New Mexico's hourly minimum wage increased by a dollar to $11.50 per hour, but an agricultural worker advocate recently warned that farm laborers will be cheated out of that increase.
Farm laborers working in southern New Mexico are particularly vulnerable to being left out of the minimum wage increase, KRQE reported. The difficulty, which has been going on for decades, is that farm laborers in the state tend to be employed by contractors rather than farms, and some of those contractors routinely game the system, Border Farm Workers Center Executive Director Carlos Marentes said.
Border Farm Workers Center Executive Director Carlos Marentes in a 2015 image
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"There is tremendous wage theft in the agroindustry," Marentes said. "Chile pickers, for instance, are paid 75 to 95 cents per bucket, so they will never produce enough to make the minimum wage. Now, the law says if you don't harvest sufficient amount to equal to the minimum wage, they must pay you the difference. That seldom happens."
A chile picker working in back-breaking conditions would have to fill 15.3 buckets per hour to earn $11.50 at 75 cents per bucket, something even the most skilled among them can rarely do, Marentes said.
"The way contractors get around not paying the hourly rate is by reporting that you worked two hours or three hours, that way they only pay you the bucket rate," Marentes said.
He added that few farm laborers complain to the state's Labor Department for fear of losing work, despite laws that make retaliation illegal.
New Mexico's minimum wage increased Saturday, Jan. 1, as did the state's tipping wage that went up from $2.35 to $2.55 per hour, according to information on the Department of Workforce Solutions' website.
The increase stemmed from an amendment to the New Mexico Minimum Wage Act, signed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham in April 2019.
The farm laborers themselves often don't realize how badly they're being cheated, Marentes told KRQE.
"They tell me, 'How could I have gone all the way to Deming (N.M.) to work two hours?'" Marentes said. "But then they tell me it's OK because in Juarez they wouldn't be able to make the money they're being paid [in New Mexico]," he said.