12/6/2004
Recent guilty pleas by a 53-year-old
Texas woman and three family members are a step in extending
civil rights protections to migrant farm workers, but by
no means do they mark an end to this issue.
New York State still has a long way
to go in remedying abuses of migrant farm workers. A Farm
Worker Fair Labor Practices Act, giving agricultural workers
the same rights that all other workers in the state already
enjoy, passed the Assembly but was bottled up in committee
by the Senate. That bill would give migrants the right to
overtime pay, the right to a day of rest, disability insurance
and the right to bargain collectively.
Until this
act is passed by the Legislature, farm workers will be open
to treatment akin to slavery. The 80,000 to 100,000 people
hired each year to do seasonal harvesting work - a job farmers
can't easily find local workers willing to do - are important
to the agriculture industry. But the majority of farmers
who treat workers well are being tainted by the abuses by
a few labor contractors whose misdeeds threaten the entire
practice.
Guilty pleas
by Maria Garcia and her relatives, Texans who ran labor
camps in Genesee and Orleans counties, highlight one such
case and amounted to the first local test of a federal law
passed in 2000 to protect illegal aliens. Prosecutors said
as many as 50 migrant farm workers were crammed into one
house, sharing a single bathroom. Worse, there were times
when there was not enough food for everyone.
