Black farmworkers paid less than white foreign laborers at Mississippi farm, suit says

Six Black farmworkers in Mississippi say their former employer, Pitts Farms Partnership, recruited white workers from South Africa to do the same jobs they were doing for higher pay, according to a lawsuit.

The suit, filed on Wednesday in U.S. district court in Greenville, Mississippi, states that the farm applied to the government to bring white workers from South Africa to the U.S. under a foreign agricultural worker H-2A visa program, claiming it could not find qualified workers locally.

The lawsuit also alleges that the farm violated the terms of that visa program by paying those workers up to $4.50 more per hour than the Black ones, as the program requires foreign workers and domestic workers to be paid equally.

The six farmworkers are represented by lawyers from the Mississippi Center for Justice and Southern Migrant Legal Services.

Pitts Farms Partnership farms several thousand acres in and near Sunflower County in the Mississippi Delta, a county that’s predominantly Black, the lawsuit said. The farm has historically had a majority Black workforce, but that population began to dwindle in 2014 when the farm began applying for and hiring white workers from South Africa, the suit says.

Pitts Farms Partnership did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit added that South Africa is a predominantly Black country and that less than 8% of South Africans are white, but none of the workers hired by the farm were Black South Africans.

Four of the plaintiffs — Wesley Reed, Gregory Strong, Richard Strong and Andrew Johnson — were hired to do seasonal agricultural work on the farm from February to November and were paid $7.25 per hour during the week and $8.25 per hour on weekends. Reed and Johnson both worked for the farm for 19 years, and Richard Strong and Gregory Strong both worked there for 24 years.

The other two plaintiffs, Stacy Griffin and James Simpson, drove trucks for the farm and were paid $9 per hour, the lawsuit said. Griffin and Simpson both worked there for about seven years.

In comparison, white workers from South Africa were paid $9.87 per hour in 2014. That rate increased yearly, going up to $11.83 per hour by 2020, the lawsuit states.

“The H-2A program allows American farmers to supplement labor shortages by hiring foreign labor when no U.S. workers are available,” one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Amal Bouhabib of Southern Migrant Legal Services, said in a news release. “It does not allow farmers to pay their American workforce less than the foreign workers, or to replace willing and able U.S. workers.”

Although the six farmworkers were retained by the farm after the white H-2A workers were hired, they were asked to train the new workers despite continuing to make less money than them, the lawsuit said.

The farm also hired a supervisor who had the authority to hire or fire workers and to assign job duties.

“This supervisor was always white,” the lawsuit said. “Occasionally, the supervisor used racial slurs, including the n-word. Pitt’s Farms was informed about the supervisor’s use of racial slurs and did nothing.”

The lawsuit alleges that the farm violated the federal Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act by paying foreign workers more than domestic workers and making greater efforts to recruit foreign workers than it did to hire domestic ones. The lawsuit also alleges that the farm violated the Civil Rights Act of 1866 by seeking out white workers over Black ones and by not paying Black and white workers equally.

Ty Pinkins of the Mississippi Center for Justice said in the news release that “with the unemployment rate in the Delta hovering at around 10 percent, it is unacceptable and unlawful that local farmers are looking to hire foreign labor before people in their own communities.”

“The case also reflects our nation’s deep, ugly history of exploiting Black labor,” Pinkins said. “For too long, powerful businesses have abused Black Americans for profit.”

This story was originally published September 10, 2021 at 7:42 PM with the headline "Black farmworkers paid less than white foreign laborers at Mississippi farm, suit says."