photos from the edge 42 - A NEW SYSTEM OF LABOR THREATENS FARMWORKER POWER
By David Bacon
Barn Raiser, 9/17/26
https://barnraisingmedia.com/a-new-system-of-labor-upends-farmworker-protections/
Farmworkers began harvesting watermelons as soon as there was enough light to see, in a field near Arvin, California, in the San Joaquin Valley. The first people at work in this field are the cutters, who go down the rows looking for ripe melons. When they find one, they cut the vine and lift it above the leaves. Antonio Torrez, works as part of a three-person team.
Harvesting watermelons is brutally heavy work, done in extreme heat, but so coordinated that it’s almost a dance. First into a field come the cutters. They sever the vine and free each ripe melon from the plant, resting it on the leaves above the furrow.
Then come the tossers. A tractor pulls a flatbed trailer carrying giant boxes down the rows. On each side are three workers. The outside man lifts a big melon off the ground and, with apparent ease, tosses it to the man in the middle. That worker catches it and at the same time picks up a melon at his feet, tossing both to the person on the inside. That third worker has to catch the flying melons while picking from his own row. He lifts them into the waiting hands of the loader on the trailer above, who catches them as they come, usually two at a time. Then the loader twists and carefully lays them into a waiting bin.
The dance is performed (there is no other word for it) swiftly, but no one drops any of the giant fruits, which can weigh anywhere between 15 to 25 pounds. The tossers swing back and forth, catching and lifting and tossing. They’re almost running as they move down the rows. In the course of a day, they rotate positions so that each worker eventually does the harder and easier jobs in turn. They work so fast they’re never more than a day, two at most, in one place.
Behind the cutters, Jose Chavez and Martin Mendoza are part of a crew of loaders. They pick up the melons, often two at a time, and hand or toss them to men on the trailer, who put them into bins.
Until recently, this kind of labor gave workers the ability to bargain, and win, better wages and protections. But the rise of temporary farmworker visas combined with an increasingly mechanical harvesting process mean big change
The crew I met at the peak of one summer’s heat was working in the south end of the San Joaquin Valley, not far from Arvin. At 5:30 that morning, as the sun came up, workers’ cars already lined the valley’s rural roads and highways, next to field after field. Even before daybreak, people were streaming from their vehicles into the rows and vines. By starting early, they could get seven or eight hours in before the heat reached its peak.
Juan Hernandez picks up a watermelon as Jose Chavez gets ready to catch it. Meanwhile Martin Mendoza tosses two melons to Jose Moreno on the trailer.
It was already over 80 degrees, and by midafternoon the temperature would top 114. The southern San Joaquin Valley is a desert-like pan between the high Sierras and the Pacific Coast ranges, whose rivers have been diverted into giant irrigation projects. High temperatures are the norm. In 1933 the thermometer reached 116 degrees on July 27. The high in July 2021 was 115.
I had been looking for watermelon tossers to photograph, and Fausto Sanchez, the community worker for California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), had given me the coordinates for a field where he’d seen them the day before. When I was a United Farm Worker (UFW) organizer in the 1970s, finding fields often meant following obscure instructions based on landmarks and imagined estimates of distance. Guidance by reading coordinates on an iPhone was a new experience. But it worked, kind of, and after failing to locate two fields I finally found the crew in a third.
Going into the field to take the pictures, I knew I didn’t need to ask permission from a supervisor. Watermelon crews work without a foreman, so I just needed their agreement to photograph them. These workers take pride in their ability, and willingness, to do this heavy labor in ferocious heat, day after day. They were glad to show a white guy with a camera what they could do.
On the trailer Marcos Mascareno catches two watermelons at a time, puts them (without bruising them) into the bins and gets ready for the next toss.
I’ve photographed such crews for decades. You don’t have much time to shoot in the middle of a field. People are working and don’t want to stop, especially if, like the melon throwers, they’re working on a piece rate. If you want pictures of people while they’re working, you do it on the run. You learn to walk backwards and look and talk and shoot, all at the same time. That in itself earns you respect.
So in this melon field I was half running and half walking backwards in the mud and vines, with a worker in front of me, sort of interested, but I’m sure thinking, “What a pain in the ass this guy is. I hope he doesn’t get in the way.” They were very polite though. No one ever said, “Get the hell out of my way.”
