The struggle to save the 66-year-old seasonal US-Jamaica Farm Work Programme is on in earnest, given the supportive US Government’s imposition in late 2010, through the departments of labour and homeland security, of new regulatory barriers to hiring Jamaican migrant workers, which will slow their admission into the United States and deny them their comprehensive benefits.

In effect, the new regulations will seriously undermine the programme’s future because they demand that all future costs associated with Jamaican migrant workers seeking employment in the programme must be borne exclusively by growers and employers in the USA.

In their reaction, Jamaican officials question the raison d’être of the new regulations.

They feel that the decision to stop the practice of Jamaican workers’ employment deductions by the Government of Jamaica is wrongly influenced by the US Government’s imbalanced perception that the programme’s existing non-profit liaison service – the Jamaica Central Labour Organisation (JCLO) – is in effect a recruitment organisation for our migrant farm workers, buttressed by a debt-stressed Government that is busy charging them recruitment facilitation fees to finding them jobs.

It is not entirely clear how US officialdom has come to such a perception because the facts have not changed whereby employers pay to JCLO three payroll deductions, including a four per cent administrative fee, a social security fee and a health insurance fee. The administrative fee serves to defray all costs attached to the programme incurred by the Jamaican Government.

Additionally, workers are required, via payroll deductions throughout their contract period, to contribute 16 per cent (in the case of hotel workers), and 20 per cent (for farm workers), of their total earnings to a bona fide savings plan, the proceeds from which they receive on a timely basis on their return to Jamaica, because of the temptation of our farm workers to be profligate in spending their earnings overseas to the detriment of their families in Jamaica. Such savings cum remittances, for both Canada and the USA, represent US$20 million, or one-fifth of the total earnings for the contract period – repatriated to Jamaica annually.

Clearly, without the JCLO liaison service, our farm workers would be exposed to widespread abuse in their migrant farm worker experience, very similar to workers from the Philippines and Mexico whose governments do not maintain a liaison service. Ours, quite admirably, function to further the mutual interests of both growers and employers, act as a useful intermediary, promote employment standards, providing support services, advising workers of employment conditions and welfare benefits, ensuring that workers and employers adhere to the terms and conditions of employment, assisting in the resolution of work and domestic disputes, ensuring that workers receive proper medical attention, and monitoring the employer’s payroll documentation, among other duties.

It doesn’t take much to appreciate, then, that without this kind of strategic intervention our farm work programme would have collapsed long ago under the cumulative weight of the abuse of our workers and their likely drift into penury, against the background of severely diminished opportunities for employment by growers and other employers. Before the new regulations came into effect, Jamaican workers arrived in the USA with their JCLO-administered benefits intact; but starting this year, they will no longer receive these benefits.

What is unfortunate about the USA’s latest regulations vis-à-vis the programme, is that it tends to lend added fuel to the desire of critics in both the US and Canada, who wish to see its demise for various reasons. Some critics represent special interest groups that seek to effect the appropriation of our farm workers into unions as cannon fodder for their own selfish political ends, while others, operating on the mistaken assumption that our migrant farm workers displace local agricultural labour, set about to misrepresent the strategic importance of the JCLO liaison service in the same way it is reported the US Government is doing.

Criticism of the programme also comes wrapped in academic veneer, much like the study published a little over a month ago in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, which Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Labour Alvin McIntosh described as a phantom study. It makes the sensational claim that some 100 Jamaican farm workers in Canada are wilfully alienated by their employers – despite the evidence adduced above – from proper protection for safety, health care and workers’ compensation. The study also implied that this spectre of abuse and exploitation was occurring with the complicity of the Jamaican Government!

But despite attempts to deprive the programme of a future, it remains a study in national institutional endurance. For the men (and lately women) who participate in it are outstanding ambassadors for Jamaica – drawn literally from the ancestral cane-piece – who for several generations carry in their sinewed arms and sturdy hearts the hopes and aspirations of their families and communities while toiling overseas, and contributing significantly to the gross domestic product of the “little piece of rock” they call home. Through their collective efforts, children are able to achieve educational attainment at all levels contributing to our stock of professional human resource, decent housing is provided for thousands of families, and entire communities enriched.

Given this background, it’s unlikely the programme will crumble anytime soon. It has experienced considerable expansion since the end of the Second World War, when it accommodated some 20,000 Jamaican men annually in the cutting of sugar cane. At present, expansion in both the USA and Canada – where no employer regulation difficulties exist – encompasses mushroom cultivation, apple picking, greenhouse production of tomatoes, landscaping, the hospitality industry, food packaging, and more.

Happily, confidence in the structure and transparency of the programme was forcibly demonstrated recently by the House of Representatives in the state of Vermont which passed a resolution (H.R.10) strongly emphasising the importance of Jamaican farm workers to that state’s agricultural economy by pointing to their contribution in realising an annual fresh apple crop alone valued at US$12-15 million annually with value-added products turning in a cash value annually of US$25-30 million.

Thousands of our farm workers will readily attest to nervousness in participating in the Programme if there is no liaison service to protect their interests, and this must be of considerable concern to the Jamaican Government. This, nevertheless, is a good basis on which to begin the discussion to convince the Government of the USA to modify, if not rescind, the latest regulations.

Everton Pryce is a former senior adviser in the Ministry of Labour, Social Security and Sport.

epryce9@gmail.com