The Battle for the Future of Farmwork
Trump’s immigration crackdown and a growing union effort are transforming Upstate New York into a battleground over who will grow our food and under what conditions.
Joseph Bullington
The jail where they have taken his wife is very cold and very far away.
In the weeks since immigration agents pulled her off the work bus, she has been in jail and he has kept working at the vegetable farm where they worked together.
She calls him from a detention center in another state and tells him about the cold, how the prisoners complain about the cold but the guards do nothing.
She has fallen into un hueco now, he says — a hollow, a hole, a gray area.
His name is not Carlos, but he doesn’t want his real name published because he doesn’t want to be taken. We sit in his friend’s one-room apartment in an old two-story house in the upstate New York town of Albion, population 7,400. A bed takes up a corner of the room, and beside the bed, a woman’s things — makeup, a hairbrush. The woman, his friend’s wife, is not here and probably will not be here again. She, too, was taken in the raid.
He tells me how it happened. Before 7 a.m. on Friday, May 2, he and his wife were on their way to work. The old white bus full of farmworkers was driving north up Main Street in Albion, heading for a farm called Lynn-Ette & Sons, when federal agents pulled the bus over.
Many such buses leave Albion every morning, Carlos says. What set the morning of May 2 apart was the fact that, this time, the feds arrested almost everyone — 14 of the 17 people on board— and that this bus was carrying farmworkers who were trying to unionize.
The union campaign at Lynn-Ette & Sons is part of a broader effort by farmworkers across New York state, who are facing down daunting odds to organize under the banner of the United Farm Workers (UFW), the famed California-based union and civil rights organization.
Lynn-Ette & Sons vehemently denies the bus was targeted because of the union effort. In a statement published May 5 by a local news site, the company wrote it “had no prior knowledge of the raid,” and “claims suggesting that these workers were targeted in retaliation for union activity … are categorically false.” Regardless, the effect has been much the same, according to UFW organizers in upstate New York. Workers involved with the union fight were taken into ICE custody, and some have already been deported. Others feel even more afraid to speak out. The organizing gets that much harder.
And the stakes get higher. The collision of these two forces — the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, on one hand, and the UFW’s union campaign on the other — have transformed the fields, fruit orchards and farm towns of upstate New York into a battleground over the future of farmwork, who will do it and under what conditions.
Albion straddles the Erie Canal and its large houses hint at prosperous days, but those days are gone and the houses are old now and many are packed full of the workers who come here from distant lands to work the big farms and orchards and dairies that sprawl out for miles in every direction.
Some come from Guatemala, some from Jamaica and Haiti, but most, like Carlos, come from Mexico, and almost everyone I meet gives me the same reason in different words: They come because the economy demands they have money to live but offers them no way to get that money where they’re from. Carlos puts it this way: “What you make here in a year and a half— you’ll never make that money in your whole life in Mexico.” And the farms, far too large to be run by the owners and their families alone, need workers — the more desperate, the better.
Between the two poles of this economic magnet stretches the jaw of the border, increasingly sharp, increasingly dangerous. But to Carlos, it presented itself more as an imposing toll booth. Where people need and want something hard to get, entrepreneurs emerge to sell it.
“There are people who bring people up from the border,” he explains. “They charge a lot.” For him, the price was $17,000. He had nothing like that kind of money, so he agreed to sell some years of his labor to the smugglers — a sort of indentured servitude, except the indenture is held not by the eventual employer but by a Mexican cartel. Practically everyone Carlos knows here made a similar bargain. Such a debt takes a year and a half or two years to pay off, he says, and those are years of great vulnerability. To get caught, fired, sent back before it is paid could be devastating.
It’s a “massive risk,” he says. “You risk dealing with the cartels, you risk getting caught at the border, you risk getting deported before paying your debt.”
And the United States depends on him, on all the people like him — he knows this, too. He feels he does a great service to this country, he says, and now this country is persecuting him. I can hear him grappling with the magnitude of the betrayal, the scale of the lie. Everyone knows you’re here illegally. Everyone pretends it doesn’t matter. They put you to work growing and harvesting their food. They work you very hard. Then, one day, it matters very much — it matters so much that they rip your life apart.