I’ve admired watermelon harvesters since my union days. They’re strong and skilled; the melons are heavy, yet they throw them in precise coordination. A given crew will travel together for months, heading north from fields near the Mexican border through California, Oregon and Washington as the advancing heat ripens the fruit. In the winter, most watermelon workers live in the border towns of Mexicali and Calexico in the Imperial Valley, and the twin cities of San Luis in Arizona and San Luis Rio Colorado in Sonora. A few live in the Coachella Valley, an hour north of the border. During the harvest season they’re on the road and don’t see their families until the picking is over and they return home.
The tractor and crew head down the field.
Some crews function as a collective and return to the same fields and growers year after year, bargaining with the grower directly. In previous years, the crew method of bargaining, and their control of the speed of the work, gave them a lot of leverage and resulted in better pay. Watermelon crews get paid as a group, $150 for each trailer. The trailer in this field held 16 full bins, for a total of perhaps 500 watermelons. They divide the money evenly, which worked out to about $20 per person for each trailer. They can load 7-8 trailers before it gets too hot for this heavy exertion.
Other farmworkers also have used their crew organization to get better wages through control over the work. Lettuce cutters had a similar power and were organized in what were called “ground crews” of 30-40 workers divided into trios: two cutting and one packing boxes. They could control the amount of lettuce they would cut in a day and would slow down or even stop to get the piece rate increased. In earlier decades, Filipino crews of grape pickers would also negotiate with growers as a group, headed by their own crew boss. The 1965 grape strike began when those crews struck, first in Coachella and then in Delano.
Today, however, this traditional way of working and bargaining is disappearing. The Filipino crews are now history. Ground crews are disappearing too, and lettuce is harvested these days by workers behind a lettuce machine that controls the work speed, making collective action harder. Lechugeros are no longer always among the best paid in farm labor, as they were before.
Each trailer carries an Igloo cooler with water. When the workers stop for a break they get a drink. Armando Miranda drinks straight from the spigot. California regulations require employers to provide one quart of fresh water per worker per hour of labor.
To see if the same process was changing the work of melon harvesters, I began driving through the San Joaquin Valley, searching for crews, particularly those recruited to work under the H-2A visa program, which allows employers to bring workers from abroad, who labor under exploitative conditions for up to 10 months, after which they have to leave the country. In the end, I found several. Often the foremen were young men in the H-2A program themselves.
The crews saw no problem with me taking photographs. They talked easily about their jobs, which they’d tried hard to get when they were recruited in Mexico.
On one ranch near Firebaugh, I recognized the name on the boxes of melons the workers were picking. King Fisher was a play on words by the Fisher family, whose Fisher Ranch is one of the largest growers in the Palo Verde Valley. In the 1970s, I was sent to that desert oasis on the Colorado River by the UFW, to help melon workers organize a union. The Fishers employed more workers on more acres there than any other grower.
The loading crew often works faster than the cutters can cut, and stop for a break when they catch up to them. Juan Hernandez wipes the sweat from his eyes as he pauses for a minute or two.
In the Firebaugh field, I found a crew of farmworkers on H-2A visas, harvesting melons early in the morning. Their recruiter, Rancho Nuevo Harvesting, contracts crews of H-2A workers for growers throughout California. The Fisher family had hired Rancho Nuevo Harvesting to harvest the field.
Under state and federal law, employers must provide the workers with housing. In 2023, acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su won a judgement against Rancho Nuevo for providing unsafe housing, underpaying workers and supplying them with spoiled food, forcing the contractor to pay over $1 million in back wages and penalties.
The temperature in Firebaugh at 9:00 in the morning was over 95 degrees. It would reach 110 that afternoon. The workers in the field were Cora indigenous people (náayerite in their language), recruited from the Mexican state of Nayarit. It was only their second day of work in the U.S. and they were not yet accustomed to the heat. The náayerite live in a mountainous region where the climate is cool, often even cold. According to a man cutting melons next to the machine, one worker began to bleed from his nose the day before, on his first day working in the fierce heat.
An H-2A worker tosses a melon onto the conveyor belt.
As they moved through the field they cut the melons from the vines and tossed them onto a conveyor belt leading to a platform pulled behind a tractor. There, other workers packed the melons into boxes. This system is replacing the earlier system, in which workers tossed, caught and packed melons with their hands. The conveyor belt and the loader assembly are parts of a mechanized system, the Melonator, intended to supplant much of hand labor in melon harvesting.
