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Biden’s immigration reform should roll back exploitative ‘guest worker’ programs May 13, 2021 1:10 PM CDT By David Bacon
Members of the Yakama Nation of Native Americans join farmworkers and other immigrants to celebrate May Day in 2017 and protest continued deportations and detentions. | David Bacon
The current guest worker system prioritizes agricultural growers’ profits over immigrants’ and workers’ rights. Joe Biden should seek a different way: building an immigration system based on family reunification, community stability, and immigrant workers’ rights to decent wages, health, and housing.
Senate Bill 5172 creates a phased-in path toward full overtime pay for agricultural workers by 2024.
Credit: AP
FILE - In this June 16, 2020, file photo, orchard worker Francisco Hernandez reaches to pull honey crisp apples off a tree during a thinning of the trees at an orchard in Yakima, Wash. The agriculture industry is asking Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee to move migrant farmworkers and food factory workers closer to the front of the line for the coronavirus vaccine because they perform work that cannot be delayed or performed remotely. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File) Author: Associated Press Updated: 2:38 PM PDT May 11, 2021
I congratulate the Washington State legislature and Governor Jay Inslee for signing into law SB 5172, Washington’s Overtime Bill for Agricultural Workers, which will help more than 100,000 farmworkers secure the overtime pay they deserve. Agricultural workers in Washington and across the country have helped carry our nation through this pandemic working long hours, often at great personal risk, to meet the needs of their communities and keep America healthy and well-nourished. These overtime protections will ensure that agricultural workers in Washington are paid for all of the vital work they do.
For too long and owing in large part to unconscionable race-based exclusions put in place generations ago farmworkers have been denied some of the most fundamental rights that workers in almost every other sector have long enjoyed, including the right to a forty-hour work week and overtime pay. I was proud to stand with farmworkers during the Obama-Biden Administration, when
Rep. Liz Cheney’s apparently compulsive criticism of Donald Trump and his supporters has finally crossed the line for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and top Republicans. They’ve scheduled a vote on Wednesday to oust her as House Conference chair [
New York Post, May 7, 2021]. Her likely replacement: New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Trump loyalist, but also a notorious immigration enthusiast. So Cheney’s downfall is good news, but her likely replacement is not. Trumpism must encompass more than loyalty to the man. Its animating feature must be the
For weeks, GOP leaders have publicly said that Cheney must stop antagonizing POTUS 45 and calling his voters terrorists. Of course, she mulishly refused, which earned the usual hosannas from leftist Mainstream Media outlets, all of which think her job is to lecture Republicans about the “insurrectionists” who have supposedly seized the party, then move it away from Trump [