A farmworker walks up the stairs of housing provided by T. Bell Detasseling in Conesville, Iowa in July 2022. The building, which can house hundreds of workers, used to be Conesville’s high school in the 1950s. (Sky Chadde/Investigate Midwest)
CONESVILLE, Iowa — The deductions frustrated him.
“You earn money faster” in the U.S. than in Mexico, the man said in Spanish. But the deductions in every paycheck slowed his earnings, and he and his family needed every dollar. A few weeks working in Iowa cornfields, with a temporary labor visa, helped him cover his expenses back home. Still, “they discount us a lot,” he said.
One was a daily, and vexing, laundry fee. His employer distributed mesh bags for dirty clothes, pledging to clean — for a price — the belongings of the hundreds of visa workers it hired. But “the returned clothes are still dirty,” the man said. The total fee amount equaled a couple weeks’ worth of groceries for a Mexican family.
The fee could be unlawful. Federal regulations require employers to let workers know of any payroll deductions in writing: “Deductions that are not disclosed in the contract are prohibited,” policy documents on the guest visa program state. But the fee is not included in a worker contract Investigate Midwest obtained. Under charges related to housing, which includes laundry, the contract reads, “no cost to worker.”
The employer, a labor contractor named T. Bell Detasseling, has long-standing business ties with the most dominant player in the U.S. corn industry, Corteva Agriscience. Corteva has said it takes labor abuses in its supply chain seriously. But, since it first hired T. Bell more than a decade ago, the contractor has repeatedly run afoul of federal labor laws. Since 2009, T. Bell has been investigated four times, revealing more than a thousand violations.
The relationship demonstrates how the massively profitable corn industry can rely on unscrupulous middlemen to staff their fields — at the expense of poorly paid workers.
By using labor contractors, Corteva and its industry peers can sidestep the legal obligation to ensure adequate worker wages, experts and advocates said.
“The big picture is very few of these workers get paid what they’re owed,” said Greg Schell, a longtime farmworker advocate and attorney based in Florida. “It’s because the big seed companies refuse to take responsibility.”
Corteva declined an interview request and did not respond to detailed questions. In an environmental, social and governance, or ESG, document, which companies use to detail how they manage risks, Corteva said it had “zero tolerance” for human rights violations by its suppliers. It added, “While Corteva has an important role to play in these issues, risks may occur within the supply chain.”
In an email, T. Bell said it was company policy to “not discuss our customer relationships or any past or current investigations.” It originally said its role as a labor contractor could not be adequately captured in a news story.
After some pressing, the company argued it was allowed to charge for laundry “as long as we do not make a profit.” This echoed language a federal investigator told T. Bell’s lawyer following an investigation. The U.S. Department of Labor did not respond to a direct question about whether this is accurate. H-2A employers are allowed to make payroll deductions, if they are disclosed, but generally housing costs, which includes laundry, are supposed to be free to workers. In 2023, the labor department fined a California employer about $18,000 for laundry fees, which the agency termed “illegal deductions by law.”
Investigate Midwest presented T. Bell with redacted copies of the paystubs it obtained and a copy of the worker contract. T. Bell did not deny or challenge the records’ authenticity.
“Seasonal agricultural labor, the H-2A visa program and Department of Labor regulations are complex issues,” T. Bell said in its statement to Investigate Midwest. “We work very hard to make sure we are compliant with all industry guidelines and we always cooperate with any regulators. We take great pride in the work we do and the role we play in the ag economy, which is very important to Iowa.”
This story is based on thousands of pages of federal and state records, internal T. Bell documents and several interviews with two longtime T. Bell employees. Both requested anonymity to protect future employment possibilities. Visa workers who complain about one employer are often blacklisted and not hired or recruited by others.
Industry turns to contractors for detasseling work
Corteva is the former agriculture division of DowDuPont. In 2019, the chemical behemoth was divided into three separate companies. Instantly, Corteva controlled about 40 percent of the corn market, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture research. As 2023 ended, Corteva reported more than $3 billion in profit.
Corteva operates in several markets, but one of its main businesses is producing genetically modified, commercially successful varieties of corn seed. A staple in American diets and vehicles, corn is used to produce soft drinks, snacks and ethanol. First, though, Corteva needs workers to “detassel,” or remove the flowery tops of cornstalks. For the most part, detasseling — a repetitive process in which workers pull the tassel off many stalks of corn in a row — requires human hands. Enter labor contractors.
In a 2022 ESG report, Corteva said it chooses “to work with business partners who share our commitment to the highest ethical standards.” Contractors must comply with all “applicable laws regarding wages and benefits,” according to its Supplier Code of Conduct. If Corteva is made aware of a contractor falling short, the “business relationship will be terminated.”
