Agreement between the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and the North Carolina Growers Association

In 2004, after a six year campaign, Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) won a collective bargaining agreement with the North Carolina Grower’s Association (NCGA). The NCGA is the nation’s largest user of the H2A program, a temporary visa which allows agricultural workers to come to the US to work seasonally. Each year, nearly 7,000 workers are recruited to work in NC through the NCGA, and all are covered by the FLOC union contract.

The union agreement secured important protections for all farmworkers who come through the NCGA: the right to appeal unjust warnings and firings, protection from retaliation from an employer, paid leave for family funerals, and an employment bid system allowing workers who successfully finished their last contract to submit a bid to return the following year. The contract also gave the union the right to oversee the recruitment process in the country of origin of the migrant workers, which in this case, most of them were from Mexico. Notably, rather than barring private recruiters, what the union did was to work with the employer to develop a process that limits the control that those recruiters have over workers’ access to work. 

For more information: http://www.floc.com/wordpress/cross-border-organizing/north-carolina-or…

GFMD 2014-2015 - RT Session 1.2 "Reducing the human and financial costs of international migration, particularly labour migration: Cooperative approaches to fair recruitment practices and lower remittance fees"

Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), North Carolina Grower’s Association (NCGA)