On an August afternoon, Pablo stared down at a foam plate sloshing with flavorless pinto beans and a particularly bad version of huevos a la Mexicana. The simple, usually delicious scramble of eggs, tomatoes, onions and jalapeños is difficult to mess up. But if anyone can find a way to make it unpalatable, it’s the cook at his labor camp.
Soupy eggs are the last thing the 42-year-old from western Mexico wants to eat. But after a 12-hour day harvesting tobacco in the brutal and sometimes deadly summer heat, he must eat – and this was far from the worst meal he’s been given. A few weeks ago, fellow farm workers got sick due to raw and moldy food they were forced to purchase.
On days like this, Pablo can’t decide which is worse: that he’s forced to pay $80 a week for this slop, or that everything about what he eats, when he eats and how much he eats is tightly controlled by his employer.
Pablo, who is using a pseudonym due to fear of retaliation, is one of more than 35,000 migrant workers in North Carolina this year as part of the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Worker Program, a guest visa program overseen by the US Department of Labor (DoL). The program enables American employers to hire foreign workers to perform seasonal agricultural work. Employers in the program frequently exploit their migrant employees, and the structure of the program makes easy work of it. Visas are tied to a single employer who must also provide housing, transportation and access to food, creating a crushing power imbalance between American employers and migrant H-2A workers.
H-2A regulations require that all conditions of an agricultural job are disclosed in the application for temporary labor certification. On their face, regulations related to food and kitchen access are very precise. For example, labor camp stoves must have a certain number of burners depending on the number of workers, and each individual is only allotted three-fourths of a cubic foot of refrigerator space, about the size of a gallon of milk. The contract entered into between the employer and worker must also detail whether the employer will provide workers access to kitchen facilities, or if the employer will provide three meals a day for no more than $15.88 a day.
But sometimes H-2A workers sign contracts with guaranteed kitchen access, only to arrive and learn their employer has what advocates call a “forced meal plan”, unlawfully siphoning money from farm workers’ paychecks.
The H-2A program is so rife with serious legal violations that attorney Caitlin Ryland with the farmworker unit of Legal Aid of North Carolina (Lanc) says forced meal plans are often overlooked – even as they become more common.
“We’re seeing more cases where individuals or companies see meals as another opportunity to make an extra buck off of a vulnerable workforce that really doesn’t have much of a choice,” she said. Forced meal plans are happening so frequently that a few years ago, Lanc developed materials to inform H-2A workers of their meal plan rights.
Pablo has encountered forced meal plans several times during the 14 years he’s come to North Carolina as part of the H-2A program. He is contracted through the North Carolina Growers Association (NCGA), which serves as his joint employer along with the farm or business where he harvests sweet potatoes, tobacco and a variety of other crops. The NCGA serves as an agricultural intermediary, applying en masse for H-2A visas needed by member businesses and then busing workers like Pablo across the border and moving them from farm to farm as needed. While American employers can obtain workers from 86 countries, 90% come from Mexico and a majority work in Florida, California, Georgia, Washington and North Carolina, where the NCGA obtains the largest proportion of H-2A workers in the state.
Workers who come to the US through a contract with the NCGA are rolling the dice with their food, according to advocates. The growers association’s contracts cover many employers and the language regarding food is often vague, leaving workers unsure of the shape their meals will take until they’re in the US. And because they have no control over the farms they’re sent to, they can gain and lose kitchen access multiple times during a single season. The NCGA did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
According to Carol Brooke, a senior attorney with the North Carolina Justice Center’s Workers’ Rights Project, forced meal plans are common in North Carolina. In fact, the organization is currently handling a meal plan-related legal case. The pending lawsuit alleges that eastern North Carolina agricultural operations Boykin Farms, Rhodes Farming, and Lee and Sons Farms were contractually obligated to provide kitchen access to workers. However, over the course of four years beginning in 2019, employers allegedly blocked H-2A workers from accessing cooking spaces and instead charged them as much as $160 a week under a forced meal plan.