Growers, especially the largest corporate ones, don’t like the old system. It gives workers too much control, which the workers use to win better wages. Today some autonomous crews still cut and toss watermelons, but for other melons this new system of machines and H-2A workers is becoming almost universal.
Grower Bart Fisher says that when an additional assembly is added to replace the pickers themselves, the machine will only need seven people to do a job that now requires 30 people in the H-2A crew. He has developed melon varieties that stand up to machine harvesting. Nevertheless, even Hank Giclas, senior vice president for science and technology at the Western Growers Association, regrets the disappearance of the old system. “These workers are skilled,” he says, “and the product is a delicate product.”
Farmworkers brought to the U.S. in the H-2A visa program harvest melons early in the morning in a field near Firebaugh, in the San Joaquin Valley. They cut the melons from the vines, ad toss them onto a conveyor belt that leads to a platform where other workers pack the melons into boxes.
According to Fisher, a shortage of farmworkers is driving up labor costs, and California law, fought for by the UFW now requires that growers pay overtime after 40 hours. “We’re marching toward an 8-hour workday and $15 an hour. It’s just going to make us noncompetitive,” he told the Desert Sun in 2018.
As the pandemic was well into its second year, Roberto de la Rosa called me from Porterville in the southern San Joaquin Valley. Roberto, a human rights lawyer and board president of CRLA, was helping a group of H-2A guestworkers who’d been cheated of their pay by a labor contractor.
I talked with a leader of this group who’d confronted their stubborn crew boss, who he knew would never hire him again. Like all H-2A workers, he was dependent on the wages he could earn in U.S. fields—low by U.S. standards, but a lot higher than farmworker pay in Mexico. He wanted to denounce what had happened to him, but also to come back to work in the U.S. the following year. He feared other labor recruiters would blacklist him as a protester and asked me not to use his real name. “All the people I work with are afraid of reprisals if we speak up,” he told me.
Workers on the machine pack melons into boxes with the “KingFisher” label. The label marks produce from the ranches of the Fisher family, one of California’s largest melon growers.
I’ll call him Eduardo. In 2020, he arrived in the San Joaquin Valley to pick oranges, tangerines and lemons for Porterville Citrus, a large grower. He was hired in Veracruz, Mexico, by a recruiter for Fresh Harvest, another labor contractor that brings thousands of workers to the U.S. every year under the H-2A visa program. Fresh Harvest also has a record of labor violations and paid $1 million to farmworkers in a case brought by CRLA in 2018 over unpaid travel time.
About 2 million farmworkers labor in U.S. fields. In 2025, the Department of Labor gave growers certifications for 398,258 H-2A workers, or about a fifth of the entire U.S. farm labor workforce. That’s a fourfold increase from 98,813 in 2012. Almost all are young men. Those who can’t work fast enough, or who protest, can be fired at any time and sent back. “We all come from marginalized communities in Mexico where there’s no work,” Eduardo explained. “It’s easy for the company to take advantage of our need.”
Federal regulations establish a minimum wage for H-2A workers. In the fall of 2025, the Trump administration cut the mandatory minimum for H-2A workers in California from $19.97 an hour to $16.59. Since the state’s minimum wage is now $16.90 an hour, the federal wage would be illegal and will therefore default to the state minimum.
The H-2A workers at the Travelodge Motel get their meals at the taco truck in the motel parking lot.
The UFW sued, and at the end of August, U.S. District Judge Kirk E. Sherriff in Fresno ruled that the federal wage was illegal because the Department of Labor didn’t “ensure that the hiring of H-2A workers will not ‘adversely affect’ U.S. farmworkers’ wages.” Nevertheless, the probably illegal wage will remain in effect while the Department of Labor formulates a new one. Despite that, the ruling is based on the obvious fact that the wage paid H-2A workers in effect functions as a ceiling on the wages of all farmworkers, who face replacement if they’re not willing to work for it.
Many H-2A workers report not being paid even what they were promised, or what the law requires. What makes the program attractive to growers is that workers do not have any ability to negotiate their labor contracts. Their living environment and mobility are restricted, and they face the loss of their job and visa if they protest.
