workers.

According to the black workers’ lawsuit, Pitt Farms paid South Africans $ 9.87 an hour in 2014, a rate that hit $ 11.83 in 2020. Plaintiffs who worked in the fields were paid the federal minimum wage of $ 7.25 an hour, or $ 8.25 over the weekend. plus occasional bonuses.

Both Walter Pitts, a co-owner of Pitts Farms, and the farm’s attorney, Timothy Threadgill, declined to discuss the farm’s hiring strategy over the pending litigation.

Dependence on South Africans may reflect the nature of agriculture and demographics in the Mississippi Delta compared to places like California.

“Row crops in the Mississippi Delta require fewer workers and more people who have machine and tool skills,” said Elizabeth Canales, an agricultural expansion economist at Mississippi State University. “We hardly have any Latinos in this remote region. Of course, it’s easier to hire South Africans if the language isn’t an obstacle, especially since you only have a very small Spanish-speaking population in this area. “

The South Africans arrived in the region ready to work weeks that were sometimes 75 hours or more, grueling schedules that older local workers could have been hard to keep up with, industry analysts said.

There was initially no public controversy over the program in Indianola. Producers in the region called South Africans “good workers,” said Steve Rosenthal, a three-time Indianola mayor who lost his re-election in October. Until the lawsuit was filed, he did not know that some black workers had been laid off.

“When you have a man you’ve trained and worked with for years who knows how to get things done,” he said, “how can you in good conscience bring someone here and pay them more than a man who was with you? five, eight, 10 years? “

A long family history in the delta

The Strong family have worked for the Pitts family for generations, who have farmed the Mississippi Delta for six decades. Richard Strong’s grandfather Henry and grandmother Isadora worked their land. Likewise his father and his uncle.

Mr. Strong and his brother were hired in the 1990s; After all, he not only operated tractors, but also large equipment such as combine harvesters and cotton pickers. He mixed chemicals to control weeds and pests. He operated irrigation cones in 19 fields covering approximately 3,000 acres. He got promoted to manager and drove around the farm to make sure everything was okay.

When he first heard about Africans coming to work on the farm about eight years ago, “I hadn’t questioned it. I just did my job, ”he said.

But when four white men showed up, it wasn’t the Africans he was expecting. Nevertheless, according to Mr. Strong, the men, a good 20 years younger than him, are “cool guys”.

He taught the men how to plow properly, how to enter GPS settings into the tractors’ navigation systems, how to operate the irrigation system so that just the right amount of water is sprayed on the crops.

Over the next few years, more and more South Africans came until more than half of the farm’s workforce was there with foreign visas.

One of them was Innes Singleton, now 28, who learned of the opportunity to work in Mississippi from a friend in 2012.

He had recently finished high school and didn’t know what to do next.

He arrived in Indianola in early 2013 and is now making $ 12 an hour which would take a month a week to earn in South Africa, where the unemployment rate now tops 30 percent.

“I learned a lot here,” he says, adding that he sometimes has to work up to 110 hours a week. South Africans now do most of the work on the farm and four locals “help us”.

The end of an era

After the 2019 season, Mr. Strong traveled to Texas to visit his sick father-in-law. When he returned, the Pitts Farm Truck he was driving had disappeared in front of the house he had been renting from the breeder for about a year. He was told to vacate and was not offered any work for the 2020 season.

A year later, others were laid off, including his brother Gregory, who said he devoted much of his life to Pitt Farms.

“I gave them half my life and in the end nothing,” he said. “I know everything about this place. I even know the dirt. “

Andrew Johnson, another plaintiff in the lawsuit, is 66 years old and said he worked on the farm for 20 years.

“I used to work in rain or shine or something,” he said.

But before the 2021 season began, he said one of the Pitts owners told him, “he didn’t need me anymore”.

Since the lawsuit was filed, other black workers have come forward saying they worked in the delta’s fields and catfish farms before unfairly losing their jobs, said Mr. Pinkins, the attorney.

At the end of October, as the harvest season was drawing to a close, eighteen-wheeled bicycles with bales of cotton rumbled along the highway in Indianola. As Mr. Strong drove past the farm where he spent twenty-four years, he scanned the rows of neatly carved earth as far as the eye could see. “I put all of that into it,” he said with a certain pride.

Then a tractor drove by, a young South African at the wheel, and Mr. Strong averted his eyes. “I miss working the land,” he said.

Kitty Bennett contributed to the research.