Growers are just beginning to bring this year’s wave of contracted laborers into Washington State for the coming season to pick apples, cherries and other fruit. The laborers are arriving to just-relaxed COVID-19 health and safety requirements for farmworkers, courtesy of a Superior Court judge in Yakima County, the heart of the state’s apple country.
Meanwhile a vote nears in the U.S. Senate that would lead to the massive expansion of the H2-A guest worker program, used by growers across the country to recruit these laborers.
In 2020, despite the pandemic, growers and labor contractors brought 28,959 workers, almost all from Mexico, to work in Washington’s fields and orchards, a 10 percent increase over the previous year. Nationally the number of H2-A workers brought to the U.S. annually has mushroomed from 79,011 to 275,430 in a decade.
COVID-19 outbreaks struck Washington’s guest worker barracks in April, starting with 36 laborers in a Stemilt Growers housing unit in East Wenatchee. Within months eight other clusters were found, and by mid-May rural Yakima County had 2,186 cases – 122 were reported on May 15 alone – and 73 people were dead.
With 455 infections per 100,000 residents, the county had the highest COVID-19 rate on the West Coast. Then Juan Carlos Santiago Rincon, a Mexican H2-A worker, died in a Gebbers Farms barracks in July. A second death followed a week later – a 63-year old Jamaican farmer, Earl Edwards, who had been coming to Washington State as an H2-A worker for several years.
BELLINGHAM, WA – Farm workers and their supporters march to protest the H2-A guest worker program and the death of Honesto Silva, a guest worker, on the anniversary of his death two years earlier. The march was organized by Community2Community and the new union for Washington farm workers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia.
MATTAWA, WA – A King Fuji striker demands no reprisals and no blacklisting because of their job action. Photo by Edgar Franks.
WAPATO, WA – Dorian Lopez, an H2A guest worker from Mexico, lives in barracks in central Washington built to house contract workers brought to the U.S. by growers under the H2A visa program. These barracks belong to the Green Acres company.
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