Louisiana Crawfish Co. / Facebook
The federal government’s rules to determine how much temporary foreign workers should be paid in Louisiana’s crawfish-processing industry violates an appeals court decision and is depressing wages for U.S. workers, according to a new lawsuit.
Crawfish industry workers and groups such as the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice filed the federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on April 27. The lawsuit seeks to invalidate a federal Department of Labor rule allowing the seafood processors to rely on state wage surveys rather than a large-scale federal study, the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) survey.
Jorge Bautista Sabino (second from right) came to the U.S. from Mexico on an agricultural visa sponsored by a farm labor contractor. After facing wage theft and other abuses, Sabino joined a class action lawsuit with the support of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, for whom he now works. (Photo courtesy of FLOC.)
For years, legal organizations and farmworker advocacy groups have sounded the alarm about the H-2A visa program the most common legal route to hiring foreign agricultural workers. Faced with massive worker shortages, farmers in the South have increasingly turned to foreign laborers, who come to work on temporary employer-sponsored visas.