The corn industry used to rely on local contractors who hired teenagers to detassel. The labor was thought of as a rite of passage. But the industry has largely moved on to contractors like T. Bell that bring foreign workers to the Midwest. The federal agency requires employers to pay foreign workers much more than minimum wage. But employers save elsewhere: They don’t pay unemployment, Social Security or Medicare taxes.
T. Bell’s run-ins with the U.S. Department of Labor, which oversees the temporary visa program, involve, among other things, its hiring practices. Since 2005, T. Bell has had the third-most employment law violations among all farm labor contractors, according to federal data.
Most stemmed from a 2009 incident. By law, H-2A workers are guaranteed most of their wages. The labor department determined many T. Bell workers didn’t make the guaranteed amount. An investigator calculated a potential fine at more than $2 million, but, because it was the first offense and no “willful factors” could be substantiated, no fine was assessed.
In 2014, Corteva asked T. Bell to staff its cornfields in Michigan, and, the agency found, the contractor illegally hired foreigners over U.S. workers. T. Bell was not fined. In 2019, T. Bell’s owners used a female visa worker as a nanny for their grandchildren. She was not paid for all hours worked. For that and other violations, T. Bell was fined $4,400.
Despite the violations, Corteva continued to hire T. Bell.
Passing oversight of workers’ rights, including adequate wages, to smaller contractors with fewer resources is common in supply chains involving raw materials, said Dorothee Baumann-Pauly, a supply chain researcher at the Geneva Center for Business & Human Rights.
“The lead firms need to understand the specific vulnerabilities” of laborers, she said. “They cannot just outsource the responsibility for taking care of that to lower levels in the supply chain, which of course, have slimmer margins and even more price pressure.”
Recruiting violations
In 2014, a bus deposited a Mexican man in Conesville, a town of 460 in Muscatine County. Surrounded by cornfields, the town had one gas station and one convenience store. T. Bell’s name adorned both. The contractor’s office greeted drivers coming into town. In most places the man looked, he was reminded who controlled whether he continued earning in the U.S.
A warehouse owned by T. Bell Detasseling near Conesville, Iowa, on Thursday, July 21, 2022. (Monica Cordero/Investigate Midwest)
With the other workers, he walked over to an 8,000-square-foot, metal-sided warehouse. After climbing a wooden staircase, he saw row after row of plywood bunk beds with twin mattresses. It could house 400 men. He soon learned the warehouse was nicknamed the “chicken coop.” The industrial-sized fans did little to cool the space in the humid heat, which dragged into nighttime.
When he was recruited in Mexico, the man had never detasseled before, he said. Never had an agriculture job, at all. He owned a business in his hometown, but the Iowa job helped make ends meet, he said. Despite no experience, he was hired. “I arrived and they told me how I had to do it,” he said. “You learn fast.”
By this time, T. Bell was hiring about 800 workers on H-2A, or temporary agricultural labor, visas each year. It was one of the largest H-2A employers in Iowa, and the largest labor contractor focused on detasseling. It contracted with other major corn companies, but it processed hundreds of fields for Pioneer Hi-Bred, which is now owned by Corteva.
Before hiring H-2A workers, T. Bell had to demonstrate to the federal government that there were not enough U.S. residents willing to detassel. It had to prove it was recruiting in the U.S. If U.S. residents were qualified, they had to be hired.
To aid U.S. recruiting, the labor department hosts a website with job listings. State workforce agencies can also refer candidates to agriculture jobs. When hiring, employers must place the same job requirements on U.S. and foreign recruits.
Prior to the 2014 season, Pioneer hired T. Bell to detassel its fields in southern Michigan, the first time the contractor worked outside Iowa. As part of its H-2A application, T. Bell wrote a job listing for U.S. workers, which was then shared with Michigan job centers. The listing raised some eyebrows.
T. Bell requested at least three months of experience detasseling. Because the season is so short — about three weeks — a prospective employee would have had to work at least four summers to meet the requirement. Also, detasseling requires no specialized skills.
Eventually, 62 U.S. residents inquired about the job. At least seven were turned away because they did not have enough experience, according to federal records.
In December 2014, months after the season ended, labor department investigators called T. Bell’s owners, a husband and wife named Tom and Terri Bell. The federal agents had interviewed roughly half of the H-2A workers on the Michigan crew. Most said they had no detasseling experience and all said they figured out how to do it in a day or two.
The Bells denied the workers’ statements. As the conversation ended, the Bells agreed to comply with the law.
Despite concluding T. Bell violated the law, the labor department did not fine T. Bell. To justify not fining the company, according to federal records, the labor department said the citation was made “for future purposes to show willfulness if the violation is found again.”
Years later, the labor department found a reason to be suspicious again.
