A civil rights group has accused an Arkansas company that annually uses a federal program to supply foreign guest workers to Louisiana sugar cane farms of “rampant wage theft” since 2016.
Lawyers with the Southern Poverty Law Center claim in a lawsuit that Lowry Farms Inc. employed a variety of schemes to shift its business costs and also underpay more than 2,000 seasonal Mexican workers so they often received less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
“Lowry Farms is using the guest worker program to exploit workers by grossly underpaying them and forcing them to work under unacceptable and unfair conditions,” Anne Janet Hernandez Anderson, the center’s Immigrant Justice Project senior supervising attorney, said in a statement. “This systematic failure to protect guest workers from the abuse the program enables and ignores must end.”