New York Growers Are Fighting Farmworkers’ Right to Organize
A lawsuit filed by New York growers challenges the right of farmworkers on H-2A visas to unionize. Win or lose, the lawsuit is posing an obstacle to the state’s farmworkers, who only won the right to collectively bargain in 2019.
Farmworkers at Kurt Weiss Greenhouses Inc. in Center Moriches, New York, on March 5, 2020. (John Paraskevas / Newsday RM via Getty Images)
When Orlando Grant and his four coworkers arrived at the Cahoon Farms orchard where they had been assigned to pick apples early one morning last fall, they noticed something strange. Many of the apples on the trees in their turf were smaller than the Wolcott, New York, farm’s minimum standard for what it brings to market. A video Grant filmed that day shows the crew of farmworkers venting their frustration, worried that they won’t meet the productivity expectations to which Cahoon holds them.
“Nothing here to pick,” a worker in the video announces. “And at the end of the day, [management] says that we [haven’t] met the quota, so that’s what they’re using against us.”
Grant told me that when the crew raised the issue with the orchard manager, he told them not to worry and that they should take their time. The workers suspected that they were being set up to fail.
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