[somenameforme]

I don't understand how any person can come to a conclusion like this from this account. Some employees lied about their qualifications, showed up to work, were unable to do they work they claimed they knew how to do, were unwilling to learn or even try to do so, they quit, and the government then decided this company owed those employees 3/4 of the entire salary they would have been paid had they completed the entire crop year.

In the other issue, their representative mistakenly clicked the 'kitchen provided' food option in the paperwork instead of 'meals provided', with the government claiming there was some conspiracy to defraud the employees into taking meals instead of receiving a food stipend, when they'd been providing home cooked meals to the employees for decades, as the DOL had observed countless times.

In both cases, there was no harm to the employees whatsoever.

[mullingitover]

> Some employees lied about their qualifications

The article uncritically printed this claim, however we have no reporting from the workers. For all we know they got off easy with the level of fines they received. The article is a press release.

[somenameforme]

So your entire criticism comes down to you thinking the article is simply lying about that and presumably everything. And what reason do you have to believe this? And would you make such claims if it were an article that confirmed your biases?

[mullingitover]

> And what reason do you have to believe this?

I didn’t say the article was lying, I said it uncritically reported only one side of the story.

This is an agribusiness news site. Do you think that they’re out here looking for an honest to god scoop about labor abuses? Do you think that if they found them, they’d make a front page story about it?

[somenameforme]

You're assuming there is another side, which there seems to be no reason whatsoever to assume. The facts, outside of the government's behavior, are extremely benign and supported by decades of precedent by the exact same people doing the exact same stuff in the exact same way. I'm certain the guys who quit, or even if they were fired, on the first day didn't expect to get a crop year's salary out of it. This makes the government's behavior all the more absurd. Yet the government's behavior is not in question, only the constitutionality of it. And indeed it turns out that it was unconstitutional.

[mullingitover]

> You're assuming there is another side, which there seems to be no reason whatsoever to assume

There are at least two sides to every contract, that's how contracts work. There are a lot of people lining up to defend the business owner, and I'm not finding a single word from any of the H-2A workers, who are uniquely powerless and in a class who has a well-documented history of being exploited.

Those workers 'quitting' was found to be constructive dismissal. They were coerced into quitting, that's the 'other side.' That meant they surrendered their transportation costs back home (which they would've been entitled to if they were fired), and arguably lost out on other work they could've done.

[somenameforme]

They can't say anything more than 'yeah we were totally fired'. So it comes down to motivation, witnesses, history, etc. The farmers have been running this farm for decades with an upstanding record, and have zero motivation to want to get rid of the employees they hired unless those employees could not competently do the labor they were hired to do.

By contrast the workers themselves signed up for some of the most brutal/specialized farm work (which they may not have understood had they lied and never actually done it before - it's one of the highest paid crops for laborers), zero witnesses to their claims (and in fact they could only get 3 of the 17 workers to even claim that they were fired), and were able to carry out a freeroll for a crop year of salary by saying 'Yeah uh we were fired.' Anonymously. Through a translator. Provided by some NGO. Online. While in Mexico. At home.

In the end if one has to make a probability judgement, this is not even remotely close. And indeed this is why the farmers are cheering having their constitutional right to a fair trial granted - they're going to win this literally 100% of the time to the point that this is practically fit for summary judgement. Again the only thing particularly weird here are the government's actions.