“We were being paid by the hour, but they put production quotas on us and continually demanded more,” Eduardo told me. “They said we’d be fired and put on a blacklist if we didn’t meet the quota. In the oranges, we had to fill a bin every hour. If there was a lot of fruit in the trees, we had to fill it every 45 minutes, or even every half hour.” In his crew of 45 pickers, eight were fired in six months for not meeting the quota. “It was completely exhausting. The food the company gave us wasn’t enough and we were tired all the time.”
Some rooms in the Palm Tree Inn have notices on the windows saying they've been decontaminated and/or disinfected "against a multitude of virus and bacteria to specifically include COVID-19."
Trump’s wage cut of over $3 an hour comes on top of other complaints that H-2A workers have had, especially about their housing. Historically, the regulations governing the H-2A program required growers to furnish housing to workers without charge. Last year, however, the Trump administration issued a new rule, now being challenged in court, that would allow growers to charge workers $3 an hour for housing, on top of its mandated pay cut. According to the U.S. Department of Labor memo, that would bring the hourly wage for H-2A workers in California down to $13.52, even more illegal should growers implement it.
In 2020 Eduardo was housed, along with several hundred other H-2A workers, at the Palm Tree Inn, a rundown motel by the freeway in Porterville. “Some of us were living 3-4 people in one room,” he said, “and there were rooms with as many as 8 or 10. In the van or bus going to and from work we were crowded like sardines. During the pandemic we were very worried about it.”
According to Mari Perez and Art Rodriguez, organizers for the Central Valley Empowerment Alliance, when they went to the Palm Tree Inn to talk with Eduardo and other protesting workers, Fresh Harvest guards threw them off the property. Other farmworker advocacy organizations also charge that labor contractors routinely refuse public access to motel residences for H-2A workers.
After the controversy over unpaid wages the motel appeared vacant. The H-2A farmworkers working for Porterville Citrus were housed there.
The Palm Tree Inn is an old motel. It received terrible reviews on Yelp until Fresh Harvest took over its rooms to house its H-2A crews. I visited the Palm Tree Inn after the workers left, a dilapidated two-story building on two sides of a blistering hot asphalt parking lot. After the controversy over unpaid wages, and the expiration of the contracts for the last workers, the motel appeared vacant. I couldn’t get into the locked rooms. The concrete stairways and outside walkways were crumbling.
Most disturbing was the notice posted in several windows, saying the rooms had been decontaminated and/or disinfected. The Material Safety Data Sheet said the chemical used was Aqua Systems’ Quat Sanitizer II, “a quaternary ammonium product proven to be effective for sanitizing work areas and equipment against a multitude of virus and bacteria, to specifically include COVID-19.”
During the pandemic, in little towns like Huron and Los Banos, growers have taken over motels like the Palm Tree Inn, hastily assembling steel bunk bed frames so that each room can house four or six workers, sometimes more. While proximity increased the danger of Covid infection, labor contractors seemed oblivious. Perhaps they were making so much money from their mushrooming labor contracts that the risk was worth ignoring, at least for them.
Farmworkers brought to the U.S. in the H-2A visa program are housed by the labor contractor Jim Hernandez at the Travelodge Motel in Los Banos, in the San Joaquin Valley. Jose Diaz Solano is welding bunk bed frames so the contractor can increase the number of workers sleeping in each motel room from 3 to 4.
Corporate agriculture is increasingly dependent on the explosive growth of this program, ignoring the cost in lost jobs to local farmworkers, and the toll on the H-2A workers themselves. The pandemic highlighted that cost. Cynthia Rice, former litigation director for CRLA, points to the isolation of the workers and the temporary nature of their presence in the U.S. as root causes of their vulnerability. “Our agricultural industry is sustained by cross border labor—we have to acknowledge that,” she says. “But these workers have only a quasi-legal status, controlled by growers.”
Where the self-organizing of watermelon crews and lettuce cutters gave them some degree of power to counter grower control, they are losing it to this exploitative new labor system.
H-2A workers for Rancho Nuevo Harvesting on the Fisher ranch.
The temperature at the time, about 9:00 in the morning, was over 95 degrees.
The conveyor belt and the loader assembly are parts of a mechanized system the Melonator. As the machine moves through the field, at the end of the conveyor belt the melons are loaded into a large hopper on a trailer dragged by a tractor.
