Trick clock: On the job with a seasonal migrant worker

David Swanson // AFP via Getty Images It was in the first warm week of summer that the toilet stopped flushing. For two weeks in 2023, Jaime and the other eleven men sharing the one-bedroom cottage were forced to go next door to do their business, twenty-four men to one bathroom. The bosses took their time hiring a plumber. Jaime is from a small town in Western Mexico, but this incident occurred thousands of miles away from home, in Flemington, New Jersey, Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Baffler explain. A year later, Jaime spends half the year at a worksite in the middle of nowhere, a placid expanse of green lawns and gothic white Victorian homes, on a seasonal H-2A worker visa, where he tends to flowers, mainly to be sold at big box retailers like Home Depot and Walmart. Jaime is forty-three, with buzzed salt and pepper hair and a stubbled mustache. He has the outgoing demeanor of a natural leader and seems to know the name of every worker at the site, the innate chivalry of someone raised in rural Mexico, and the casual tan and work boots of someone who spends most of his time doing manual labor outside. At the height of the season, the facility, run by a midsize company, ships several million plants per week. Jaime and the other foreign workers accompany the plants through their lifecycle, from sorting seedlings to turning the soil, running water lines, planting, monitoring, and prepping the final product for shipment. A team of women from Central America prepared seeds for planting while a corset of black tubes misted the leaves with precision from above. The warehouses, where mature plants in bloom are stored, are like gargantuan filing cabinets for racks of colorful flowers. “It’s like being in an enormous garden,” Jaime said. Near a row of plastic domes, a group of other migrant workers was setting the stage for replanting. A pickup truck emerged down the dirt road from between distant greenhouses. Someone sounded the call, and the group rushed back to their stations, with shouts of, “Corre, corre!” El Hombre had arrived. “El Hombre” is a stocky, white American, one of the bosses who reports to the owner of the facility. He growls to the workers in broken Spanish–his penchant for calling the Mexican workers “hombre” is what led to the nickname. “He feels . . . agitated,” Jaime said. The workers gave El Hombre hesitant stares, nodding, unsure what to expect, but he just listed off a few tasks and told the group to have a good weekend. When he got back in his truck, there was an audible, collective exhale. Jaime is one of over three hundred thousand H-2A visa workers that travel to the United States each year–a massive increase over a mere ninety thousand a decade ago–as fewer American citizens opt to make a living through agricultural labor. Passing through for four-to-nine month stints, their hands are crucial to food systems that sustain millions of people. By some estimates, they account for over a quarter of all agricultural workers in the country, meaning that one out of every four apples, one out of every four cigarettes, one out of every four flowerpots, is made possible by a largely invisible foreign workforce. Their housing is guaranteed by their employers, as are basic rights: to be paid a fair wage, to receive medical care if they are injured on the job, to receive overtime. But interviews with over a dozen contracted workers who have lived in at least seven different states over the past five years reveal a rising culture of cutting corners, habits that can veer at times into bonafide labor abuse. Following Trump’s decisive win in the November election, the situation is likely to get worse–a lot worse. Before their visa is issued, each H-2A worker receives a pamphlet outlining their rights–to be shown the contract, to receive a pay stub with hours listed, to work at least 75% of the promised hours, to be provided with free transportation and housing–and how to submit a complaint to the Department of Labor. In the house Jaime shares with eleven others, a large green and white poster with paragraphs of tiny text is tacked to the wall informing the workers of these rights as well as their responsibilities in Spanish and English. The process of getting a contract is complex and risky–especially if you’d like to keep both your cash and your dignity. But despite these regulations, bosses will use crafty means to lower workers’ pay, like giving false, low estimates of harvests, failing to provide access to kitchens or supermarkets and then charging $20 a day for food, or subtracting rent from the paychecks of workers who are not aware their housing should be free. A report from the nonprofit Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, which compiled interviews with one hundred H-2A workers in 2019, found that every single one of them had experienced at least one serious legal violation of their rights. When Beto Hernández, who picked watermelons in Georgia in 2018 and 2019, and the three other men who would be sharing a room opened the door to their new temporary home, they saw only two beds. “I don’t like sleeping like that,” he said in an interview in his hometown in Mexico. He wound up sleeping on the floor for six months, which, in addition to the strain caused by carrying watermelons all day, left him with back pain that has never truly subsided. The bosses took stipends for rent and food out of his paycheck, to the point his salary dipped below minimum wage. “They almost didn’t let us drink water. They said, ‘You know you’re here to work, if you want to drink water go back to Mexico,'” he said. “If in a week we filled twenty trucks [with watermelons], they would pay us for fifteen.” Across the country, workers face varied forms of exploitation, some that endanger their lives. Sergio Cuevas, who worked at a dairy farm in New Mexico in 2022, was threatened with a shotgun by a manager when he complained that hours were missing from his paycheck. He was one of only two men in his cohort who agreed