Iowa’s recruiting platform used sparingly
As the 2019 detasseling season approached, T. Bell requested its regular contingent of hundreds of H-2A workers. Many would detassel about 400 cornfields Pioneer — whose parent company had been renamed Corteva — needed processed.
Like many H-2A employers, T. Bell used a service that submitted the application paperwork to the labor department. The company used an outfit based in North Carolina named National Ag Consulting Inc. Its president, Teresa ward, responded herself to questions the labor department had about T. Bell’s application.
In Iowa, once an employer requests visa labor, the accompanying job listing for U.S. workers is shared with Iowa Workforce Development, the agency overseeing the state’s job centers. The job listing is uploaded onto an agency website named IowaWORKS, which connects job seekers with employers. IWD sent Ward a form letter.
The letter told Ward that “qualified applicants” would be referred to T. Bell through IowaWORKS. She and T. Bell had to monitor the website for U.S. candidates and T. Bell would need to report whether the applicants were hired.
The report needed to include how many U.S. workers applied, their names and their phone number or email address. H-2A employers can only reject U.S. residents for “legal, job-related reasons.” This helped the government determine whether employers had met their recruiting obligations.
That year, a job center referred two U.S. residents to T. Bell, but they weren’t hired. When federal investigators started asking questions, T. Bell said it had never seen the referrals — because it had no IowaWORKS account.
The federal labor department has said employers need to cooperate with agencies like IWD. But a spokesman for the state agency said it cannot force H-2A employers to have an IowaWORKS account. Access would aid U.S. recruitment, the spokesman, Jesse Dougherty, said.
State records Investigate Midwest obtained show T. Bell now has an IowaWORKS account. However, it appears to be rarely used, according to the records and Dougherty. The site allows employers to add common interview questions, to select preferred candidates and to correspond with job candidates. T. Bell has used none of the functions.
Sixty U.S. residents have been referred to T. Bell since the account was created, according to the records. But it’s impossible to tell how many have been hired, Dougherty said. T. Bell could have contacted the workers off the platform.
Ultimately, federal investigators determined T. Bell had not violated the law. The job center produced screenshots showing T. Bell had no access to IowaWORKS at the time.
Even with no fine, though, investigators decided to deliver a warning.
In January 2021, an investigator phoned T. Bell’s attorney, Mark Hudson. His office was about an hour north of Conesville, in Cedar Rapids, and his specialty was labor law. The investigator got right to it.
T. Bell needs to make an effort to contact U.S. workers, the investigator told Hudson. The company’s previous attorney had made postcards to distribute, but the practice had stopped, according to the investigator’s notes of the phone call. Hudson said he’d remind his client.
In response to Investigate Midwest’s questions, Hudson said his firm does not discuss client matters. “Given this, there is nothing else I can share other than confirm our previous work with this client and the fact that the investigation you ask about was resolved with the U.S. Department of Labor.”
T. Bell workers pay premium for poor meals
In summer 2023, Corteva, through Pioneer, had hired T. Bell to detassel more than a hundred of its cornfields in Iowa. One day, in one of those fields, a Mexican man had worked his way down a row for hours, and now it was lunch.
T. Bell provided the same meal each day: a fatty stew with rice, delivered in aluminum foil, with three tortillas. It never seemed enough to power him through the rest of the day.
He wasn’t looking forward to dinner, either. He knew, being one of hundreds in line, he’d get little more than a “spoonful,” he said. They would “arrive very hungry, and (T. Bell) would ration the food,” he said.
Another aspect of the food bothered him. As part of a program offering free health care to farmworkers, local medics sometimes visited Conesville. They warned him to avoid fatty food. They “tell us that we shouldn’t eat too much fat,” he said, “but that’s what they give us, so we can’t.”
The sign entering Conesville, Iowa, in July 2022, where T. Bell Detasseling employs hundreds of H-2A workers. (Sky Chadde/Investigate Midwest)
T. Bell’s workers paid almost double for the food. The labor department capped the amount employers could charge for food at around $16 a day. But, each year, T. Bell petitioned the labor department to charge a higher fee, $29 a day.
In its H-2A application, T. Bell said it hires a local chef who closes his restaurant to run the company’s kitchen during detasseling season. The labor department has regularly approved the higher charge.
All the deductions could add up. After about a month, more than $1,000 had been withheld from one worker’s paycheck — roughly a fifth of his total pay.
Why continue to work there, then?
“Necessity.”
Investigate Midwest is an independent, nonprofit newsroom. Its mission is to serve the public interest by exposing dangerous and costly practices of influential agricultural corporations and institutions through in-depth and data-driven investigative journalism. Visit it online at www.investigatemidwest.org
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Publish date : 2024-10-05 23:30:00
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