But Both Parties Are the Same…..

I hardly need to make fun of these folks around here, but I’ve been going at it on Twitter with the kind of leftist idiots who are outraged that Republicans are endorsing Harris. This just means both parties are the same derp, as opposed to, you know, wanting to engage in a political campaign that wins and gives permission for the few non-fascist Republicans to vote for the Democrats. It’s so annoying, especially because these people so often claim to care about workers but actually have no willingness to discuss how Democrats are now more pro-worker than they’ve been since at least the Johnson administration if not Roosevelt and that this election really matters because the next Secretary of Labor will be someone like Julie Su or someone like Eugene Scalia and I guarantee you the parties are not the same here…

In any case, this is a good discussion of what the Biden administration has done for farm labor and how important it is for center these issues in our conversations about the election of Harris.

In her five years as an attorney for the U.S. Department of Labor, Shelly Anand litigated cases against companies violating workplace safety protections, including in the food industry. Then, at the end of 2020, Anand helped launch Sur Legal, a worker-rights nonprofit focused on the Deep South—so she was well-positioned to help when a liquid nitrogen leak in January 2021 killed six workers at Foundation Food Group in Gainesville, Georgia.

“We knew OSHA was going to show up; we knew a lot of different law enforcement agencies were going to show up; and we knew that the workers were going to be undocumented, intimidated, and terrified,” she said.

Sur Legal hosted a Facebook Live gathering to educate workers on their rights and began talking directly to individuals who worked at the plant, many of whom had witnessed the incident and were now traumatized. Ultimately, Anand and her colleagues were able to help about two dozen workers from the plant access what she calls a “life-changing” pathway: they were temporarily granted protected status so that they could help federal investigators identify conditions that might have contributed to the incident—which ultimately represented violations of the law.

In the past, federal agencies have occasionally granted what they call “deferred action for labor disputes” at their own discretion. However, in January 2023, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) formalized the process for the first time to encourage undocumented workers, who might otherwise stay silent due to fear of deportation, to report violations of labor laws on the job.

“It came out of DHS, but we look at it as a labor and a worker-rights policy,” said Jessie Hahn, a senior labor and employment policy attorney at the National Immigration Law Center (NILC). “It’s very much based on the perspective that the Biden administration has, about how best to enforce labor and employment laws and what is going to facilitate that.”

Between January 2023 and August 2024, according to DHS, more than 6,000 workers—many working in the food system—have been granted this temporary protection, which can last up to four years. They include the Georgia poultry workers, guest workers picking strawberries in Florida fields, and tortilla factory workers in Chicago, among others.

However, as the presidential election approaches, it’s one of several immigration policies that are at risk—and that would reshape the legal landscape for food and farm workers.

….

People close to the issue told Civil Eats that, given the unspoken reality of how deeply farms and food businesses rely on undocumented workers, they’re more worried about worker abuse increasing under Trump’s leadership than about mass deportations.

It’s real lives on the line here:

Advocates expect Harris to support the H-2A rule changes, since they came out of the Biden administration. As a senator, she also introduced a bill that would have extended minimum wage and overtime protections to farmworkers.

On the other side, while Trump has not mentioned this H-2A rule since it was proposed, Republican lawmakers have been pushing back on many of its provisions. At the end of August, a federal judge sided with 17 Republican-led states in a lawsuit brought against the Department of Labor, blocking the Biden administration from implementing the provisions.

And at the end of Trump’s presidency, his administration published a different H-2A rule, which drew strong opposition from farm labor groups because it weakened worker protections. At the time, his Department of Labor said the rule would “streamline and simplify the H-2A application process, strengthen protections for U.S. and foreign workers, and ease unnecessary burdens on employers.”

The political ping-pong over the H-2A rules shows how, since immigration is so politicized, even small changes to labor policies that primarily impact immigrant workers are often the result of years of back-and-forth that span multiple presidential administrations.

Among other things, and this is true of all labor issues, we need multiple terms of Democrats just to consolidate gains because of the ping-pong nature of governance between the two parties.