Farmworkers, unions, advocates urge defeat of SAWA

Presenter  Farmworkers, unions, and advocates are urging the defeat of the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act. It would slash U.S. farmworkers’ wages. Here’s KEPW’s Curtis Blankinship:

Curtis Blankinship (KEPW) On Oct. 2, 2025, the Trump administration and Department of Labor announced cuts to the adverse effect wage rate. The new rule cuts the wages paid to H-2A foreign visa workers by a third, and these workers will now also have to pay for their housing. 

According to the Oregon Farm Bureau, the hourly wages for those workers will be as low as $13 to $15 an hour—below the minimum wage. 

This rule also lowers the wages of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents who share job sites with H-2A workers and will make it financially beneficial for growers to hire more foreign workers.

In 2024, over 3,700 H-2A foreign visa holders worked in Oregon and over 400,000 nationally. 

In 2025, records show that Trump employs 184 H-2A foreign visa workers on his own properties, according to the Trump administration’s estimates. 

The cut will transfer $2.46 billion in wages from workers to employers annually, one of the largest transfers from workers to employers in U.S. agricultural history. 

Trump’s estimate is that the most recent rule will expand the program to 514,000 visas a year. 

On November 21, 2025, the United Farm Workers of America, the UFW Foundation, and 18 farmworkers filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to reverse the cuts. Thirteen states, including Oregon, filed an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit. 

In May 2025, a federal district court denied the request for a preliminary injunction to stop the cuts, so they will continue while the case works its way through the courts. 

In June 2026, Republican chair of the House Agricultural Committee, Glenn “GT” Thompson, submitted the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act, or SAWA.

The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, or UFCW, America’s largest private sector union, representing 1.2 million workers in meatpacking, food processing, grocery, and other essential industries across North America, released a statement in response to House Republican Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act, or the SAWA Act. 

UFCW International President Milton Jones said: 

“Across the country, rural communities are powered by farm and food processing jobs. The Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act will turn these stable, permanent jobs into temporary ones, leaving workers with less money to take home and spend in their local economies.

“Americans are already shouldering the burden of an affordability crisis, but instead of addressing it, House Republicans would rather focus on weakening the jobs that keep our country running and put food on American families’ tables. Jobs in meatpacking and food processing and the communities that rely on them should be invested in, not demolished. Turning dependable jobs into temporary ones will threaten the livelihoods of thousands of Americans, devastate entire communities, and threaten our food supply chain.”

Corporations bring in hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to fill seasonal and temporary agriculture jobs via the H-2A visa program. These workers have limited protections against abuse by employers, often resulting in low wages, weak benefits, and poor working conditions. 

The Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act (SAWA) would expand use of the H-2A visa program to non-agricultural, year-round jobs, potentially displacing workers in industries like meat, poultry, and seafood processing.

This legislation would also slash wages for workers by codifying key provisions of the Trump administration’s wage cuts regulation, which could cost all farm workers, both native-born and foreign-born, between $4.4 billion and $5.4 billion annually. 

The UFCW urges lawmakers in Congress to vote against this bill, and instead support legislation that invests in the jobs that power America’s rural communities, like the Grocery, Farm, and Food Worker Stabilization Grant Program Act, which would create a grant program to provide stabilization payments to food workers in the case of a natural disaster or other emergency. 

All this amid increased tariffs to fight forced labor practices in other countries. For more information, go to Northeast Organic Farming Association at NOFA.org or go to the UFCW site at UFCW.org. And for the opposition letter, go to agri-pulse.com. 

For KEPW News, I’m Curtis Blankinship.