CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Exploitation of America’s Farmworkers

Farm workers on a field near Mount Williamson in Inyo County, California. Photograph by Ansel Adams. Public domain.

Farmworkers are the backbone of America, but this country has a long history of exploiting the very people on whose labor we depend.

Under the Trump administration, so many ICE agents have shown up at farms that farmworkers have stopped showing up to work, crops have gone bad, and — no surprise — food prices have soared. This March, the administration’s answer to consumer concerns was to expand the guest worker program, permitting U.S. farms to hire more temporary workers, while doubling down on its deportation efforts and putting traditional legal pathways to citizenship on hold.

The result: a more vulnerable, lower-paid workforce, with no rights, no representation and no voice. The same logic structured the infamous Bracero Program in the 1940s.

Separating labor from belonging, and work from full citizenship, and even........

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