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Breaux Bridge crawfish workers filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. seeking to invalidate a U.S. Department of Labor rule they claim allows distributors to underpay them sometimes by as much as $4 to $5 per hour.
Companies hire hundreds of workers, particularly during season, to handle the traps, harvest and bag crawfish, then clean and process them. Some workers remove the tail meat and perform many other tasks by hand. The companies rely on H-2B employees, often from Mexico, who come to south Louisiana to work from January through July.
“Crawfish processing wages in Louisiana are too low, year after year,” said Elizabeth Leiserson, a Texas RioGrande Legal Aid attorney representing one of the worker plaintiffs. TRLA provides free legal services to people who cannot afford an attorney in 68 counties in South and southwestern Texas.
“One reason is that the industry relies a lot on H-2B workers, and the Labor Department is letting crawfish employers sidestep the normal requirements for setting H-2B wages,” Leiserson added in a press release.
Basically, before issuing the certification that allows companies to hire temporary workers from foreign countries – using H-2B visas – the employer needs to show that pay will not be less than the prevailing wage for local American workers. The rub, according to the lawsuit, comes in showing what the prevailing wage actually is.
The 2015 Wage Rule modified existing regulations to allow employers to use their own surveys to set the prevailing wage and that rule change impacted the conditions and pay for similarly employed U.S. workers, according to the lawsuit.
In Louisiana’s case the annual survey is done by the LSU AgCenter. That report is way off, the lawsuit contends, largely because LSU only surveyed four the possible 72 crawfish processing plants for comparable wages. The average wage reported in 2019 was $9.75 per hour and $9.28 in 2020, according to the LSU AgCenter report.
Crawfish workers lawsuit
“It’s no accident that employer-provided surveys yield lower wages than the government survey,” Leiserson said. The U.S. Department of Labor’s “rule incentivizes employers to find ways to submit surveys with lower results. The small number of employers surveyed in Louisiana raises serious questions about whether the survey is statistically reliable – but DOL lets employers rely on it anyway.”
According to the lawsuit, seafood workers in Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia are paid far less by employers who based their pay on employer-provided wage surveys. In many instances, the hourly pay for seafood workers in the four states would be as much as 25% higher if their pay were based on the federal government’s large-scale wage survey.
“A few dollars an hour can make a huge difference for our members,” said Ursula Price, the executive director of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, one of the plaintiffs in the case. “Our members have bills to pay and families to feed, and a rule that lets employers take money out of H-2B workers’ pockets means they’re not getting a fair wage.”
The plaintiffs include both Louisiana-based and H-2B crawfish workers and the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. The plaintiffs include Mary Jane Williams, Mary Hester Lewis, and Martin Johnson, Jr., all three of whom are U.S. citizens who are currently employed at Crawfish Distributors Inc., a crawfish processing plant in Breaux Bridge, and have worked there for years without the wage rates changing significantly. The plant also employs Mexican workers on H-2B visas.
The plaintiffs are represented by Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, the North Carolina Justice Center, and Edward Tuddenham, an attorney in private practice.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Neither the LSU AgCenter nor the U.S. Department of Labor immediately responded the queries.
