Seasonal workers sue agricultural giant

As a day laborer, Raul Salas would often have to wait for odd jobs that were never steady and barely allowed him to make a living.

So he says he jumped at the opportunity when, last year on a June day, a fellow laborer named Pensamiento offered him a seasonal job detasseling corn in Indiana.

“He came up to me over there,” said Salas, pointing to a spot in downtown Brownsville where day laborers were known to gather to wait for work. “He said it would be really good work for me.”

Pensamiento took him and others from around the Rio Grande Valley to the Weslaco Branch of Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc., an Iowa-based corn seed producer, Salas recounted, speaking in Spanish. There, a contractor named Juan San Miguel persuaded them to go to the fields near Warsaw, Ind., with the promise of high wages and substantial bonuses, he said.

But Salas, 69, is now one of 20 migrant workers who this month filed a federal lawsuit against San Miguel and Pioneer, which they said failed to pay them minimum wage, took illegal deductions from their wages and forced them to live in rundown, overcrowded hotel rooms.

Texas RioGrande Legal Aid and Indiana Legal Services are representing the plaintiffs, who are asking for an unspecified amount of unpaid minimum wages; an equal amount in liquidated damages; and an unspecified amount in “actual, incidental and consequential damages resulting from the defendants’ breach of contract.”

Pioneer declined comment on the specifics of the lawsuit as litigation is pending. But in a statement, Bridget Anderson, public affairs consultant for the agricultural company, said, “We feel these allegations brought by TRLA are unfounded.”

“We have a long-standing, successful history of employing agricultural workers to work in Indiana,” she said. “Furthermore, Pioneer Hi-Bred has a great track record of meeting and often exceeding state and federal requirements related to our workforce. We look forward to responding to the allegations at the appropriate time.”

When asked to discuss the company’s track record, Anderson said Pioneer did not feel it was appropriate to comment.

THE JOB

Every year, Pioneer and other seed companies recruit thousands of summer workers to detassel corn in Indiana, which ranks 10th among the states in total agricultural production and generates about $25 billion from farm, food and forestry products, according to the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture.

In corn detasseling – a key part of the process for producing hybrid corn seed – workers remove the pollen-producing top part of the corn plant to keep it from pollinating itself. The detasseled corn is then pollinated by pollen carried by the wind from another variety of corn on the same field that has not been detasseled.

It is a crucial step, one that usually takes about 20 days and that, despite technological advancements, requires hand labor. Seed companies in Indiana used to rely on high school and college students to detassel corn but in the last 20 years have moved to employing migrant workers, said Kent Yeager, director of public policy for the Indiana Farm Bureau.

Among growers in Indiana, Pioneer has a good reputation, Yeager said.

“I don’t think there is a community in Indiana that would not want a Pioneer seed facility,” he said. “They are usually viewed as very good assets in the communities they are in. ... It would be very out of character for them to be at fault.”

WORKERS TAKE A STAND

For Salas, like for most migrant workers, the job was an economic necessity, he said.

He and other workers, he said, traveled across the country to work for the agricultural company, but after a little more than two weeks of arduous labor, they were sent home at their own expense, even though he said they had been told the jobs would last at least a month. Workers were promised between $2,000 and $5,000 for the work, plus bonuses, according to the lawsuit. But Salas said the company only gave them about $50 a week to eat.

His last check was for $200, and that was all he had left, Salas said — he never saw the bonuses.

“The contractor would get mad if we reproached him,” Salas said. “We could not reproach him about anything. We could not do anything about it.”

In the cornfields, workers said, conditions were poor. Workers had “dirty and inaccessible Port-o-Potties and warm and inaccessible drinking water,” the lawsuit charges. Some workers were exposed to pesticides when a crop-duster sprayed a field while they detasseled corn, according to the lawsuit.

“It hurt. It stung,” remembered Salas, who says he would wake up early to take the bus to the fields, located more than an hour’s journey from the sleeping quarters. He recalled how the contractor, who had presented himself as an amiable man, would often yell at him and the others to rush through the work.

“He was always telling us to go faster and faster,” he said. “There was little time to rest.”

When the jobs were over, more than a dozen of the workers banded together and sought help, Salas said.

TRLA GETS INVOLVED

Texas RioGrande Legal Aid has received complaints from workers regarding Pioneer’s employment practices almost on a yearly basis, according to a statement from the legal services agency. The lawsuit is the fourth large federal case the agency has brought against Pioneer on behalf of farmworkers in the last five years.

This case is a familiar one for attorneys at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, said Marinda van Dalen, one of those lawyers. Pioneer and other major agricultural companies rely heavily on South Texas workers and often employ fly-by-night contractors to round up a lot of workers for a short period of time, she said.

The practice allows for contractors to remain unaccountable and often results in lawsuits, van Dalen said. But the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act both limit the amount of penalties that can be collected from a corporation as a result of the litigation.

Agricultural companies thus “see this type of litigation as a cost of doing business,” van Dalen said. “And the potential exposure they receive from this type of lawsuit is just not large enough to change their practices.”

Pioneer has annual revenue of more than $1 billion, and it is owned by an even larger corporation, DuPont.

Van Dalen said that real change in labor practices will not come as a result of lawsuits but from agricultural employers themselves.

A TROUBLED INDUSTRY

The agriculture industry is one that has been troubled by labor disputes since the days of Cesar Chavez, labor experts said. That is because work contracts are often informal and enforcement of the agreements is limited, said Susan A. Schneider, director of the LL.M. Program in Agricultural & Food Law at the University of Arkansas School of Law. Migrant workers transition from job to job quickly and many are undocumented, which makes them less likely to claim their rights, she said.

“I think everybody would agree there are a lot of violations of the law that are rampant throughout the whole agricultural system,” she said. “But there is also not a lot of enforcement.”

All contractors, for instance, must register with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division to recruit and hire workers for agricultural companies. But the U.S. Department of Labor often lacks the resources to investigate all violations and complaints and enforce action, Schneider said.

Another problem is that migrant workers do not fall under the definition of “employee” under the National Labor Relations Act, which excludes them from many traditional workers’ rights such as collective bargaining through the formation of a union, Schneider said. Instead, the basic rights of migrant workers are outlined by the federal government under the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act. The U.S. Department of Labor investigates violations and complaints.

The U.S. Department of Labor has investigated Pioneer for labor violations in the past though the penalties have been minimal. The Brownsville Herald has filed a Freedom of Information request to retrieve the details.

WAITING GAME

For now, the farmworkers that filed that lawsuit can do little but wait for a resolution. Salas, whose father and grandfather were farmers, grew up in the fields. He knew what the work would be when he accepted the Indiana job, he said.

Karla Trujillo, 27, did not. A medical student in Matamoros, she needed money to pay for school and came to same spot where Salas was recruited when she heard a man was looking for farmworkers.

“It was our first time. It was hard work, but we were prepared to do it,” she said. “All I want is for them to pay us what they had promised us. We did our part, and they didn’t do theirs.”