It’s an open secret that the farming industry around Albion depends almost exclusively on the labor of people like Carlos, and this is by no means unique to upstate New York. Nationally, almost three-quarters of all crop workers are born outside of the United States, and about 42% of them are undocumented. Some 17% come seasonally on a temporary farmwork visa called H-2A.
This lack of U.S. citizenship makes farmworkers vulnerable to exploitation and abuse by farm owners, says Daniel Costa, a research director at the Economic Policy Institute.
“When workers don’t have status, they, in practice, don’t have workplace rights,” Costa explains. And many, he says, carry heavy burdens of debt from the crossing to the United States. “These workers are risking a lot if they speak up.” Farm owners can easily fire and replace them from the rich vein of desperate third-world workers offered by illegal migration and legal guest worker programs.
The result is that farmworkers, despite the difficulty of the work and the skill and knowledge required, are among the lowest-paid workers in the country, earning around half the wage of the average U.S. worker. Critically, Costa says, this doesn’t only impact undocumented workers; it pushes down benefits for all workers across the industry. If employers have easy access to workers who don’t really have rights, he says, it makes it harder for U.S. citizens to push for better wages or safety equipment, in “a race to the bottom.”
This is what’s badly missing from the aphorism that immigrants “do jobs that Americans don’t want.” A few years ago, I worked the hay season in Montana’s Big Hole Valley. The local style of putting up hay is labor intensive, and the bosses complained about how hard it was to find workers. They seemed uninterested in trying to solve the problem by raising wages, which sat at $75 per day. Instead, they turned to the H-2A program and brought up a couple guys from Mexico.
In New York, a seasonal Jamaican worker on an apple farm sums it up simply: “No well-thinking American would want this job,” he says, “and if they did take this job, they’d have to pay them way more than they’re paying us.”
While anti-immigrant groups blame immigrant workers for this dynamic, Costa says the real villains are the employers who take advantage of the immigration system to underpay workers. The real solution, then, is not deportations but full rights for all workers. That means not only citizenship rights but labor rights, too.
The U.S. government has long denied farmworkers the protections of basic labor law. While the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 guarantee workers overtime pay and the right to unionize, both laws explicitly exclude agricultural workers.
In 2019, New York state passed a law, the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act, that guarantees agricultural workers overtime pay, access to workers compensation — and the right to unionize without employer interference.
In 2022, the UFW launched its organizing campaign in New York. Growers, meanwhile, sued the state over the law. But the courts ruled against the growers, and by this spring, farmworkers had won UFW union certifications at eight farms, covering nearly 1,000 workers.
“That’s a lot more than zero and a lot of progress since 2019,” says UFW Secretary Treasurer Armando Elenes. “But we have a long way to go. Our goal is to improve farmworker lives at scale by raising wages and improving working conditions across the state.”
The Trump administration’s goals regarding farmworkers are less clear, in part because the very fact of immigrant farmworkers cuts to the irony at the heart of Trumpism: Rapid mass deportations won’t lead so much to American greatness as to the collapse of the American food system. But Costa doesn’t think the administration earnestly intends to replace the noncitizen farm labor force with well-paid U.S. citizens. “The strategy,” Costa says, “is pretty obviously: terrorize the workers who are here and replace them with workers who are on visas.”
H-2A visas technically give workers a legal status, says Costa, but that status is controlled by the employer, who can threaten and replace workers who ask for better wages or conditions. Importantly, the visas do not offer workers a path to citizenship or a long-term place in the communities where they work. They bring people to work, far from their families, and then they send them back.
As the H-2A program has ballooned, so has abuse. A 2020 survey, by the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, interviewed 100 Mexican H-2A workers and found almost all had experienced multiple rights violations, including unpaid wages.
“We view guest worker expansion and mass deportations as twin threats,” says UFW communications director Antonio De Loera-Brust. “They want to make it cheaper to bring in more workers and treat them worse.”
“These policies aren’t about helping American workers,” says Elenes. “It’s about maintaining control of a disposable labor force for powerful employers. … We see mass deportation policies for what they are: an attempt to divide and intimidate the working class and suppress labor organizing so that the status quo of exploitation can continue.”
As for Carlos, he’s waiting to hear whether ICE will release his wife, who is fighting her deportation in court, or send her back to Mexico. If so, he says he plans to join her there.