According to the complaint, meals were reportedly only provided twice a day Monday through Saturday. The meager breakfast consisted of coffee and slices of bread. In another example, workers arrived at a labor camp after a long day of work only to “find their dinners left out for them, cold and covered in flies”.
Nothing voluntary about it
Some forced meal plans are also unlawful because they charge workers prices that far exceed the daily cost allowed by DoL. The most expensive forced meal plan that attorney Aaron Jacobson has ever encountered was around $150 to $200 a week, almost half of workers’ paychecks.
Jacobson is a supervising attorney with Lanc’s farmworker unit, where he has litigated cases related to forced meal plans going back to 2018. He noted that nothing about these forced meal plans is “optional” or “voluntary”. Workers have to pay for the meal plan even if they don’t eat the food – and it’s often a hard violation to prove because most employers know better than to leave a paper trail. Jacobson says that typically, when H-2A workers are taken to cash their checks, their employers then immediately demand a kickback: cash for the plan.
Ryland has represented workers in more extreme cases. In one, an employer told workers that they would have to pay a fee if they wanted to leave their labor camp, and the employer also locked them out of the labor camp kitchen and threatened to shoot workers who fled without first paying their debts. The workers who remained were forced to pay exorbitant amounts for meager, poor-quality food. Unable to go to the grocery store or use the labor camp kitchen, hungry farmworkers built a makeshift grill with cinder blocks and an oven rack to grill fish they caught in a nearby swamp.
These conditions aren’t as uncommon as you’d think, said Leticia Zavala, a former farm worker who now organizes North Carolina H-2A workers with the worker-led organization El Futuro Es Nuestro. Workers often report barred kitchens and chained refrigerators, she said.
Zavala’s outreach efforts put her in touch with Felipe, who’s worked in the H-2A program for nine years. He’s also using a pseudonym due to a well-founded fear of retaliation. In his experience, refusal to comply with a forced meal plan often comes with intimidation – or worse.
“A few years ago, nine of us [workers] refused to sign the forced meal plan contract,” Felipe said. “The manager told us: ‘You’re no longer working here. Get your stuff ready because the [NCGA] is going to pick you up.’” With Zavala’s help, Felipe and other workers were transferred to another farm.
The incident occurred in 2020, when DoL’s current maximum daily charge for a meal plan was $12.67. In their complaint, Felipe and his co-workers noted they were paying up to $20.85 a day, which included out-of-pocket costs for food on Sundays when their employer didn’t provide meals. Felipe says all he wants is “dignified food”, something that’s been hard to come by in the US.
With Zavala’s help, Pablo has also recently filed complaints demanding kitchen access. This led to his termination and transfer to two different farms. At his current farm, he’s on yet another forced meal plan. Breakfast is typically some bread or a bowl of cereal. By 9am, he’s usually hungry again, but he must wait until noon for lunch. Most days it’s a plate of beans and rice, a few tortillas and very little protein. Pablo sent the Guardian cellphone images of recent meals, including a “soup” made of beans and hot dogs and various iterations of potatoes cooked in a watery salsa with bits of bacon or diced hot dogs.
The 2022 H-2A Modernization Rule clarified that employers that elect to provide meals to H-2A workers must ensure the meals are calorically and nutritionally adequate. To meet the requirement, US DoL encourages employers to consult caloric intake guidelines from the United States Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health.
But fresh fruit and vegetables are almost never offered as part of a meal plan of any kind – an irony, given how much time workers spend each day harvesting these very items. The cheap, starchy, carb-loaded and heavily processed foods served in forced meal plans can have health consequences.
Sara Quandt is a biological anthropologist with expertise in human nutrition. The professor emerita of epidemiology and prevention at North Carolina’s Wake Forest University School of Medicine has conducted research with farmworker communities for more than 30 years.
According to Quandt, if workers aren’t consuming enough calories to sustain the difficult physical labor they perform, their bodies first eat through their fat reserves and then their muscles are used by their bodies as fuel. The cyclical nature of farm worker diets is akin to the impact of yo-yo diets, in which dieters are often losing and regaining the same few pounds but never recovering muscle lost during the process.