to take legal action against the farm–the rest were too afraid of losing their position, and with it, likely their ability to find a new contract elsewhere. Last December, an H-2A worker picking oranges in Florida died after working for hours in the hot sun without water breaks. In 2021, two H-2A workers in Missouri died in a fire because their trailer had never been inspected to make sure it was a suitable place to live. The following year, a bell-pepper harvester died who worked for five hours without a break, and in the summer of 2023, a tobacco grower in North Carolina died after he was made to sit inside a hot bus instead of being taken to the hospital when he showed signs of extreme heat stroke. After a sugar cane chopper died of heat stroke on the job in Florida in April 2024, the proposed penalty to his employer was a mere $27,665. These experiences are not exceptional and are treated by most workers as expected risks of entering the indentured servitude that is the H-2A lifestyle. Mistreatment of foreign farm workers is a decades-old dynamic across the States–and this tradition of dehumanization appears more permanent than any legal protections afforded by the Department of Labor. It even spreads to Mexican recruiters, who, when looking for potential workers to fill spots at farms in the United States, prioritize men with broad shoulders and bowed heads. “You have one guy who knows his rights and you lose all of them,” said Jaime Mojarra Salas, a former recruiter for a dairy farm in Idaho that relies heavily on temporary workers. Friends and family members who have already found a contract will often promise to recommend you to a recruiter for a fee, and men posing as recruiters will collect filing fees through bank transfers only to ghost when the money arrives. Once they are matched with a job, few workers complain about unsafe or unsanitary conditions for fear of having to rejoin the carousel of seekers. “I haven’t been scammed, exactly, but they’ll say you have to pay 15,000 pesos [$800] to put your name in,” said Manuel Iglesias, a car mechanic trying to get a contract in order to build a house for his aging mother. As of this writing, he is still searching. At the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles in 2022, as part of the Biden administration’s pledge to address the migrant crisis, delegates from the United States laid out a set of actions the Departments of Agriculture and Labor would take to increase the number of H-2A contracts and ensure the safety and comfort of visa holders, including a $65 million grant system to encourage the hiring of more H-2A workers from Central America. In September 2023, the Department of Labor announced a new rule that would allow workers on H-2A visas to unionize–seventeen states (along with the International Fresh Produce Association and nine co-plaintiffs) are now suing the Biden administration over it. The Department of Agriculture also released new guidelines for wages of H-2A workers, which hang somewhere between $14 and $19 an hour depending on the state. And in January of this year, the Department of Homeland Security announced undocumented people would be able to make work-related complaints without risk of deportation, a rule that, if implemented effectively, could serve to bridge the channel between those with visas and those without. Oftentimes, H-2A visa holders are paid at or above the minimum wage, while undocumented people labor alongside them for less. But this talk of new policies does not always imply action, most workers agreed, because the vast majority would never risk their positions and their good names in the community of employers and recruiters by making a complaint to the government. The onus is on employers and Department of Labor investigators to change the reality of life for workers. Jaime, like so many others, has been subjected to crowded, unsanitary living conditions, as well as stolen pay. It’s worth it though, he says. Because, if he works two or three more years, he’ll have a house back home in Western Mexico. With the savings from his first two years working in New Jersey, he has begun laying the concrete foundation, but he needs more money to finish and furnish the house.  “I know exactly how it’s going to be,” he says in Spanish. “The two bedrooms in the back, the living room and kitchen in the front, with a patio.” Back home in Mexico, where Jaime works in construction, he only makes about $400 a week (more than many laborers in his town who make roughly $80 toiling in the lime orchards)–but if he worked in Mexico year-round, it would take him over twenty years to save the money necessary to build the house because all of his income would be eaten by rent and household expenses. For any family in this pueblo, an influx of U.S. dollars is life changing; it is the difference between getting by and living comfortably. This is why Jaime lives a double life. In an interview in Mexico several months before he returned to New Jersey this year for his third season on the job, Jaime worried it might be his last. “They weren’t prepared to receive workers there, and I’m returning to the same place, to the same suffering.” But once he arrived, his attitude brightened. This past June, Jaime was eager to show how the worksite had improved since the year before, explaining how he and the other workers clock in and out by tapping ID cards on a screen, a new automated system that ensures they are paid the overtime they’re owed. “It has gotten a lot better,” he said. The incoming Trump administration is unlikely to extend leniency to any group of foreigners–no matter how essential they may be to the American economy. Last year, in addition to the toilet breaking in Jaime’s house, one of the other cottages flooded, leaving twelve men living in several inches of sitting water. “There were a lot of complaints, a lot of reports that went ignored, and it got to the point, the extreme moment when the liquid seeped out all over the room, and they had to throw out the carpeting,” he explained. “If a supervisor, someone