I ask him how he thinks Lynn-Ette & Sons will replace the workers they lost to ICE at the height of the planting season.
They already have, he says, with guys on H-2A visas.
On the same day ICE arrested Carlos’ wife for being in the country illegally, Andrew and Antonio boarded a plane and flew from Jamaica to upstate New York, passing through the airport immigration checkpoint with H-2A visas sponsored by a farm called Wafler, an apple orchard and nursery near the small town of Wolcott.
“In the moment you’re coming here,” says Andrew, “it’s like you’re coming to hell.”
Workdays here start around 7 a.m. If it’s harvest season, they put you on the picking platform of a tractor-like machine that carries you down the rows of apple trees while you pick as fast as you can and the machine doesn’t stop and, except for two 15-minute breaks and a 30-minute lunch, you don’t stop either, not even for a sip of water.
“We get no time to even breathe, you understand, because we keep going, going,” Andrew says. “It’s like slavery.”
We are parked at a pullout a few miles down the road from the farm’s worker housing. We huddle behind the car to talk, trying to stay out of sight of the road. They ask that I call them Andrew and Antonio instead of their real names, because they fear retaliation. They don’t fear ICE but their employer, who they say could terminate their H-2A visas.
Andrew and Antonio have been “coming to hell” for 10 years. They say the months of toil in the New York orchards drag them away from their families and hurt their health. If they were to find work on a farm in Jamaica, it might pay $30 a day — compared to the $18.83 per hour they make here. “We have children going to school, going to college,” says Antonio, who looks shyly at his feet as he talks. “It’s for them we do this.”
Around us, apple orchards carpet the land — and these orchards disagree strongly with the image of apple orchards I somehow have in my mind. These are not pleasant groves of old, gnarled trees. More, they resemble hedges of stunted saplings, the trees planted only a few feet apart and supported by wires anchored to wooden posts, the rows marching away for a half mile or more. This is industrial-scale apple production, and New York is behind only Washington (and sometimes Michigan) as the top apple-producing state in the country. The apples these workers pick end up all over the world.
The harvesting machines contribute to the general air of industrial efficiency that pervades these apple-growing areas. The machines, designed and sold by the Wafler family, resemble a tractor with adjustable metal platforms on the sides, where six to eight workers can stand and pick apples as the machine rolls down the rows. The machines greatly increase efficiency: Antonio says that, on a machine, compared with a ladder — he has done the work both ways — a worker can pick two or three times as many apples in a day. Farm owners who use the machines can feel the difference in their pocketbooks. Workers feel the difference in their bodies: The machines mean picking about 9,000 to 10,000 pounds of apples in a day, instead of about 2,700 to 4,500 pounds. Either way, the wages are the same.
In the quest for ever more efficiency, the machine has imposed the unstopping rigor of the assembly line on the apple fields, reshaping the rows to accommodate it: Instead of growing straight up and down, trellises force the hedges of trees to grow at an angle, creating V-shaped rows that can be better harvested by workers on the machine.
Antonio and Andrew feel that the boss treats the workers, too, like parts of the machine — disposable parts.
To complain about the pace of the work, or pause to catch your breath, or raise concerns about unsafe pesticide exposure, is to risk the boss replacing you with a worker who will do a better job of keeping their mouth shut.
If a shift to visa workers is what the Trump administration has planned for the food system, Wafler is ahead of the game, since more than two-thirds of the 125 to 165 workers it employs every year come seasonally on H-2A visas, according to UFW.
“He says he likes the H-2A program because if he don’t want to call this guy, he just don’t call him up,” says Antonio, referring to farm owner Paul Wafler. “He love to use that phrase.” In 2015, for example, he says Wafler fired 35 workers. He and Andrew were brought the next year, as replacements. “He says he like the Jamaicans because they don’t have anywhere to go.” H-2A visas permit noncitizens to work legally in the United States — but only so long as they work for the company that sponsored the visa, which means it’s difficult for workers facing abusive, unfair or unsafe conditions to leave mid-season for a different farm.
Scot, a non-H-2A local who has worked at Wafler for many years and requested anonymity for fear of retribution from his employer, describes Wafler’s treatment of workers even more starkly.
