Abstract

Over the years, farmworkers have endured low wages, long hours and poor working conditions. When Congress enacted the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Workers Protection Act (AWPA) in 1983, it sought to remedy these conditions by regulating the practices of farm labor contractors and growers, and by providing a private right of action to farmworkers to ensure that violations of the AWPA would be redressed in the courts. This Note focuses on a recent Eleventh Circuit case, Aimable v. Long & Scott Farms, Inc., wherein the court accepted the defendant grower's defense that the plaintiff farmworkers laboring in his field were not his employees for purposes of liability under the AWPA. Instead, the court found the defendant crewleader solely liable for the AWPA violations at issue, leaving the plaintiff farmworkers to collect a judgment from a bankrupt individual who, as the grower knew, had been repeatedly enjoined from working as a labor contractor. This Note argues for a per se rule that makes growers the employers of the farmworkers in their fields. Such a rule would guarantee farmworkers the remedies to which they are entitled under AWPA, and would prevent the arbitrary results which are produced in cases such as Aimable.

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