from the state, had seen, there would have been a direct sanction to the company.” The year before that, gas was never installed in his cottage, so the men could not cook, and when the weather turned, there was no heating. “We almost slept in each other’s arms. None of us bathed for three days because the water was biting cold. . . . For two, three months we ate nothing but sandwiches.” This year, to his surprise, he is making $17.40 an hour, nearly 40% higher than the minimum wage for agricultural workers in New Jersey. He sends almost all of it to his family. Jaime describes his financial situation as “broken in three”: between saving for the house, providing for his household’s expenses, and feeding himself. In his cottage this year, eight men sleep in the bedroom, and four in the living room. The group adheres to a strict schedule for chores, cooking, and showering, and splits the cost of groceries. Mexican food is what the men miss most from home, other than family and privacy, of course. Food made with the right amount of oil, meat with the right amount of juice. Once every couple of weeks, he and a group of other migrant workers will attempt to cross the threshold of the local Buffalo Wild Wings to allow themselves a small treat–though the waiters will sometimes refuse to seat them. “Sometimes I’m really scared to go out,” he said. Though it is necessary to make the weekly pilgrimage for groceries, Jaime avoids the local Walmart as much as possible, because a woman there once told him to go back to his country, and he left the store humiliated–she was not aware that returning to Mexico was what he intended to do anyway. Some H-2A visa workers do harbor hopes of settling in the United States and providing the means for their families to join them, but this is the exception rather than the norm. The H-2A program does not offer pathways to long term immigration, and most workers are focused on building better lives in their home countries, where they have family and community. Jaime takes goes across an unmowed lawn to another grouping of cottages and points to a white, wooden house with rusting metal trimmings. “That’s the one,” he says. That is where he lived last year–his bottom bunk, which he showed me, now occupied by another worker, has a two or three-inch mattress on top of a flat board. The workers hang small curtains around their cots for privacy. But worse than the shared bathrooms, injuries, and stolen pay, most workers say, is the purgatory itself, separation from one’s real life, living like a carpenter ant–just work, food, and sleep–for half one’s life. Jaime has only worked four-to-seven-month contracts, but those who pick fruit for ten months on end are living for the 15% of their lives in which they experience true peace back home. One of Jaime’s housemates missed the birth of his son last year because he had just arrived at the worksite in New Jersey. He returned home to a six-month-old baby, already alert and making sense of the world, to this point a world that did not include his father. “I didn’t know whether I should hug him or not,” he says with mist in his eyes. On the day his wife was in labor, no one notified him until the baby had been delivered, and he did not share his anxieties with the other men in his group, managing his emotions alone. When the men call their families, most choose to go outside, not just to respect their housemates but because some are more sentimental than others when talking to their wives, and they want to avoid embarrassment or ridicule. But phone calls only go so far–most of these men return to taller, altered children and foreign family dynamics, having missed milestones like birthdays, weddings, and funerals. Jaime describes this feeling as shame: “You see that they’re bigger. But at what moment did they grow?” Under President Biden, protections for H-2A visa workers were expanded in large part to justify a crackdown on migrants seeking asylum at the southern border. The cash flowing from agricultural workers back to their countries of origin, particularly Central American countries, was intended to provide a reason for desperate people to stay put. The incoming Trump administration is unlikely to extend leniency to any group of foreigners–no matter how essential they may be to the American economy. This could mean fewer H-2A visas will be granted, a reality that could endanger food systems nationwide, as well as damage the economies of towns in Mexico and Central America that rely on income from these workers. Competition for the few remaining contracts would be fierce, and scams would likely surge. Employers could also be more emboldened to deny workers their rights, as protections would be stripped or rarely enforced. This is a change that could turn the country on its head, as nativists realize just how much America relies on foreign workers to put food on the table. As his third season comes to a close, things seem to be looking up for Jaime–no leaks, no broken toilets, no stolen overtime pay. At this point in the season, the majority of the orders have been fulfilled, so the workday begins at 7:00 a.m. and ends early, at 3:00 p.m. The extra few hours of rest feel like a forbidden indulgence, because Jaime is losing close to fifty dollars a day of possible income. He’s able to send $500 home each week. One time, Jaime and a few friends took the train to New York City and saw the Statue of Liberty, so he could send photos to his kids. The city didn’t bring him the same exhilarating feeling as being in Guadalajara, he said, but he’s thinking about giving it another try. He feels at home with the land in New Jersey now, at home in his routine, unpleasant though it might be. His supervisor is one of the kind ones, and the farm owner’s teenage kids clean plants and prepare soil with the Mexican and Central American crews and are learning Spanish. Next year, Jaime says, he plans to return. This story was produced by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Baffler, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.