“He ain’t got no mercy,” Scot says. “He only cares about his money. He says if one guy dies today, he’ll get another one tomorrow.”
The 2009 apple harvest had just begun in upstate New York when the tractor Kenneth Smith was riding ran into an apple tree, and Smith’s foot got caught between the two.
Smith’s coworkers took off his water boot to find his foot badly mangled. He needed 17 staples to close the wound and he couldn’t walk without crutches.
Smith had travelled to Cahoon Farms on an H-2A visa to make money he couldn’t make in Saint Thomas Parish, Jamaica — but now he couldn’t work. He hung around the farm’s worker housing for three months until the company paid for him and the other seasonal workers to fly home at the end of the season. The other H-2A guys, not the company, kept him fed, he says.
Smith felt Cahoon had treated him badly, but he couldn’t do much about it. He spent the next several seasons working for different farms in the area. To his dismay, he found conditions much the same: The owners treated the workers as expendable, replaceable. “They just use you and abuse you,” Smith says.
By 2022, he was back at Cahoon — but now things were different. New York’s new law protected farmworkers’ right to organize, and Smith and other workers were fighting for a union. And it wasn’t just at Cahoon: Next door, Antonio and the other Wafler workers also unionized.
“If you give workers rights, they will use them,” says De Loera-Brust. The 2019 law made New York one of only three states with strong protections for farmworker unions, he says, urging others to follow suit.
The New York law does not, however, make the organizing easy or risk-free. “One of the biggest hurdles is that workers are concerned that, if they engage in any effort to organize, the company will not hire them back next year or will fire them outright,” says Gabriella Szpunt, the UFW’s New York organizing coordinator. Those fears turned out to be well founded: According to Szpunt, both farms retaliated by not recalling some of their H-2A workers, including Smith and Antonio, who thinks Wafler targeted him for his leadership role in the union campaign. The union filed unfair labor practice complaints with the New York Public Employment Relations Board, the agency charged with enforcing the 2019 law, and the farms ultimately recalled the workers.
In January, Cahoon Farms signed a contract with its unionized workers, becoming only the second — and the largest — farm in New York with a union contract. It’s the UFW’s first in the entire Northeast.
The contract, which covers both Cahoon’s seasonal H-2A workers and its local, year-round workforce, includes some modest wage increases, and, more importantly to the workers I spoke with, it aims to protect workers against being treated as disposable. Specifically, the contract requires the farm to provide sick and injured workers with sick leave and workers’ compensation, establishes an employer-matched retirement fund and bars the farm from arbitrarily replacing workers.
Wafler, meanwhile, has declined to negotiate, according to the UFW. In February, a state-appointed arbitrator ordered Wafler into a contract, but the farm has not followed the terms, according to Szpunt and workers. The UFW has filed an unfair labor practices complaint.
The UFW has won certifications at six other New York farms, including Lynn-Ette & Sons. At Lynn-Ette, unlike at other unionized farms, the roughly 20 local, largely undocumented workers were excluded from the bargaining unit representing the farm’s roughly 60 seasonal H-2A workers, according to the UFW. Some of the local workers were pushing to establish their own bargaining unit when ICE raided their work bus on May 2.
In this way, the campaign at Lynn-Ette exemplifies the hurdles facing the union campaign: That visa workers and local workers are often pitted against each other and that, while a union contract can offer protection against workplace abuse, it offers less protection from ICE. I asked UFW leadership about this. “Solidarity between seasonal guest workers and year-round undocumented workers is not just possible — it’s necessary,” Elenes writes in an email. After the May 2 raid, the UFW helped organize protests outside the ICE facility in Batavia and coordinated lawyers for the arrested workers, three of whom have since been released on bail. (At least five workers have already been deported, according to the UFW, while the rest remain in ICE custody.)
While ICE raids on farms highlight the vulnerability of farmworkers, they also reveal the food system’s utter dependence on these workers — and hence their “immense latent power,” as Elenes puts it.
For farmworkers, the challenge now is to turn that dependence into leverage to win a more just food system.
Neither Wafler, nor Cahoon, nor Lynn-Ette responded to requests for comment.
Joseph Bullington grew up in the Smith River watershed near White Sulphur Springs, Montana. He is the editor of Rural America In These Times.
