A Madras, Oregon, resident was awarded nearly $208,000 in February after a federal jury found organic vegetable grower Cal Farms violated his rights by hiring foreign workers on H-2A visas instead of him. Virgilio Carvajal, now 61, is a U.S. citizen who sought work at Cal Farms in 2019 and 2020, but the company didn’t hire him.
The H-2A temporary agricultural visa program allows farms to hire foreign workers when they can’t find enough local workers to fill jobs. But employers first have to swear that they’ve tried to hire U.S. workers and were not able to.
Michael Dale, one of Carvajal’s three attorneys with the Northwest Workers’ Justice Project, says workers who come to the United States through the H-2A program are vulnerable to exploitative working conditions because the visas are linked to a specific employer, meaning that if they are fired or quit that job, they have to leave the country.
“They get young workers, they get male workers, they get folks that will basically work until they drop because they want to be able to come back into the country for future work,” Dale told the Labor Press. Cal Farms claimed it didn’t hire Carvajal in 2019 because he worked for the farm in 2008 but left part way through the season, Dale said. A state employee responsible for ensuring fair treatment of agricultural workers (known as a monitor advocate) intervened and Cal Farms agreed to interview Carvajal. Cal Farms then told Carvajal they’d contact him with a start date within a week or so, but did not contact him until more than six weeks later, well after H-2A workers had started. By then, Carvajal had already found another job. Carvajal applied at Cal Farms again in 2020 but the farm rejected him because he had not followed through with the job in 2019.
The jury awarded Carvajal $17,712 in lost wages and $190,000 for emotional distress. Carvajal, who became a U.S. citizen in 2013, is the sole breadwinner for his family of eight and worked hard to send his older children to college, Dale said.
“He feels very vindicated, and like his faith in the American system of law was justified,” Dale said.
Dale said outcomes like Carvajal’s are uncommon, but problems in the H-2A system are common among both U.S. and migrant workers.
“The program is not sufficiently monitored to assure that U.S. workers — and as far as that goes, the H-2A workers — receive what they’re supposed to,” Dale said.