The consequences can be even more severe for those with chronic conditions. Pablo currently shares housing with a few men who have diabetes. He says that the workers try to look out for each other’s health by sharing food or otherwise encouraging men with chronic illnesses to avoid foods that will make them feel unwell.
Pablo said: “Some people need certain food or food at certain times, or they lose the energy to work. But the field manager will keep demanding them to keep working.”
That’s a recipe for disaster, according to Quandt. “If somebody passes out from low blood sugar, it’s not going to look any different to their co-workers or supervisor than if they passed out because of the heat. So taking them to a cooler area and having them drink water isn’t going to make a difference; they need a sugary drink and treatment,” she said.
A spokesperson for NCDoL said that while the agency is “sympathetic” to these situations, NCDoL “has no enforcement authority over the type of food provided to migrant workers”. North Carolina’s Migrant Housing Act does require certified housing for H-2A workers to have a working stove, refrigerator and a sink with hot and cold water, which means workers like Pablo and Felipe who have been locked out of kitchen facilities can file complaints. However, “anything related to meal plans should be referred to US DoL’s wage and hour division”, the state agency said.
A representative for the DoL said that when employers fail to comply with the H-2A program’s meal requirements, the agency’s Wage and Hour Division will assess back wages and penalties and where warranted, “seek debarment and/or revocation” of an employer’s H-2A certification.
“We take seriously the requirements for H-2A employers to provide meals or furnish free and convenient cooking and kitchen facilities to workers,” a DoL spokesperson said in a statement. “These obligations are critical worker protections, especially for H-2A workers who often live and work in remote areas. We know that every day, across America, H-2A farm workers labor long hours to grow and harvest the crops that place food on the table for our nation. As they do so, it is vital that they have adequate nutrition to stay healthy during their temporary work period.”
Workers like Pablo have paid the price for filing complaints with state and federal agencies.
“Every farm threatens you if you don’t sign the food contract and then if you don’t sign it, there’s nowhere else to eat and you get fired,” Pablo explains. “It’s now been four different times that I have registered complaints and got fired … I will continue making complaints because we have rights. But every time I get fired, I have to start again from zero.”
Forced meal plans are not unique to North Carolina. At a recent event, Zavala learned from religious leaders in the midwest that some H-2A employers are charging workers $44 a day for meals. Solimar Mercado-Spencer, attorney and director of the farmworker rights division of the Georgia Legal Services Program, regularly hears of forced meal plans in her state.
Ryland, one of the Lanc lawyers, sees “a real shift in that it’s not even about making money off the farm work anymore; it’s about making money off of the person”, she says. “So it’s charging workers for the opportunity to come to the United States, it’s charging them higher rates for the visa and then charging them for the food. It’s really about making a profit off of the workers’ isolation, as opposed to making a profit off of the farm work.”
The many issues around food access inside the H-2A program force workers to develop inventive, and sometimes costly workarounds. Some plant gardens outside their labor camp. Others purchase outdoor grills and mini refrigerators. Last growing season, Felipe bought a car that he stores in North Carolina when he returns home to Mexico. It was a major expense but was worth it. Employers usually only provide transportation to the grocery store on Sundays. Now, Felipe doesn’t have to rely on his employer to get around.
It’s one way that Felipe can circumvent a system that undermines workers’ freedom and bodily autonomy.
Zavala, the farmworker organizer, said: “A forced meal plan is a very obvious form of control and manipulation. It has to do with your wages, it has to do with your health, it has to do with your liberty to make decisions on a daily basis.”
Pablo said these conditions are beyond demoralizing.
“It makes you feel enslaved, like you’re a prisoner,” he said. “It’s like you’re not important to anybody.”
During his earlier years in the H-2A program, he was unwilling to risk losing work in the US by fighting unjust conditions. That man doesn’t exist anymore, in part due to Zavala, who has taught him how to make the most of the protections offered to H-2A workers.
“Our families have lots of dreams and hopes for us, but some people die in the process of working in the United States,” Pablo said. “When we’re this far away from home, we have to do more than just hope we can make it back alive. We have to raise our voices.”
